As Fires Raged in Southern California, Nonprofits Stepped Outside Their Lanes

When there’s an emergency, we know that nonprofits will be there: the food bank, the shelters, the churches, the Red Cross. Less visible are the community nonprofits that went outside, above and beyond their ordinary missions in the Southern California wildfires.

We’re inspired:

Protecting farm workers from unsafe air

Despite air quality warnings, farmworkers were still working in the fields in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, harvesting crops. When their employers weren’t providing protective equipment, Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) went out into the fields to distribute thousands of N95 masks to farmworkers. CAUSE also gave out masks in low-income and Latino communities and called for local governments to make disaster information more accessible by translating their websites, alerts, and social media into Spanish.

“We aren’t normally a direct service provider,” explained Lucas Zucker, policy and communications director at CAUSE. “However, we acted because we saw there were communities being left behind in the emergency response, and we wanted to fill in those gaps.” Thank you, CAUSE!

Meals for First Responders and Displaced Families

The San Buenaventura Mission and the L.A. Kitchen partnered with World Central Kitchen to provide temporary kitchen space to this nonprofit so it could organize emergency meals. In a few short weeks, more than 1,500 volunteers and local celebrity chefs worked together to provide over 35,000 meals to first responders and evacuees impacted by the fires.