The night the Palisades fire broke out, all of Gabe Wachtel and Colin Enzer’s group chats were blowing up. From longstanding text chains with friends to Enzer’s fantasy football chat, the Pacific Palisades natives’ phones were inundated with messages from people wondering whether their families’ homes were still standing and looking for ways to help.
As the fire destroyed their neighborhood, the pair joined together the next morning with a handful of their friends from across the coastal enclave to create a WhatsApp group to share updates and start organizing a cleanup effort.
Within an hour, there were about 480 members, said Wachtel, 27, who said every home he lived in as a child was destroyed in the fire and does not yet know the extent of the damage to his mother’s home. The messaging channel grew so fast that it was flagged as a potential bot farm and shut down, which required contacting Meta to get it back up and running.
That same day, Enzer, 26, set up a dedicated GoFundMe. The initial goal was to raise about $10,000 for cleaning supplies and an inexpensive vehicle or two to help clean up their neighborhood when authorities say it’s safe to do so.
Today, there are more than 1,000 people in the WhatsApp channel, which has been repurposed as a WhatsApp community to allow more people to join. The GoFundMe has raised over $120,000 from about 1,600 donors. It’s been a far more successful effort than Wachtel, Enzer and the outfit’s seven other lead organizers ever expected. Now they face the thorny question of how best to use the funds they’ve amassed.
Like other well-intentioned organizers before them, the crew has come up against the complicated realities of the crowdfunding economy. In the wake of major tragedies, raising money can be surprisingly easy. More difficult is delivering on the promises that brought the donations.
“We’re learning as we go,” said Wachtel, who works for a property management company, as he and Enzer sat in the backyard of Wachtel’s home in Century City on Tuesday.
“At the core, it’s about cleanup and bringing people together, and we’ve also been blessed to be able to do a lot of other things too,” added Enzer, who has yet to confirm the status of his parents’ house in Pacific Palisades. “We want to see what are the holes that we can fill and things we can do.”
Their group has been codified as an LLC called Together Palisades and the paperwork has been filed for it to become a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. There’s a website, TogetherPalisades.com, and 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] while lying in bed and feeling so helpless just watching everything unfold,” said Enzer, who works in talent management and digital media and lives in Santa Monica. “I saw the WhatsApp and people already wondering how to help so [I] pulled the trigger on creating the fund.”
A statement posted on the group’s GoFundMe page states that it is “an effort to aid the restoration of Pacific Palisades.” The organizers “will be working with community leaders to allocate funds in the most effective ways,” it says, with 30% of the funds to be dedicated to cleanup efforts, 25% to restoration, 20% to displaced family relief, 20% to business subsidies and 5% to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Before the group begins doling out money, its organizers say they hope to find a nonprofit or fiscal sponsor that can serve 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 at the University of Washington Bothell School of Nursing and Health Studies who wrote a book about the rise of crowdfunding to cover healthcare costs. Across the country following natural disasters, she said, inexperienced people are suddenly tasked with effectively managing and distributing thousands of dollars.
“I’ve definitely spoken with people whose campaigns have had a lot more traction than they expected them to and have felt out of their depth,” she said. “Things like that can sometimes catch people unaware and pose challenges for getting money out to where the need is quickly.”
Kenworthy said successful campaigns often attract significant scrutiny, especially as fraudulent fundraisers for a wide range of causes have become more common.
“There’s a lot of skepticism with how people view information online and I think that increasingly leaks into the GoFundMe environment,” she said.
That skepticism is well-founded in the wake of the recent wildfires. There have been multiple reports of fraudulent crowdfunding campaigns related to the relief effort. To avoid being scammed, authorities urge the public to stick to established sites such as GoFundMe and Kickstarter and to be on the lookout for red flags, including suspicious organizers with limited online footprints and tenuous connections to causes.
Benicio Wallraff, a talent scout and manager in the music industry who grew up in Pacific Palisades and is friends with the organizers of Together Palisades, made the first donation to the group’s crowdfunding campaign. He is simultaneously running his own GoFundMe that has raised more than $50,000 for his father, who lost his apartment and essentially all of his belongings in the Palisades fire. That success, Benicio said, has attracted at least one scammer attempting to capitalize on his family’s misfortune.
“One of the artists that I manage sent me a GoFundMe that was started by ‘B Wall’ and the title was ‘Palisades fire for Diego’ or something, and then completely copy-and-pasted the whole entire thing,” he said, adding that the post was eventually taken down.
As with any popular crowdfunding campaign, potential backers of the Together Palisades GoFundMe page are left to 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 within the community,” Wachtel said. “And now that we’re growing into something that’s more than what any of us could’ve imagined, how do we let people know that we’re legit and part of the community?”
GoFundMe has a Trust and Safety team that has verified hundreds of fundraising campaigns associated with the L.A. County wildfires and compiled them on a dedicated website. That list does not yet include Together Palisades.
Melanie Standage, a spokesperson for GoFundMe, said there “has been an incredible outpouring of support” with thousands of fundraisers for relief efforts launched on the platform since the wildfires broke out.
The company “is working directly with the organizers” of the Together Palisades fund, she said. That work includes an effort “to understand how funds will be used,” she added.
“When a fundraiser is started to help someone other than the organizer, funds are safely held by our payment processors until the beneficiary’s information is verified, then transferred directly to the recipient of the GoFundMe,” she said.
Enzer said the group’s organizers have had conversations with the platform about being verified, but the company “wanted us to mention specific businesses and families, which we want to avoid doing because it can complicate their FEMA or insurance claims.” He added that they plan to get verified once they’ve established a bank account associated with the organization’s LLC, a process that is currently underway.
In the meantime, support for Together Palisades, like many crowdfunding efforts, is based largely on faith in the longtime community members who are running it and trust that they will be responsible stewards of the contributions.
Jonah Jacobson says he chose to donate to the group’s GoFundMe because he believes in its mission and trusts its organizers, who he grew up with in the neighborhood.
“It’s really more just an investment in the people who are running it,” he said. “You just know that they’re going to put as much as they can into this project and hopefully it amounts to some revitalization of the town.”
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