South Florida on the scene in the face of California fires
By: Diana Bello Aristizábal
January has been a devastating month for residents of the Los Angeles metropolitan area and its surrounding regions, who since Jan. 7 have seen their streets burn in flames due to several fires that have claimed the lives of at least 27 people and destroyed thousands of homes. In the face of this tragedy, South Florida has been on the scene with donations and aid in different forms through Global Empowerment Mission (GEM) headquartered in Doral.
“We deployed an advance team to Los Angeles on Jan. 9 led by our director of field operations domestically and our director of operations in California. Our team is comprised of fire survivors of the 2018 Paradise fire (Northern California), so we have a very informed approach,” explains Emily Fullmer, chief operations officer at GEM, which base office to respond to the emergency is located in Chico, California.
The organization’s work consists of distributing cash cards and essential family kits with hygiene products and food to those who have evacuated or lost their homes through BStrong, an initiative in partnership with GEM that provides emergency assistance to people in crisis. The purpose of delivering cash cards is to grant enough money to survivors so they can cover expenses of a hotel and short-term incidentals.
“With the size of this disaster, we will be operating in California for multiple years, and we will use a lot of what we’ve learned from our experiences responding to other fires (Paradise, 2018, Maui, 2023) to put together a long-term response,” Emily says, adding that phase 1 will end when the fires are extinguished. At the time of press, some were still active.
The goal of phase 1 is to cover the immediate needs of survivors, while during phase 2, the organization will cover its medium-term needs through donations of mattresses, bedding and all kinds of urgent items to live in interim housing.
“We have warehouses in Chico, Los Angeles and Doral from which trucks are being transported with products to be quickly distributed among all impacted areas. We can, for example, send a truck on Monday night and it will arrive on Tuesday morning.”
Most donations that have been deployed come from Fortune 500 companies (both goods for victims and supplies for volunteers) but GEM has also received help from individuals who have come to the Doral office to assemble essential kits. “Both companies and individuals are donating their time, money and resources to make all of this possible.”
Those interested in joining this cause can visit https://www.globalempowermentmission.org/. People are encouraged to donate primarily money rather than goods.