The Current - Why GoFundMe campaigns often aren’t fair

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

Crowdfunding campaigns have raised big money for the survivors of the L.A. fires and other disasters — but not everyone gets equal support. We look at why some campaigns raise more money than their organizers know what to do with, while others struggle for attention. 

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This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Wildfires in Southern California have forced tens of thousands of people from their homes. Many of them have lost everything and aren't sure what kind of aid they'll get or when that aid might arrive. And so many people are turning to social media to ask for donations to their GoFundMe campaigns. I lost everything. From a guy with everything to nothing. I spent my whole life helping people. But we thought we were going to be good. We thought we were going to come back, maybe some ash in helping people. But we thought we were going to be good. We thought we were going to come back, maybe some ash in the neighborhood.

But going up in the community and seeing everything that we knew gone, it's just baffling. My grandparents lost everything that they own in their home. They're old and shouldn't be worrying about that. They should just be worrying about like their health and just living out the rest of their days not working. GoFundMe crowdfunding has become a big part of the response to the LA fires. Thousands of GoFundMe's have popped up to support people affected. Colin Enzer and his friends decided to start one initially just to fund some cleanup efforts where Colin had grown up

in the Pacific Palisades. We had an expectation that maybe we get five thousand ten thousand dollars and then we can make sure everyone who wants to come help do our little community cleanups. For us it was, we're all raised there, 20s to 30s, all of our families are still there and we all had the dream of owning a home there and we wanted to show that like we're not giving up on that dream. The Palisades fire is ongoing and is one of the most devastating in California. And Colin's GoFundMe took off. Seeing this energy, it's like, this is why we love our town.

The GoFundMe, I was getting a lot of messages on it, ideas of what to do with the money as it kept growing. At the same time, it was also a bit of panic for me because I'd say it was like two days in when I saw $65,000 in there. I was like, I don't even think I own a bank account where I can transfer this amount of money in a month. So I was like, we need to figure out what to do with this.

Colin Enzer and his friends have raised more than $130,000 and are trying to figure out how to best spend it. It's a relatively nice problem to have because other GoFundMe campaigns for fire relief are not seeing that kind of success. Pete Corona wanted to help level the playing field. He is a creative executive in the TV and film industry and co-creator of the Displaced Latino Families Wildfire Mutual Aid Directory.

He's in Los Angeles. Pete, good morning. Good morning, thank you for having me. Thanks for being here and thanks for the work that you're doing. Tell me about this directory that you've created. What is it? Yes, essentially it's a source of truth,

as we call it, for all Latino families that were affected by the Eaton fire in Altadena, while we're not exclusively bifurcating the palisades or Pasadena or Altadena, they disproportionately affected Latino families that are concentrated in Altadena. So it, as of this time, has over 600 individuals and families from the Latino community, which started basically as a list for one and two degrees of friends that were affected by the fire and their homes burned down, their families' homes burned down, and just really keeping track for ourselves.

And then this Excel spreadsheet, which has now become quite complicated just in terms of we've coded it and have family information, how people can help outside of just the GoFundMe, including Amazon wishlists and whatnot. So it's really become this huge, great resource for the community in Los Angeles. Why did you need to put something like this together, do you think?

I mean, there are these individual GoFundMe's, but why did you wanna put together a directory that would bring some of them for this community in particular together? I think, well, not everybody in the community speaks English right. I don't want to make a blanket statement to say that. Everybody comes from sort of an immigrant background,

but there is a lot of mixed status. And because of that, you know, it's not a very visible community, and status. And because of that, you know, it's not a very visible community. And we have the luxury of having, you know, healthy social media followings and access to people and influencers and actors that have a much bigger platform that we could then utilize and give the families that don't necessarily have Instagram accounts or social media accounts and platforming them in a different way and amplifying their particular accounts and fundraising efforts, which I feel like we've done a pretty good job up to this point.

Obviously, it's hard because we all have day jobs and it's a community friend effort and we've roped in 12 volunteers at various different times. Tell me more about that. I mean, and you hinted at the language issue, but why would it be difficult for people in this community to raise money on GoFundMe? What were they up against? There are all of these different GoFundMe campaigns and a lot of money has been raised, but as I said, it's not a level playing field.

