Like any major disaster, when floods hit south Louisiana last month, big relief organizations streamed in - and people all over the world gave money. But it’s no longer just the big brand names of philanthropy that attract donations from afar. Crowdfunding has grown up, and now millions of dollars are funneled to small and specific causes. In Baton Rouge, it has changed the nature of flood relief efforts.
Crowdfunding Changes Disaster Relief In South Louisiana
Rhiannon Suir love cats. Which is good, since she’s got more than 20 in her small Baton Rouge apartment.* She takes me into a room where a handful of kittens sleep on a bed and tackle each other on the floor. “Just look at these guys. They like to sleep and eat - they lay around, they’re my spirit animal.”
Before she moved to Baton Rouge she was a vet tech in Los Angeles. She heard that a few local animal shelters were flooded, and called some friends to go pick up cats that would otherwise be euthanized.
Cat litter and toys are all over the floor. “They’re roommating with our guinea pigs right now,” in her son’s room, says Suir.
Her seven-year old son likes sleeping with four kittens in his room. Her husband Brandon - not so much. A sign on the door says “Cat Hotel - Brandon’s Nightmare.”
Suir has a DIY adoption process to find homes for the cats. She’s paid for all the cat litter, food, shots and other stuff with a GoFundMe page. It’s raised about $1,000. Suir says “We’re not entirely paycheck to paycheck we’re close enough that, like, yeah we definitely couldn’t afford to feed an extra 12 cats. You know, if we needed to. Because that’s on top of the five that are our cats.”
It’s been mostly people she knows around the country, people who may not have given to general flood relief efforts but wanted to help her with this project.
Online campaigns like GoFundMe match donations and services to the exact people, or animals, who need them. The idea is to eliminate the inefficiency of larger organizations.
There are thousands of flood-related causes like Suir’s on GoFundMe. There’s one for police officers, one for employees of Massage Envy, even one for a bobcat refuge.
Search for “Louisiana Floods” on GoFundMe, and a strange universe of needs pops up. Adult children who’ve set up a page to help their elderly, flooded out parents. It’s hard to tell who they expect will donate, probably friends and family. Some have only raised a few hundred dollars. But then there’s the occasional individual homeowner who’s somehow got $10,000 in donations.
Ky Luu is an expert in disaster management at Tulane University. Luu says, “There’s a potential for those who are more socially savvy at marketing – they’re the ones who are attracting the funding.”
He says a downfall of crowdfunding disaster relief is how subjective it is. “Are those resources spent according to those who are in the most need?” asks Luu. “If somebody puts forward an argument that they have lost their home, they are in need of immediate cash assistance. It’s a wonderful mechanism in the short-term, but in the long run we don’t see these funding mechanisms supporting long-term recovery.”
That may not seem like a big deal when you’re talking about a few thousand dollars here and there. But he points to an online campaign that raised $2.5 million after Hurricane Sandy. “We’re talking about real serious dollars here, where we do need some regulations,” says Luu.
Regulations, or even relationships with the big charities which ideally have a bigger picture of a whole community’s needs after disaster. But recent scandals and critiques of the Red Cross are driving the interest in crowd-funding disaster relief.
With crowdfunding, Luu says there’s a risk people could take the money and run and not help anyone.
But when crowdfunding’s at its best, he says it helps get people money fast. After Katrina he says fast cash could have made a big difference. He says if we had crowdfunding as an option then, individual businesses would have been able to “...get funding support to keep them moving forward, versus waiting for the formal authorities to do their assessment, waiting for that money to finally become available - and at that point in time it’s too late to recover."
Suir heard people with flooded homes worry about how long it will take to get FEMA money. So she helped a few do a GoFundMe. “It’s been pretty imperative, especially for getting the ball rolling." They may not raise much, or anything, with crowdfunding. But why not give it a try?
*Suir has adopted out many cats since the time of this reporting and is down to just 12 as of the last week of September.
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