Q&A
JFN West Coast director: ‘People are coming together in a way we haven’t seen in a really long time’

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Our Big Kitchen Los Angeles is experiencing a huge demand for opportunities to volunteer to prepare food packages for first responders and displaced families.
Volunteers are clamoring for opportunities to help after devastating fires struck the L.A. area during the past week, said Tzivia Schwartz Getzug, West Coast director of the Jewish Funders Network, in a phone interview on Sunday. Schwartz Getzug talked about the importance of supporting local organizations, immediate versus longer-term needs she anticipates the Jewish community will encounter and concern about the fire’s possible resurgence. (As of Sunday evening, the fires has reportedly killed 24 people, burned 40,000 acres and destroyed 12,000 structures in Los Angeles County, including synagogues and homes in the Jewish community.)
The following has been edited for clarity and length.
Nira Dayanim: What are you seeing in terms of how people are stepping up?
Tzivia Schwartz Getzug: Personally, I don’t know anybody who is not looking for volunteer opportunities, donation opportunities, engagement opportunities. Anecdotally, we’re hearing people are coming together in a way we haven’t seen in a really long time and looking for opportunities to support one another, whether it’s donating to the federation or other kinds of funds that are being developed, or showing up to provide meals to firefighters and first responders, or supporting the folks in the evacuation centers.
This morning I spent a couple of hours at OBK LA, which is Our Big Kitchen Los Angeles, an organization that normally throughout the year provides opportunities for the community to come together to prepare nutritious, hot meals for the food insecure and distribute them in both the Jewish community and the broader community. I was there this morning helping to make over 500 meals for first responders and first responders and evacuees, and the place was packed. I actually had to ask for permission to participate, because there are so many people there looking for ways to volunteer. I spoke with the director of the program, Yossi Segelman, and he showed me his cellphone, which was just exploding with people writing to OBK LA asking for opportunities to engage or to volunteer.
So, we’re just trying to find ways for those folks who are looking for volunteer opportunities to engage, and then also for those who want to donate and be a part of the response that way, to be able to engage that way as well.
ND: What has the last week looked like for Jewish Funders Network?
TSG: We sent out a message last week in our newsletter suggesting that people reach out to the Jewish Federation here in Los Angeles and donate there. Today, we sent another letter specifically to all of our membership — not just to the L.A. folks, but everybody — letting them know that this is a huge, huge catastrophe, and imploring them to support local organizations in Los Angeles who can best serve the communities. Those now include the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, Jewish Family Services, Jewish Free Loans, Bet Tzedek Legal Services, OBK LA and others.
ND: Is your team still in crisis mode, or are conversations starting about how to approach the aftermath of the fires moving forward?
TSG: One of the things that we always talk about when we talk about crisis funding is that there’s always the immediate crisis, and then there are the mid and long-term needs that are going to arise. We encourage our members to hold back a little bit — yes, to give as much as they can now, but to always remember that there are both those mid-term and long-term needs, and those are going to change as we see the situation settle down. We are probably still in crisis mode at this point, and we’ll see what the next week, two and three look like in terms of where the needs are and how we can encourage our members to support them.
One of the other things I’m looking at is how we as a network of funders can engage with other networks of funders locally in Southern California so that we can work together, strategize and leverage each other’s strengths to make sure that we’re getting support to the people and institutions that need it the most.
ND: What are some examples of what those mid- to long-term needs might be?
TSG: Folks need extra support in terms of housing and in terms of getting their lives back together, especially those who have lost everything. I’m talking to people who told me that they’ve had to evacuate but they still don’t know whether they have a home or not. That’s a very different story than somebody who already knows that their home has been destroyed and they’ve got to figure out immediate needs today that are going to look very different in a month or six months.
I also think we’re looking at rebuilding —- there are Jewish institutions, synagogues, that have burned down. There are rabbis who have lost their homes.
The Los Angeles area is pretty spread out and big, and we tend to, in some ways, stay in our local communities. But if we’ve got folks on the west side from the Palisades and Brentwood who are moving to the San Fernando Valley, or who are moving farther south into the South Bay for at least the next six months, year, who knows how long, we’re going to have to figure out how to meet their Jewish needs differently from a geographic standpoint.
There are also going to be ripple effects that we can’t even begin to think about. One of those, by the way, is that the housing crisis we’ve had in Los Angeles for quite some time now is going to be exacerbated by all of this. All of those thousands of families who have been displaced or have lost their homes are already seeking other kinds of housing, and that is going to push prices up because the areas they’re coming from are financially in the upper echelons. Those folks are going to be looking at high-end homes and even medium-level homes, those prices are all going to go up — as that trickles down, what does it mean for the housing crisis and for the unhoused crisis that we already have in Los Angeles? Our policymakers are really going to have to start thinking about medium and long-term implications, and we’re going to need support from the philanthropic community as well as from the government, of course.
ND: What else should our audience know about what’s going on?
TSG: It’s not over yet. Unfortunately, we are expecting not as strong but still high winds again in the coming week, and we just don’t know what that means. We just don’t know who’s going to be impacted by that and how much more destruction we’re going to see. We’re obviously praying that it is mostly under control, but we’ll have to see.