LA Fire Relief Gift Cards
PARTNER: Baby 2 Baby
DATE: January 2025
LOCATION: San Mateo, California
Thousands of dollars raised to benefit hundreds of LA families.
Overview:
When the LA wildfires devastated local communities, we knew we couldn’t just watch it happen—we had to do something. To take action, we launched a gift card drive to support families who had lost everything. With the help of our community and in partnership with Baby2Baby, we raised thousands of dollars in gift cards that provided families with the flexibility to purchase exactly what they needed most, right when they needed it.
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The goal of this drive was to help families—especially kids—replace the essentials they lost in the fires. We knew transporting goods would be a challenge, so we reached out to Baby2Baby, a trusted organization already on the ground, to confirm what was most useful. Their answer? Gift cards. Fast, flexible, and easy to distribute, gift cards gave families the freedom to choose what was most urgent for them, whether that meant clothing, toiletries, school supplies, or food.
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We researched several organizations in Los Angeles that we thought would align with our purpose. We wanted to make sure that we could trust the organization to transfer our gift cards into the hands of the kids that needed it most. Baby2Baby is an established non profit based in LA that focuses on the youth. This was the organization we were hoping to partner with. We researched who was on their board of directors and reached out to a couple of their board members through email. One of the board members responded immediately back to us. They assured us that if we partnered with Baby2Baby the donations would make it into the right hands. We emailed our community with details about the fire and our mission, and we set up convenient drop-off locations to collect gift cards. For those who preferred to give cash, we offered to handle the purchasing of cards ourselves. We did everything we could to make it as convenient as possible for our community to participate. We set a goal for ourselves to raise $2,000 and we far surpassed it by raising $3,000.
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With the natural disaster going on, time was of the essense so this project was all about fast action and smart giving. No big event—just clear communication, local partnerships, and a shared goal to make a difference. After solidifying our partnership with Baby2Baby for this project we created a google spreadsheet which listed hundreds of our community members with all of their contact information. We drafted and tweaked several emails until we knew our email conveyed our message. We knew the key to participation was to make it as easy as possible. We collected gift cards in a variety of formats which included emailed gift cards, cash donations and drop off locations for those that wanted to pick up actual gift cards at a store. We made sure that everyone knew there was no donation too small. The focus was solely on making sure every donation could be used directly by families (kids) affected by the fires.
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Thanks to the generosity of our community, we raised $3,000 dollars in gift cards for hundreds of LA families. We mailed these gift cards directly to our contact on the board of directors at Baby2Baby. Our contact sent us updates of the families that she provided our gift cards to which we then relayed back to our community who graciously donated. We were thrilled to hear that many of the families included teens and they were using our gift cards to buy bedding, bath essentials, clothes for school and school supplies. She described the appreciation these kids felt when she would hand them these gift cards. These were kids that lost everything overnight and did not know what was ahead of them. They were scared. This project reminded us how important it is to act quickly when disaster strikes—and that even when you can’t undo the damage, you can offer comfort, choice, and care.