So what were they up against in kind of getting attention, if I can put it that way? Sure. I think there aren't a lot of resources in Spanish, first off, and a lot of these are mono-language individuals, and so they only speak Spanish. So there's that barrier. Then there's a lot of, you know, misinformation that was going around and it primarily, you know, in the Latino community, because I also work for a nonprofit on the Latino side and it disproportionately affects the Spanish-speaking community because there aren't a lot of regulations around it. So, you know, we wanted to make

sure that we were at least providing as much information that we could, both in English and in Spanish, for this community, because we also want to make sure that they have proper language in their GoFundMe accounts that wouldn't knock them out of contention for any funds for FEMA as well, which is important for us to highlight. This is a concern that if you get some money from GoFundMe, perhaps you wouldn't be available for federal disaster relief assistance. That's correct, and they have quite strict guidelines,

but vague at the same time. And so we're just trying to make sure that, you know, they don't say anything that would disqualify them, because ultimately, hopefully the government would give them more money than they were able to raise and go fund me. You know about attention, right? I mean, I mentioned that your day job

is as an executive in film and television. And so part of this is about cultivating attention. How valuable is the ability to cultivate attention in a time of crisis like this? Yeah, it's extremely important. I think, you know, unfortunately, the beginning hours of the fire, there wasn't a lot of information coming out

to anybody in the neighborhood. A friend of mine whose family lost their home, her mother had to drive towards the fire to see how close it was, and it wasn't until an hour and a half later that they get a physical call from cops in the neighborhood saying that they had to evacuate. So it was quite messy and clunky in the beginning. And I think what our main concern was is how can we help, how can we organize and get these people the information that they need?

What sort of difference have you made? I mean, in putting this spreadsheet together and putting the spotlight on families and individuals who need support, what have you seen? So up to this point, we have about 640 families and individuals on the list, sadly, and we have it ranked, we have it coded from ascending order from their percentage of goals. And up to this point, they've raised over $12 million of the 20 million asking end goal.

So it's been quite heartwarming to see the community come together for these families. And obviously not everybody is at the 50% mark, but we're trying to enable different tactics and highlighting families. And GoFundMe has reached out to us to help start a fund that would be nonprofit and 501c3 eligible so we can then further amplify it and hopefully get larger donations, which we're going to launch today actually. Just before I let you go, that's really, really successful and it's fantastic that you're doing this. Just what is it like for you?

I mean, one of the things I hear from friends in LA is that in the wake of these fires, the thing that they have been so encouraged by is how people have helped each other out. People that they don't even know, people on the street, maybe never used that they might have lived next to, that they don't know each other, but it turns out that everybody is kind of pulling along or many people are pulling on. You're part of that. What is that like for you to be part of this effort?

Honestly, it's obviously a bit tiring, but more than anything, you know, Los Angeles, I think gets a bad rap sometimes as, you know, it's a company town based in entertainment mostly, but there's a lot of other people outside of the business. Yes, it's a sprawl, but what this time has shown is that their community is there and people have been so quick to organize and drop everything and just to see friends and friends of friends and other people jump into action and want to help out every day since the virus has started. So it really has been such a warm time despite the disaster around us.

Thanks for being part of it. And thanks for telling us about the work that you're doing, Pete. Good luck and thank you. Thank you so much, Matt. Pete Corona is a creative executive in film and television, also co-creator of the Displaced Latino Families Wildfire mutual aid directory. He was in Los Angeles, California. I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories

I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? This issue of some GoFundMe's raising more than they know what to do with and others struggling for attention highlights dilemmas around crowdfunding for disaster relief, which

has also become popular for Canadians reeling from wildfire loss. Tony Cookson is a professor of finance at the University of Colorado Boulder. Jacob Remus is director of the Initiative for Critical Disaster Studies at NYU Gallatin. Good morning to you both. Good morning. Good morning. Tony, why did you want to start looking into how effective GoFundMe's are in the aftermath of fires?

As I said, they become incredibly popular, but you wanted to look at whether they're doing what they are meant to do. Why did you want to do that? Well, we experienced a pretty major wildfire here in Colorado. The 2021 Marshall fire came within two miles of my home. So I knew a lot of disaster survivors who were asking for aid on GoFundMe. And as part of coping with this loss in our community, I was going through GoFundMe's, I saw just a wide

disparity in how much people were raising. Some people would be raising over 50,000 within a couple of days and they seem to be pretty well off otherwise. Whereas other people who look pretty similar, just in terms of people in the community, were raising less than 5,000. And we, my co-author, Emily Gallagher and I, and Phil Mulder on the study, were really curious about like, well, how does this relate to sort of other resources that people have to recover? So that was kind of our initial impetus

