In the foothills of Altadena and Pasadena, you can hear the rumbling of skid steer loaders and the bang of hammers here and there as rebuilding from the Eaton Fire gains momentum. But it’s clear there’s still a long journey ahead.
Entire blocks once defined by multigenerational family homes were leveled. Living rooms, kitchens, and gardens that once supported vibrant community life are dirt lots, tufted with grass.
At the California Wellness Foundation, we’ve been seeking to understand where our efforts will be most impactful and most aligned with our mission. While many philanthropic partners mobilized broad emergency relief, Cal Wellness focused on its core commitment: advancing wellness by supporting those most impacted by systemic racism. This means centering marginalized communities often times overlooked and underrepresented, especially in decision-making and financing. We knew we needed a community-power approach that centered self-determination and their voice, in addition to financial investment.
Through extensive community listening, participation in regional funder tables, engagement with grassroots coalitions, and consultation with disaster recovery experts—including those involved with Hurricane Katrina—we identified some critical gaps.
Finding "Our Lane"
We knew that the Eaton Fire displaced many people of color, disproportionately harming Black residents. These homes in Altadena were not simply homes but pillars of generational wealth for families who had been denied fair access to homeownership elsewhere in Los Angeles due to racist covenants and redlining. Their loss represented both material devastation and the disappearance of irreplaceable cultural heritage—family photographs, heirlooms, and stories passed from one generation to the next.
And we knew residents most impacted by systemic discrimination and most at risk of displacement are also those least likely to access traditional recovery resources. This meant Black and Latino homeowners and renters, day laborers, domestic workers, immigrant and Indigenous families, and small business owners in the Altadena area were facing an even steeper uphill battle when it came to rebuilding their lives.
As an immediate response, Cal Wellness committed more than $1.1 million in grants to organizations with deep community ties, ensuring resources flowed quickly to families often excluded from mainstream disaster aid. Several months later, we provided $3 million in program-related investments (often low-cost loans for charitable purposes) to get at larger-scale goals that require more financing. (For more on this innovative mission-aligned approach to financing, read my colleague Javier Hernandez’s post.)
At the end of 2025, recognizing that equitable recovery is a long-term endeavor, we also deployed an additional $1 million in grants to build infrastructure for long-term collective action and to support the local organizations that step in with a level of trust and cultural fluency that governmental systems often cannot match.
In a philanthropic ecosystem where disaster funding often prioritizes short-term relief, Cal Wellness’ lane became clear: addressing inequity and community voice as central features of disaster recovery, not an afterthought.
Beyond the Short Term
One of our partners, Altadena for Accountability is working to transform the systems that failed residents during and after the wildfires and calling on residents to share their stories with California’s attorney general. The group campaigned for nearly a year for an investigation into whether race, age, or disability factored into the scarcity of fire trucks in West Altadena and lateness of evacuation orders – and succeeded when the California Attorney General Rob Bonta opened a civil rights investigation in February.
Climate disasters have too often abandoned black and brown people, disabled people, and elderly people, Gina Clayton-Johnson, Altadena for Accountability’s co-founder and Essie Justice Group’s executive director told me. It’s more important than ever to challenge unequal governmental responses, she said, and set a precedent for survivors of future climate-driven disasters that is rooted in community voice and civil rights.
Similarly, the Fire Poppy Project focuses on renters and other under-resourced Eaton Fire survivors who were overlooked in the traditional disaster response. The project takes a multifaceted approach, weaving together no-cost smoke remediation services and DIY equipment rentals with workforce development, tenant organizing, and community empowerment initiatives. Through its work with the DENA Soil Project, Fire Poppy also works to remediate and heal Altadena’s contaminated soil while honoring indigenous connections to the land.
The foundation has also invested in networks such as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, to support survivor-led organizing and coalition-building in the wake of the fires. Through the Dena Rise Up coalition, co-anchored by NDLON, this work is equipping homeowners, renters, and workers who have been directly affected by the fires – particularly Black, Latino, immigrant and working-class residents – to shape recovery priorities, prevent displacement and advocate for these often-overlooked groups to have access to rebuilding resources.
Key Lessons
Over the past year, we’ve learned several lessons that will guide Cal Wellness’ continued investments and philanthropy’s broader approach to disaster recovery:
- Communities and experts estimate a five- to seven-year recovery timeline, highlighting the need for long-term philanthropic partnership rather than episodic intervention.
- Cash assistance remains essential well into the recovery phase.
- Preventing displacement must be woven into all phases of recovery efforts.
- The wildfires exposed deep structural inequities, but they also revealed the resilience and leadership of community organizations, mutual aid networks, and neighborhood advocates. As rebuilding efforts continue, philanthropy has a responsibility to sustain and expand this work.
The work ahead is not only to restore what was lost, but to an opportunity to build a stronger future. Together with residents and partners, we can ensure that the communities whose histories and contributions are essential to the cultural and civic fabric of Los Angeles shape the decisions that determine their future. This will help us all emerge better prepared to navigate the next emergency.
