Using a three-pronged strategy focused on its community of female business owners, the Female Founder Collective raised $1.7 million for California wildfire relief as of Wednesday morning. The campaign is primed to raise far more, a portion of which will be disseminated to female business owners who lost everything in the fires that ravaged Los Angeles starting on January 7.
The Female Founder Collective was launched in 2018 by designer Rebecca Minkoff and advisor, brand builder and former digital publishing exec Alison Koplar Wyatt to support, develop and elevate female-founded and women-owned businesses.
“[The L.A. fire department campaign] started as an Instagram fundraiser Wednesday morning [the second day of the fires], then it took on a life of its own,” Minkoff told Glossy on Wednesday. Donations have ranged from a few dollars to a $100,000 donation. Most are around $1,000.
“[As soon as it launched], my phone started blowing up with donation alerts,” Wyatt told Glossy. It was a bright spot for the co-founder who is one of the thousands of people who lost their homes in the Palisades fire last week.
It’s estimated that more than 450,000 Los Angeles residents are currently under mandatory evacuation notice, many of whom will be unable to return to their property or home for years to come due to damage or total loss.
Knowing the importance of speed, the FFC team worked with Meta and PayPal to circumvent the 45-day waiting period to transfer funds of this size. As of Wednesday, the full amount had been delivered to the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation, Minkoff told Glossy.
The team simultaneously created a second way to get involved through a limited-edition T-shirt and social graphic created by illustrator Robert Wilson. Minkoff told Glossy she initially ordered 250 NY hearts LA tees, which promptly sold out. Another 500 are being printed now. The idea was inspired by a similar project for 9/11 victims Minkoff oversaw through her eponymous fashion brand.
“When I saw the design, it was particularly emotional for me because New York had long been my home [before I moved to L.A.] and I feel the same way about my community here that I did for New York,” Wyatt said. “There’s this assumption that everybody [in the Palisades] is wealthy, but that’s absolutely not the case. People have been there their entire lives, and it is a really sweet community of families and generations of people that came to be in this really delicious part of the country where the mountains truly met the sea.”
The team is asking for a minimum donation of $100 for the tee, but Minkoff told Glossy that 90% of shoppers are donating far more. While the cash donations were routed directly to the L.A. Fire Department, the profits from the tees will fill the FFC’s grant program to be distributed to female-owned and -founded businesses in L.A. that have been hurt by the fires.
It is estimated that more than 12,000 structures were burned in the L.A. fires that started on January 7 and continue to burn through parts of Southern California.
Grant applications are already flooding in from the many Angelenos who lost their business in a fire last week. For now, the FFC team is working on educational resources for business owners on accessing FEMA funds, dealing with insurance, navigating unseen challenges and applying for grants to rebuild.
The third pillar of the FFC’s campaign involves beauty retailer Thirteen Lune, which partnered with the organization to collect and disseminate essentials on the ground in L.A. Thirteen Lune founder Nyakio Greico told Glossy this week that she is collecting donations from brands and consumers in her company’s Larchmont storefront. She is routing bags of personal care products and other essentials to victims as early as this weekend. Like much of the support coming from the beauty community this week, Greico’s plan is evolving day by day. So far, she has been overwhelmed by the positive response from the L.A. community. “When women come together, magic happens,” she told Glossy.
According to the FFC, female-founded businesses are 1.5 times more likely to close after a natural disaster than those owned by men. The team hopes to help as many grant applicants as possible and, for those they cannot help, they will spotlight them through content over the coming weeks.
“It’s a long road ahead,” Wyatt said. “Everybody’s calculating what it’ll take to get themselves back to where they were, and they need help — all the help they can get.”