The night of the Palisades fire, Gabe Wachtel and Colin Enzer's group chats all blew up. From long-running text chains with friends to Enzer's fantasy football chat, Pacific Palisades natives' phones were flooded with messages from people wondering if their families' homes were still standing and looking for ways to help.
As the fire ravaged their neighborhood, the couple formed a WhatsApp group the next morning with a few friends from the coastal area to share updates and organize a clean-up effort.
Within an hour, there were about 480 members, said Wachtel, 27, who added that every home he lived in as a child had been destroyed in the fire, and the extent of the damage to his mother's home was still unknown. The messaging channel grew so fast that it was flagged as a potential bot farm and shut down, requiring Meta to be contacted to get it back up and running.
On the same day, Ensor, 26, established A dedicated GoFundMe. The initial goal is to raise about $10,000 for cleaning supplies and an inexpensive vehicle or two to help clean up their neighborhood while officials say it's safe.
Today, there are more than 1,000 people in the WhatsApp channel, which has been reinvented as a WhatsApp community that allows more people to join. The GoFundMe has raised more than $120,000 from about 1,600 donors. It was a more successful venture than Wachtel, Enzer and the outfit's other seven leading organizers had expected. Now they face the difficult question of how best to use the funds they have raised.
Like other well-intentioned organizers before them, the group has come up against the complex realities of crowdfunding economics. In the wake of major tragedies, raising money can be surprisingly easy. It is very difficult to fulfill the promises that brought the donations.
“We're learning as we go,” said Wachtel, who works for a property management company, as he and Ensor sat in the backyard of Wachtel's home in Century City on Tuesday.
“Mainly, it's about cleaning up and bringing people together, and we've been blessed to do a lot of things,” said Enzer, who has yet to confirm the location of his parents' home in the Pacific. Palisades. “We want to see what holes we can fill and what we can do.”
Their group is coded as Together Palisades LLC, and paperwork has been filed to become a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. There is a website, TogetherPalisades.comand A @TogetherPalisades Instagram page. A friend designed t-shirts to sell on the website, with all proceeds supporting their cause.
The GoFundMe was “created last Wednesday [Jan. 8] Lying in bed and watching everything, I feel so helpless,” said Ensor, who lives in Santa Monica and works in talent management and digital media. “I looked at WhatsApp and people are already thinking about how to help [I] pulled the trigger on creating funds.”
A statement posted on the group's GoFundMe page says it's an “effort to help restore Pacific Palisades.” Organizers say they will “work with community leaders to allocate funds in the most effective ways,” with 30% of the funds going to cleanup efforts, 25% to rehabilitation, 20% to displaced family relief, and 20% of the funds. 5% for business grants and the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Before the group starts disbursing money, its organizers hope to find a nonprofit or financial backer that can act as a conduit and help manage the funds. There are questions about taxes. One of the group's organizers recently passed the bar exam, so he's helping navigate the legal process.
It's a familiar story, said Nora Kenworthy, a professor of nursing and health studies at the University of Washington Bodell who wrote a book about population growth to cover health care costs. In the wake of natural disasters across the country, inexperienced people are suddenly tasked with effectively managing and distributing thousands of dollars.
“I've certainly talked to people whose campaigns have gotten more traction than they expected and felt their depth,” he said. “Things like that can sometimes catch people unawares and cause challenges to get money to where it's needed quickly.”
Kenworthy says successful campaigns often come under significant scrutiny, especially since fraudulent fundraisers have become more common for a variety of reasons.
“There's a lot of skepticism about how people view information online, and I think that's increasingly leaking into the GoFundMe environment,” he said.
That suspicion is well-founded in the wake of recent wildfires. There have been several reports of fraudulent crowdfunding campaigns linked to relief efforts. To avoid being scammed, officials urge the public to stick to established platforms like GoFundMe and Kickstarter and look for red flags, including suspicious organizers with minimal online footprints and weak connections to causes.
Benicio Wallraff, a talent scout and music industry manager who grew up in Pacific Palisades and is friends with Together Palisades organizers, made the first donation to the group's fundraising campaign. He runs at once His own GoFundMe Raised more than $50,000 for her father, who lost his apartment and essentially all of his possessions in the Palisades fire. That success, Benicio said, has attracted at least one scammer trying to take advantage of his family's misfortune.
“One of the artists I manage sent me a GoFundMe that was started by 'Be Wall,' and the title was 'Palisades Fire for Diego' or something, and then copied and pasted the whole thing,” he said. He said that he was eventually stripped of the position.
As with any popular crowdfunding campaign, potential supporters of the Together Palisades GoFundMe page will make their own decisions about whether they believe donating to it is the best way to make a difference.
“People know us and there's a sense of familiarity in the community,” Wachtel said. “Now that we're growing bigger than any of us could ever imagine, how do we let people know we're legitimate and part of the community?”
GoFundMe has a foundation and advocacy group that has vetted and compiled hundreds of fundraising campaigns related to the LA County wildfires. A dedicated website. Palisades is not yet included in that list.
Melanie Standage, a spokeswoman for GoFundMe, said there has been “an incredible amount of support” with thousands of fundraisers for relief efforts launched on the platform since the wildfires.
The company is “working directly with the organizers” of the Together Palisades fund, he said. That work includes trying to “understand how the funds will be used.”
“If a fundraiser is started to help a non-organizer, the funds are held securely by our payment processors until the beneficiary's information is verified and transferred directly to the GoFundMe recipient,” he said.
Enzer said the group's organizers had talked on stage about being verified, but the company “wanted to single out specific businesses and families that we want to avoid because it could complicate their FEMA or insurance claims.” He added that we plan to verify the bank account associated with the company's LLC once it is established, which is currently underway.
Meanwhile, support for Together Palisades, like many crowdfunding initiatives, is based on trust in the long-time community members who run it and the trust that they will be responsible stewards of their contributions.
Joanna Jacobsen said she chose to donate to the group's GoFundMe because she believes in its mission and its organizers, who grew up in the neighborhood.
“It's really an investment in the people who run it,” he said. “You know they're going to put their best into this project and it amounts to some revitalization of the city.”