was actually seeing this happen in our own community. What did you learn about why it is that certain people get more help on GoFundMe and people, some people don't. So what we saw was that actually people who had higher income, so people in the top terseil having over $120,000 of income annually, raised substantially more, about 25% more in their GoFundMe than people in the bottom tercile. And so this disparity, we sort of looked into it, looked like it was coming actually from

the supportiveness of people's networks. So higher income people tend to sort of know people, more people, they get more donations, there are no more people who are in a position to give. And so it's just kind of a natural like visibility thing is that they're sort of visible to the right people to sort of help support them. And it makes a really big difference in aggregate because having more funds in this actually helps you to recover and start your reconstruction of your house much sooner. Jacob, pick up on that.

What do we know about why, I mean, in some ways, maybe it sounds obvious, but why does that richer people tend to get more donations while those who actually need the donations more get fewer donations? So I think there are a number of reasons. One, as Tony was saying, people's networks tend to be really like themselves. There's something called social, that social scientists call homophily, which is basically just a fancy word for saying birds of a feather stick together or you're likely to be like

your friends. So richer people are likely to have richer friends. We see that in a lot of different contexts. So if your house burns down or if it's flooded in a hurricane, and you need a place to stay, your friends, if you have a big house, your friends are likely to have a big house and have a place for you to stay. If you have less money, you have a less big house, your friends are also likely to have a less big house. And so they're less likely to be able to put you up. So that's one reason kind of a, and that's sort of a morally neutral reason, right?

It's not great that people tend to have friends like themselves, but we all expect it and that's reasonable. A more dangerous reason is that we often are trained by society to have more sympathy for people who are more glamorous or who are richer or who are better looking and who seem to have lost more, right? If you have a big expensive house that burns down, you've lost more in terms of value than if you have a small house or if you don't own a house at all. And so we often see replicated in our donations and our giving, we see replicated the inequalities of society that already existed.

I had read as well that part of this is about what people see when they go to these platforms to donate money, that a more polished page in some ways would receive more donations than a page that somebody has just kind of scrapped together because maybe they aren't a designer and they're not sure what they're doing. Somebody had, in reading this, somebody had said it's like going to Amazon

and you're not gonna buy something that doesn't have any reviews as opposed to you're gonna buy something that has all the reviews. Is that fair, Jacob? Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that one of the things about GoFundMe when they go really big is that it's strangers giving to strangers. So it's people with money, people with resources who are giving to the people who they perceive

of as needing aid, as opposed to giving money to friends, giving money kind of equal to equal. So when it's someone who's far away and someone who has more giving to people who have less, it's an experience of charity, right? And charity in both directions. And very often when we give charity, we're giving charity to the people who are performing their need, are performing their worthiness, are performing being better recipients. And that performance is indeed a performance. And as you are suggesting, it's about how do you present yourself? Are you presenting yourself well? Are you presenting

yourself as responsible with money? Are you presenting yourself as somebody who should be getting aid as opposed to someone who shouldn't, someone who's going to waste it, someone who was poor already and therefore didn't lose much. So absolutely, because it's not, because it's not really mutual aid when it's someone from far away giving to someone who's in the disaster, because it really is still in this logic of charity, we get many of these same really, really dangerous and kind of ugly things that happen in charity, which is judging people's worthiness and wanting a performance of need. Tony, you mentioned earlier that this can make a really big difference.

How large are the disparities between how marginalized families would do when it comes to disaster relief compared to families that would be better off? So in terms of the, how much is raised, if you look at the top tercile people in the martial fire, they can expect about 25% more proceeds than someone who's in the bottom terseile. That's about $8,000 for someone who lost their home.

The average that we saw was about $31,000 was raised in these GoFundMe's. We saw that this actually mattered quite a bit. Like if you raised more than like 30,000 in your GoFundMe, we saw that you were significantly more likely to rebuild about four to eight months faster than counterparts who have small GoFundMe accounts. So we saw that that actually seemed to matter for sort of the ultimate indicator of recovery.

