The first week of 2025 was filled with perfectly normal celebrity Instagram posts. I mean, it’s been a nightmare, but in a way, we’ve gotten used to it.
Actor and musician Mandy Moore was one of many entertainers who lost part of their homes in the Altadena, California, wildfires last week. In her post back in the neighborhood, photos of jaundiced wildfire smoke reveal debris, charred trees and an exterior staircase on the verge of collapse. Moore’s caption listed further losses, including her husband’s studio and instruments, her children’s school and the home of her brother-in-law, who is expecting their first child in the next few weeks.
What we have here is a giving system based on your network – who you know, how wealthy your network is.
Emily Gallagher, University of Colorado Boulder
But when Moore added a link to a GoFundMe campaign set up for the pregnant couple, she said, “So many people have asked how they can help…donate to help rebuild. Please consider sharing,” she said nervously. In an era of widening inequality and increasing disasters, who can participate in crowdfunding?
“You’re worth 14 million – GoFundMe is crazy,” the top comment had more than 1,600 likes and cited questionable estimates of Moore’s net worth. . “You give that money to your brother-in-law! Why ask the millions of Americans who are struggling to get by?” read another. “Did I miss the part where you asked the hurricane people (in North Carolina) for help?” and, creepily, “Even if you give me the money, you’ll never live.”
In fact, Moore’s complaint caused a media firestorm of its own, first grabbing headlines for the “backlash” to her request and then again for her response to that backlash. (“Of course,” she wrote in a post noting that she is also helping her family and asking for ways people can help. “We also just lost most of our lives in the fire. Please don’t do that.” One thing is to force you to do something.” She has since deleted both the GoFundMe link and the “F OFF” comment.
Moore’s in-laws have since surpassed their original goal of $60,000, raising more than $200,000. This is just part of the more than $100 million donated to Los Angeles wildfire victims through GoFundMe, a company spokesperson said. But that number pales in comparison to the thousands of dollars raised by Finster Paul on behalf of his grandmother, Nesta, who also lost her Altadena home in the Eaton fire, and the thousands raised by her 29-year-old father, Gregory Walker. The appeal states as follows: We lost everything we had in the Eaton Canyon fire, and before we had almost nothing. ”
TFire-related donations to GoFundMe in the first few weeks of 2025 have already accounted for nearly half of all natural disaster donations for all of 2024 ($235 million), according to company statistics. has reached. The scale of this disaster is an ominous start to the year, but perhaps a sign of our new reality.
GoFundMe is a horrifying monument to our neoliberal era. This has become an essential means of seeking and receiving cash assistance during a crisis, but governments and insurance companies are increasingly unable or unwilling to do so. But while it shows human resilience and generosity in the face of tragedy, it also steadily produces evidence of the injustices that plague our society.
This site reveals the unpleasant truth that some people’s lives are simply worth more than others, at least when it comes to donating in times of need. And rather than helping the problem with the democratizing power of the internet, a growing body of research suggests that online crowdfunding actually makes it worse.
“Crowdfunding is regressive,” said Emily Gallagher, a finance professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-author of a study examining GoFundMe campaigns after the 2021 Marshall Fire outside Boulder. . Although the fires affected economically diverse Coloradans, Gallagher said higher-income victims were more likely to use GoFundMe and received more and larger donations. I discovered that there is. Beneficiaries with household incomes above $120,000 received more than 25%, or nearly $8,000, more than households with household incomes of less than $78,000. (This study controlled for different values of property loss.)
Gallagher and his co-authors attribute the disparity in donations largely to differences in the social networks of wealthy and non-wealthy people. “Movements among high-income people are more likely to be organized by people outside of their immediate family,” she says. “They have a wide network of people who can donate, and they’ll give a little bit more. What we’re offering here is your network, who you know; It’s a giving system based on how wealthy your network is and how big it is.”
What we do when we recover from disasters is often to maintain an unequal status quo.
