The wildfires in Los Angeles consumed the home of a cancer patient who had just received good news about her recovery—and the home of another whose cancer had just returned. They razed the house of a woman who had lost everything once before in a World War II bombing. They flattened fruit trees and flower beds planted with care. They destroyed a wedding ring on the eve of a couple’s 40th wedding anniversary. They burned the beloved instruments of a 90-year-old jazz musician. They demolished a nursery that had just been prepared for a soon-to-be-born baby girl.
These stories of loss are from GoFundMe. Since the wildfires broke out last week, the site has been inundated with thousands of fundraisers for the victims. Collectively, they’d raised more than $100 million as of Tuesday evening, a GoFundMe spokesperson told me. (The company did not immediately respond when asked where the totals currently stand.) In recent days, I’ve found myself scrolling through page after page of Angelenos documenting their losses. For people like me who don’t live near L.A., the destruction can start to read like a set of statistics—more than 12,000 structures damaged or destroyed; roughly 40,000 acres burned. But statistics have a strange way of obfuscating the magnitude and depth of the damage. On GoFundMe, the harm is shockingly visceral. As the catastrophe unfolds, the site is serving as a real-time record of the wildfires’ destruction.
Each GoFundMe page is unique in its own way. Some fundraisers are started by victims themselves, others by loved ones looking to help out in whatever way they can. The campaigns come with a description explaining why residents are asking for donations, and many detail the small but irreplaceable possessions that the fires took: family photos and home videos, letters and manuscripts, rare books and childhood diaries. Gone is the artwork residents have spent a lifetime creating. One woman who lost her home had moved in so recently that she hadn’t even finished unpacking. Another family had spent years remodeling their house by hand. Multiple people lost a parent’s ashes. These fundraisers are inflected with the emotional toll of disaster. They contain the shock of the unimaginable and the mourning of devastation. But they also contain love, gratitude, and extraordinary resilience. “I’ve still been able to laugh,” one victim wrote, “at my Roomba app telling me it’s time to replace some parts (just SOME?).”
For those of us without a direct connection to the fires, GoFundMe can help tether us to the losses. That’s not just because of the details that are included in each fundraiser. These pages are ricocheting across the internet. They are being passed along in group chats and posted to Instagram and circulated in emails. They are being compiled into lists and spreadsheets that are sometimes overwhelming in length: As Rachel Davies, a writer who put together a list of more than 1,000 fundraisers, told the Associated Press, “I feel connected in a strange way to all these people that I don’t know.” Through these channels, you might learn whose sibling, former professor, or best friend has suffered. The world becomes a little smaller.
That GoFundMe is so full of stories also indicates just how deeply embedded in the infrastructure of natural-disaster response the platform has become. The more than $100 million that has been raised through the site for L.A. wildfire relief so far just about matches the entire amount that was crowdsourced for natural-disaster relief on GoFundMe in 2023. Indeed, in May, Axios reported that over the past five years, the number of fundraisers for natural disasters has increased by 90 percent. “GoFundMe has become a major form of disaster assistance,” Emily Gallagher, a finance professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told me.
In 2021, a wildfire broke out just miles from where Gallagher lives in Boulder, destroying more than 1,000 homes. Together with colleagues, she researched the use of GoFundMe as her community recovered, and found that victims who used the platform were 27 percent more likely to have started rebuilding their home within a year of the fire. Two-thirds of Americans with homeowners insurance are underinsured for wildfires; if catastrophe strikes, they won’t be reimbursed for the full cost of what they lost. Meanwhile, applying for and receiving federal aid can be cumbersome. This is what makes crowdfunding so appealing. Donations can be used for whatever a recipient needs, as soon as they need it.
But there’s a dark side to GoFundMe’s role in fire relief. Crowdfunding tends to advantage the wealthy: In the fire that broke out near Gallagher, high-income households were more likely to have a friend set up a campaign on their behalf. These households, who had larger and wealthier social networks, then went on to raise substantially more money than lower-income residents with GoFundMe campaigns of their own. The net effect is that those who are most in need of funds may be least likely to receive them. For those who do benefit from the platform, FEMA has warned that funds raised through GoFundMe can affect eligibility for assistance, which may create an added layer of stress and confusion for already overwhelmed disaster victims.
When catastrophic events like the L.A. fires receive national attention, many people want to chip in. Without any personal ties, they may choose to donate to campaigns that, for whatever reason, resonate with them personally. This can lead, as the sociologist Matthew Wade suggests, to what are effectively sympathy markets, where donors are tasked with making moral judgments on who is most worthy of donation. In the extreme, GoFundMe can perversely encourage users to package their despair into marketable narratives. Trauma sells.
This is well understood by the scammers who lurk on the platform. GoFundMe has long struggled with fraud as people concoct stories of misfortune to sham unwitting donors out of cash. (So much so that a website called GoFraudMe once dedicated itself to tracking down fake campaigns.) To help prevent this with the L.A. fires, a GoFundMe spokesperson told me, the company has spun up a centralized hub of verified fundraisers, which have been reviewed by a team of experts. Still, when one victim’s friend created a fundraising campaign after she lost her rental home, a copycat emerged within hours. “Someone has tried to just make their way in and try to profit off of my tragedy,” the victim told The New York Times.
As the fires continue to devastate Los Angeles, new fundraisers continue to pop up on GoFundMe: one for a 15-year-old soliciting help for his mother, another for a 94-year-old artist who lost a lifetime’s worth of paintings and writing. If the fires are a window into our grim climate future, so are the fundraisers themselves. Contained within the stories is a double tragedy. There is the acute loss told by each individual narrative. But these fundraisers add up to tell the story of something much larger: that of a financial system unprepared for the new realities of climate disasters.
The post The GoFundMe Fires appeared first on The Atlantic.