In LA, I mean, there was the story of the singer Mandy Moore who got in hot water, at the very least on social media because she was raising money for her in-laws. She's very successful. People said, how could you possibly do that? She said the backlash was not helpful or empathetic. Do you think Tony that that's, is that an outlier situation or is that an illustration of what

we're talking about here? I think it's a bit that an outlier situation or is that an illustration of what we're talking about here? I think it's a bit of a, it's a bit of an outlier. I mean, I think we didn't have as much in terms of like the celebrities and backlash, but we did see some of the same undercurrents in the martial fire is that we saw some people who were pretty well off or were refusing additional donations. You know, one thing that surprised us actually

is that high income people were more likely to have a campaign at all, which like I actually thought they'd be less likely. When we looked into it, it was actually because they were more likely to have a family member organize it for them. So whether that family member is Mandy Moore or not, that maybe that aspect is something

that sort of higher income people kind of share is that they have more supportive networks, not just in sort of richer people, but maybe in the sense that sort of like that big house, you actually have the capacity and the time and the space in your life to help out in ways that are not necessarily monetary. Jacob, you can understand why this is popular, right? People see a disaster, they want to help.

And one of the things that these platforms do is allow them, in the best case scenario, to connect with people that they have no personal connection with, but they see a story and they feel like if they can get involved, maybe they can help that individual out. What do you see as the benefit of turning to the public for disaster help? Yeah, well, I think the sympathy that we all have when we turn on our TVs and see people suffering,

that's good, it's admirable, it's human, it's normal, right? We're often told that in a disaster, we watch disaster movies and we see people acting as animals or mean or selfish. And that's not actually what happens in most disasters. In most disasters, both near and far, people act with empathy, with sympathy, with solidarity. And I think that's to be celebrated and to be relied on, right? The government can't respond immediately. There's bureaucracy. You can't rebuild a house immediately. And so the quickness of informal

aid like GoFundMe is really valuable, is really important. And of course, it gets resources to people who need resources. And that's all again, that's excellent. That's very important. And I don't want to discourage anybody from giving money if they're so moved. People have given money to disaster relief for generations, again, both near and far. And that's a wonderful thing because we are seeing more disasters, both in the sense of there are more disasters because of climate change, they are worse. And also because of social media and because of traditional media, we are literally seeing those disasters more.

We are getting film and radio and television depictions of disaster more and more. And so we're being asked more and more to give. And that's a good thing. Those of us with more, those of us who are not affected by a wildfire should be helping people who are. So how do we do it better? This is what I'll ask you in the last few minutes that we have. We saw, I mean, and part of that is in the conversation that we just had around the spreadsheets

that people like Pete have put together. There are other ones as well, highlighting some of the less well-funded GoFundMe's. If people want to help and they want to donate, Jacob, what should they keep in mind? To me, it's about acting in a spirit of equality and solidarity and humility. And so not looking for necessarily looking for someone who seems perfect, not expecting someone who's asking for money to use it in the way that I'm going to use it, but rather to say, I have resources that I can spare right now and I'm going to give to somebody else and they can use it however they want. And if they are not perfect,

that's fine. One of the things that I always do when I'm giving to disaster relief is I try to find a fund, much like the very first person we heard from, a fund that's controlled by local people who know the needs. So I can give money and then someone who's nearby, someone who's trusted by their neighbors, someone who's really embedded in the place where the need is, can then disperse it as it's needed, rather than me, a few thousand miles away, trying to guess who needs it most, or in what way, or when. Tony, do you have any words of advice, just finally,

for people who, as I say, see disaster, they want to donate, but they want to make sure that their donation is actually going to somebody who needs it, and they want to feel good about that gesture. What would you say to them? I guess I'd sort of build on that sort of last point about sort of funds that sort of help people who are sort of less likely to be seen.

We saw this with the Marshall fires, the vast majority of the donations came in to individuals or households who were named. Group fundraisers were a lot less successful. I mean, I think the one that we heard about that raised 12 million, I think we have to keep in mind, there were 640 people who are beneficiaries of that. And if you spread it across 640 people,

12 million sounds great, except for it's really like 20,000 per person. What would really be great is if that could be 20 million or 30 million or 40 million, if more people sort of thought about sort of giving to something that was kind of this more collective identity would be, I think, helpful. Our natural tendency is to give to individuals because we can see that benefit, but that sort of leads us to sort of give more through our networks and our networks have this

this sort of bias built into them where we end up giving to people who are sort of better off or more like us. And so I think keeping that in mind and giving outside of our network, doing so in productive ways is a good way to go. There's a lot to think about here. Thank you both for being part of this conversation.

Thank you. Thank you. Tony Cookson is a professor of finance at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Jacob Remus is director of the Initiative for Critical Disaster Studies at NYU Gallatin. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.