Camp Fire Emergency Relief

Our organization, United Way of Northern California, continues to be a leader on the front lines of the Camp Fire Recovery process. Throughout our initial Phase One response to the Camp Fire, we have been able to directly vet, approve and award more than 8,500 applications from families who lost their home in the Camp Fire. These resources have gone to cover basic needs as well as transportation/relocation costs. We are proud to call GlobalGiving a partner in that effort. 

In our Phase Two response, we are focused on the mid-long term care for those who lost their home and have not been able to recover. This has happened to more than 1,000 of the almost 14,000 individuals/families impacted. Some of these were uninsured, some underinsured, some denied by FEMA for various reasons and others lost their job as many commercial buildings were also destroyed in the town of Paradise. To take on this enourmous long-term challenge- UWNC (with support from your organization) has been able to open an office in Chico (pictured) to be closer to the clients and give survivors greater access to our programs. This has helped tremendously as our only other office was located more than 80 miles away (in Redding) previously. We have also filled that office with three staff, two of which act as Full Time Case Managers to handle the more complicated cases we come across. To date, also with support from GlobalGiving we have been able to serve 23 clients and plan to do much more! Some examples of the type of care we are providing include helping with transportation (finding used vehichles for clients who are seeking work but lost their car in the fire) as well as re-housing through our Stable Housing Opportunities Program covering the cost of moving expenses, deposits, early utilities for those who need to relocate. 

We believe we are positioned currently with the resources to help roughly 100 more families in this way. Our focus now is to continue to raise support for our Case Management/SHOP Initiative to help another 50+ families and transition back to our programs designed to make families more financially stable. Those programs include: financial coaching, Volunteer Income Tax Assistance, workforce readiness workshops/job fairs and after school youth initiatives. We see this work as being even more critical in the future as we know our community will stop looking at this as "recovery" and simply have more homeless, more students less prepared for school and more families struggling to make ends meet. We can not thank GlobalGiving enough for their support to date of resources going directly to survivors that we have administered and for making us a strong organization to this point with the ability to react and get those most in need the help.