We've been getting quite a few individual donations lately, far more than ever before. We're honored by that, and we want people to know what we're doing with the resources they're entrusting to us. So here's a summary of what TBR has been doing on the recovery this last week.
#1) We have more than 1300 responses on the flood damage survey 5 days after launching it at LAfloodsurvey.com. This gives us a way to understand what is happening with people who have been displaced, especially the 95% of people who are *not* in shelters, but about which next to nothing was known prior to the survey.
#2) Last week, we called about 700 people who responded to the survey, to check in with them, see if there were any urgent mental health or other referalls and discuss people's needs. 3 goals here: a) to meet a few of those needs directly, b) to have people's lived experience inform the recovery and the policy that are coming and c) (perhaps most of all) to simply make human contact with people who are isolated and often in quite serious distress.
3) We've placed Amazon orders for 477 people for immediate needs, with about 365 or so additional requests verified and legitimated. We're funding that entirely from online donations, and it will continue if more contributions continue to come in.
4) From Thursday's calls, we realized that people's top priority was clean out homes before the mold takes over. With 18 hours of lead time, we organized our first volunteer house-gutting operation, which we called "Gut Check Saturday," which happened this morning. About 160 TBR volunteers took part, partnering with about 200 flood-damaged homeowners (with close to double that signing up online).
We formed volunteer teams, which deployed to around 40 homes. The people who didn't get volunteers today were put on a list we've sent to a non-profit entity that is contracting with professional contracting services for free gutting starting next week.
5) We've created an online list of recovery resources here. If there are other resources or info that's important and reliable that ought to be there, please let us know in the comments and we'll add it.
6) Finally, we've created a one-page Volunteer Guide for house clearing and gutting, which covers everything people need to know. That can be downloaded at here.
Thank you for your belief in what we're doing. You can donate here to allow us to do more of it.
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