As the Eaton fire swept through Altadena, California, Mai-Lin Graves came to a brutal realization: The victims were people she grew up with.

“That’s my old elementary school teacher, that’s the person that used to pick us up at the Boys and Girls Club, that’s my old friend from elementary school — everybody had lost their housing,” she said. Graves, who had moved to New York for work, began reposting their GoFundMe campaigns to feel closer to home.

Cierra Black, a Los Angeles resident and a friend of Graves, had been doing the same thing, feverishly reposting the waves of GoFundMe pages of Black families who had lost their homes in Altadena and Pasadena. They both knew the community’s history and what was at stake of being lost: a place where Black families had settled after leaving the Jim Crow South, and where Black Angelenos who were displaced from their South Los Angeles neighborhoods by freeway construction projects in the 1950s had bought homes. Despite redlining and racist real estate practices in Altadena, multiple generations of Black Angelenos called the neighborhood home.

The Eaton fire destroyed more than 9,000 structures and killed at least 17 people, with at least 24 people reported missing. Many of the dead were Black elders from the community who had remained in their homes amid delays in evacuation orders.

National news coverage in the early days of the fire, however, tended to focus on the Palisades fire, which burned on the other end of the county and had decimated a wealthy coastal neighborhood. Stories focused on celebrities who had lost their homes or dramatic images of mansions burning along the iconic Pacific Coast Highway. Graves and Black feared a similar dynamic would be play out in crowdfunding, with the Black families of Altadena going overlooked.

Black, who is a freelance journalist, began working with Leslie Vargas, her editor at AfroPunk, to compile the GoFundMe campaigns of Black families affected by the Eaton fire. They called the spreadsheet “Displaced Black Families GoFundMe Directory” and shared it on the AfroPunk Instagram account to its 1.1 million followers. Graves joined the effort, vetting submissions. As a part of a wellspring of mutual aid that sprung up across the region, the list spread widely across social media. And it started to have an impact. One of Graves’s childhood friends who added their campaign to the list saw their donations double within the same day. Within a week, the list has grown from a few dozen campaigns to more than 700 that have raised a total of more than $17 million.

Such effort is necessary to overcome negative perceptions and structural racism, the organizers said. “When it comes to relief, certain people are automatically deserving, and others you have to question if they’re deserving or not,” Black said. “That definitely applies to a lot of working-class Black people, or even Black people across the spectrum.”

Her concerns of inequality within giving are especially true as charity has shifted toward GoFundMe.

Since its launch in 2010, GoFundMe has established itself the prevailing way for individuals to fundraise online. Raising and distributing $30 billion since its founding, the privately held, for-profit site, which rakes in millions in revenue each year through donation fees and tips, has become the world’s biggest crowdfunding platform and the go-to way for Americans in crisis to give to one another.

The site allows individuals to craft their own calls for aid — whether it’s for spiraling health care costs, natural disasters, or other emergencies. It helps people raise funds in cases where government aid may fall short or is absent altogether. In the last several weeks, GoFundMe has raised more than $200 million in fire-related donations, according to the company. That sum nearly equals all disaster-related relief fundraised on the platform in 2024. Over the past five years, GoFundMe has also seen a 90 percent increase in disaster-related fundraising.

The platform, however, is also rife with inequality. A growing body of........

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