Jacob Lemes, New York University
Other researchers have found similar results. A study of U.S. GoFundMe campaigns launched during the first seven months of the COVID-19 pandemic found that out of 175,000 pandemic-related campaigns, GoFundMe raised nearly a quarter of all funds raised. It was found that only 1% received a single penny, and more than 40% did not receive a single penny. Donation. Additionally, researchers found that campaigns run by people living in neighborhoods with higher incomes and higher levels of education attracted more donations.
“I don’t think GoFundMe is a great way to correct social imbalances,” Gallagher said. “That’s exactly where the government needs to step in.” (This sentiment was echoed in the comments on Moore’s Instagram post, with one user writing, “You’re confusing Mundy with the federal government. (I think so.)
But Gallagher’s own research shows that government aid after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017 was also regressive, with more money going to households that originally had more money. It turned out. This is consistent with the conclusions of a federal advisory committee established after Hurricane Katrina. The commission said Fema’s recovery program “provides an additional boost to wealthy homeowners and other less needy people, while lower-income people and others are pushed further into poverty after Hurricane Katrina.” There is. disaster”. Other researchers have found that disparities are racialized, with white disaster victims and white communities receiving more government aid than black victims and communities.
It was a fraught situation of systemic injustice that Moore’s Instagram complaint sparked last week. It is understandable that she asked for help on behalf of others. I can also understand the anger of those who feel less fortunate than her, even if perhaps misdirected. Mr. Moore is by no means the first or only wealthy person to benefit from the fact that while disasters may flatten houses and trees, they have no such leveling effect on society.
After a devastating explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917 killed more than 1,500 people and left thousands homeless, Massachusetts residents received hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid, including tons of furniture, to survive. Disaster Historian and New York announced. University professor Jacob Lemes. But the distribution of that aid came with certain expectations. “There was a very strong idea that disaster relief should restore the status quo, so if you were poor before the disaster you should stay poor, and if you were rich before the disaster you should stay that way,” Rich said. “This was directly reflected in the quality of material aid provided. “The working class and poor got second-hand furniture, and the wealthy got new furniture. What we do when we rebuild is often to maintain an unequal status quo.”
Is it possible to break this cycle? As the disasters caused by the climate crisis loom ever closer to us, we need a recovery that reduces rather than entrenches inequality, or at least benefits the poor as much as the rich. Is it possible to come up with an effort?
“It’s really hard to do this in capitalism because all these structures and policies are focused on property,” Lems said. “If you try to recover property, you end up recovering property.”
Addressing inequality at Fema has been a priority for the Biden administration, which announced a major reform package in January 2024, but the right has already labeled Fema’s “anti-racism and reactionary war goals” We are firmly committed to “fairness.” DEI program. With Fox News, Elon Musk, and the Christian Right taking aim all at once, the future of Fema’s impartiality under the Trump administration is highly questionable.
Lems points to the efforts of activists such as Occupy Sandy, which helped introduce a generation of activists to the idea of ”mutual aid” as an alternative to the regressive model of returning property to property owners. do. One way interest in this mutual aid has spread since the Los Angeles wildfires is through the coordination of spreadsheets that share GoFundMes for specific communities. The GoFundMe Directory for Displaced Black Families includes links to more than 600 fundraisers. Similar spreadsheets have been created for Latino families, Filipino families, people with disabilities, and musicians.
Pete Corona, a Los Angeles-based television executive with strong ties to Hollywood’s Latinx community, set up a spreadsheet of Latinx families with actor Michelle Prada and influencer Carly Velasquez. While their Instagram followers (101,000 and 328,000, respectively) don’t match Moore’s (5.5 million), the initiative is moving like wildfire. Corona says there is. The list that started with just 10 names has grown to over 500 people. Corona and his allies found themselves fielding requests for assistance, including translating messages and appeals, checking on fundraising efforts, and updating spreadsheets in real time. The one that has raised the least amount of money will be placed at the top of the list.
The spreadsheet is just one aspect of a broader mutual aid effort in Los Angeles, where community groups and residents are coming together to help those in need. But they also challenge how ordinary people can hack the systems available to us to try to achieve something a little more just, from GoFundMe’s opaque algorithms to social media’s follower inequality. It gives us a glimpse of it.
