In early December, heavy rains in Haines unleashed flooding and mudslides, damaging infrastructure and property. Officials say 9 homes were destroyed. After the storm, state relief money poured into Haines. And a grassroots fundraising effort has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.
Roads were blocked with debris. Friends’ homes flooded. Rebecca Kameika first heard about the landslide on her own road through a text message. Like many residents, she and her partner evacuated their home.
She knew her friends and family in Georgia would want to help the town.
“So, I was trying to find an easy link to organizations here,” she said.
“I was just going to find a link and put it on my Facebook and let people know.”
She searched the internet for a little while, but came up empty handed. So she made her own fundraiser and put it on social media. Her goal?
“I put $200,000 because I thought if I put $1,500 dollars, which is really what I thought I was going to get, I put $200,000 in there because I figured someone’s going to not scroll past that. [They’d] say ‘okay, this needs something.'” Kameika said.
She texted her dad and posted a link on social media. A few friends from town shared it. And then it took off.
She started her fundraiser at 3 p.m. Wednesday. That night, GoFundMe put a hold on her account because donations came in so fast. It had raised $15,000 dollars in 12 hours. By 9 a.m. the next morning she says it was nearly double that.
“And then I kind of started panicking because I didn’t have a plan, because I, my plan was that it was going to be very small,” she said.
Kameika realized she was dealing with a lot of people’s money. So she partnered with some long-time residents with experience fundraising. They decided to donate all the money to the local Salvation Army–with stipulations: it would all stay in Haines, and it would be added to whatever the organization already planned to donate.
[Then she started to worry that the online service may take a big fee. Kameika has a business degree. Her plan was to look up the fees and negotiate a reduction or waiver–it’s a disaster after all. But she discovered they don’t take them. Just standard credit charges.]
The fundraiser generated nearly $220,000 in two weeks. Direct donations through GoFundMe for the town and family and loved ones of the two residents lost in the mudslides come to nearly half a million dollars. It’s a starting point from which to rebuild.
Salvation Army Sargent Kevin Woods is on the distribution end of all the support. He and his wife served meals and connected displaced Haines residents with lodging throughout the devastating storms.
“We were serving about 600 meals a day and we’re at 12 or 15 different locations, now,” he said.
That was last week. He says even though the rain has stopped, there’s still a lot of work to be done to address the long term needs of the community.
“That money, it seems like a lot, but there’s a lot of, you know, devastation in this community. And when some of the other agencies, you know, that came for the initial emergency, are not here… the Salvation Army, I’ll still be here, you know, because we’re based here. I mean, this is our home,” said Woods.
Woods is based in Haines, but other aid organizations reached out, too. The American Red Cross partnered with them and other local resources, like the clinic, to offer aid. Here’s CEO Tanguy Libbrecht, from the American Red Cross of Alaska headquarters in Anchorage.
“In addition to us providing the hotel stays, one of the big things that we do is we provide what we call disaster health services. And that might be something like replacing things like eyeglasses or medications, durable medical equipment, those type of things as … we become aware of those needs,” he said.
American Red Cross also sent volunteers to help with mental health services. The organization would offer the same amount of help in Haines whether they got donations or not, but big checks from regional donors have been coming in over the past weeks.
The clean up isn’t over in Haines. People are still out of their homes. The community is only beginning to grieve the loss of life. A baseline sense of safety in town is interrupted. But this week, Salvation Army is downtown, distributing gift cards and clean up kits. It’s a start.