Porfiria Guerrero is getting ready for the lunch rush, stacking lunch boxes alongside other volunteers inside the Pasadena Community Job Center. The large, open room is bustling, and tables are set up in an L formation in the back for a lunch station, where a small fleet of women pauses after setting up.
The meals are for anyone who needs them: people who lost homes or work in last month’s wildfires, those who are here to help, or those like Ms. Guerrero, both a giver and receiver: She has found day jobs through the center, worked as part of the staff, and for the last six years volunteered here.
Ms. Guerrero cleans for two families whose homes burned down; she’s lost that income. On the second day of the fires, she gathered with other day laborers at the job center. They wanted to help – each other, and the Los Angeles area.
Why We Wrote This
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Natural disasters upend lives and neighborhoods, challenging our ability to persevere. After the Los Angeles fires, one organization leverages love and tenacity to expand its sense of service.
“It’s incredible,” says Ms. Guerrero. “People come to help. People come to get many things.”
That shared love grew into a donation hub providing essential items – like today’s lunches – to the Los Angeles area, especially near Altadena. The job center’s role in serving marginalized people made it a natural stop for donations in a surge of giving during the fires. The workers’ ability to organize and manage those items expanded the center’s sense of community service, leveraging that goodwill into support for 27,000 people.
And it’s still going, with fire relief distributions twice a week.
“There was just something about the organic nature of [how] it grew to support the needs of the community,” says Nathaniel Whitfield, an artist and lecturer at UCLA who volunteers to support the workers. “But it was also from the community and through the community, and it was building community.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Cleanup brigade
The job center was established in 2000 as a place for day laborers to find work, and about 50 to 80 people pass through here each day to find manual labor jobs like building, house cleaning, and moving. Workers agree to a code of ethics and job standards. Center staff help set wages, and, for safety, screen employers and keep track of the workers’ locations. Funding comes from a county grant and private donations.
The center is also a safe place for nonnative people to find reliable information about immigration. Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of orders about citizenship and deportation. The center has helped workers prepare for Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. A rapid response team has formed in case immigration officials show up.
It is “a place with dignity where [workers] can [find] jobs and benefits that they deserve like human rights,” Ms. Guerrero explains in a text, which is more comfortable for her than speaking English.
That shared sense of purpose compelled them to form a cleanup brigade in the fires’ early days. As the Eaton Fire burned just a couple of blocks north, streets surrounding the center filled with charred debris and trees blown down by heavy winds. The workers organized the best way they knew how: They picked up their tools and started clearing cluttered sidewalks and roadways.
Some had lost their homes; many lost jobs. They needed basics like food and clothing. Mutual aid sprouted. Some brought in donations, which were also pouring in from across the city. While other organizations struggled to manage a flood of generosity, items sent here were put to use. Word got out that the center was getting donations to the people who needed them, which led to more donations, and more volunteers – 10,000 over the next month and a half.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Community built in real time
The ethos driving that momentum is posted on a refrigerator in the back of the office. It reads, “Solidarity not charity.”
“We are resilient,” says Manuel Vicente, communications director for the job center, which is affiliated with the nonprofit National Day Laborer Organizing Network. For example: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the workers organized a food bank at the center. It’s still there.
“We are a community who loves our community, who love each other,” he says. There are no politicians or public figures coming to save them, he adds. “At the end of the day, we only have each other, and we know that.”
On a mid-February morning, drivers roll up to tents that shelter supplies, which the volunteers then load into cars. Because of the surplus of donations and goodwill, the giving is easy here; one woman stops to share her surprise at the generosity. She had come by, hoping to get a meal. Volunteers sent her home with meals, water, and other items for herself and some of her neighbors, who live in an apartment building across the street.
José Tellez is one of the members of the expanded network of volunteers. He works as a handyman in areas that weren’t affected by the fires, and heard about the donation drive on Spanish-language radio. He drove up from Culver City, at least an hour away, to help on his day off; he’s handing out water pallets. After driving through Altadena and seeing the widespread losses, he wishes he could do more.
“This is a place of solidarity,” he echoes with the help of a translator.
Iris Spear is running the volunteer signup table. He watched news of the fires from his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he says he played video games all day; he drove over 2,000 miles across the United States at the end of January to help. He picked the job center from a government website that listed organizations in need of volunteers. He works at the job center by day and sleeps in his van at night. Mr. Spear says he has everything he needs.
He remarks on the humanity he’s discovered. Looking at the news, he says, “It seems like everybody’s out to get everybody, you know? But in reality, there’s all these people who come to help.”
That coming together is what this center does well, says Mr. Whitfield. It fosters coalitions in support of the recovery, with migrant workers at heart; the same people, he adds, who will help rebuild the neighborhoods destroyed by fire. This growing, organized support offers a road map for how to respond, he says.
“It’s a shame they had to come together through such circumstances,” he remarks. “But it is also in such circumstances that you can really see the beauty of a community that’s been built in real time.”
