A clean-up crew sweeps ash and clears debris from the Palisades Fire on January 11, 2026. Source: Contributor Films / Shutterstock.com.
In the wake of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, a diverse array of nonprofits, community-based organizations, and grassroots networks mobilized across the heavily affected Pacific Palisades and Altadena communities. For wildfire survivors, these organizations have provided essential emergency supplies and longer-term recovery services.
Given the major role that these groups play in disaster-affected communities, it is essential to understand the factors that make them successful. As a co-lead investigator of an ongoing National Science Foundation RAPID project my team set out to document response and recovery processes following the wildfires. As part of this broader project, I led interviews with 40 representatives of nonprofit, philanthropic, and other grassroots groups to understand how organizations engaged survivors, incorporated community-defined priorities, coordinated with one another, and adapted their services over time.
Our preliminary findings highlight the importance of collaboration and community engagement as a foundation for organizations to provide effective disaster recovery support. Groups that form partnerships and work closely with disaster survivors to build trust and co-produce solutions play an essential role in shaping equitable and lasting recovery outcomes.
Listening Before Acting: Community-Defined Needs
Organizations that provided the most effective support to communities in Los Angeles prioritized listening, first, out of recognition that sustainable solutions must begin with an understanding of community-defined priorities. Rather than assuming what survivors needed, these organizations created open channels for communication and community feedback, using direct outreach, town halls, informal gatherings, and broader community-wide events to learn about the lived realities of fire survivors. They also engaged community members through survivor forums, culturally responsive information hubs, and peer-to-peer networks. This multi-faceted approach allowed organizations to be responsive to shifting conditions throughout the recovery phase.
Critically, not all engagement strategies empower communities in the same way. My previous research on community engagement after the 2010 Haiti earthquake showed that community participation varied widely. In some instances, communities were involved through more top-down consultation or information sharing, while in other cases they were elevated as partners in shared decision-making. Similar distinctions have played out in Los Angeles following the fires. The most adaptive organizations have relied on modes of participation where residents are not only heard, but meaningfully involved in shaping program design, resource allocation, and evolving recovery priorities.
Coalitions as Platforms for Collective Engagement
In many instances, organizations across Los Angeles came together to form new coalitions for disaster recovery. This aligns with past research, which has shown that interorganizational networks and emergent coalitions enhance coordination, build social capital, and strengthen collective efficacy in disaster response and recovery environments. After the wildfires, nonprofits, grassroots groups, and local stakeholders came together to coordinate their activities and reduce duplication of efforts, ultimately enhancing their collective ability to meet community needs. This coordination even included the creation of physical spaces for community gathering to support survivors and provide easy access to recovery resources, such as The Collaboratory, a community space that was established as a hub for survivors of the Eaton Canyon Fire. The building became home to a range of local partner organizations providing coordinated recovery services, resources, and community support.
Coalitions in Los Angeles came together to make information and resources more centralized and easily accessible. Shared resources and information hubs at the Collaboratory and elsewhere have reduced the burden on residents navigating fragmented recovery systems.
Coalitions such as these obviously offer great potential for streamlining disaster response and recovery processes. But coalition-based engagement requires careful attention to representation and power. While some organizations in Los Angeles embraced formal structures as effective organizing platforms, others questioned their inclusivity. Coalitions can inadvertently become the default “voice” of the community, but without clear and intentional power-sharing agreements they can reproduce hierarchies and sideline smaller or less-resourced groups. Equitable and lasting coalitions require structures that promote reciprocal engagement and learning across organizations of all kinds.
How Funding Can Help and Hurt
In examining the successes and challenges faced by community organizations, it became clear that funding structures significantly shaped engagement practices and recovery approaches. In some cases, competitive funding environments potentially discouraged collaboration and incentivized measurable funder established outputs over relational, community-centered work. For example, to gain funding support an organization may be forced to shift their focus and develop new programing related to health, wellness, or education to align with identified funder interests. This may be counter to an organization's preference for investing funds in community engagement activities and supporting community identified needs, such as direct financial assistance. This dynamic reflects prior research demonstrating how accountability regimes shape recovery governance and how donor-driven performance metrics often privilege what can be counted over participatory and community-based processes.
In Los Angeles, organizations committed to community-centered processes and community-designed recovery strategies have called attention to the importance of having more flexible funding models. Disaster governance research suggests that adaptive, decentralized resource structures enhance organizational responsiveness in uncertain environments. This, in turn, promotes recovery efforts that align more closely with community-defined priorities and influence more inclusive and equitable outcomes. In Los Angeles wildfire recovery, creative approaches—such as direct financial assistance for renters or wage workers who lost income—emerged directly from listening to community priorities. These adaptive strategies demonstrate how meaningful engagement can shape service delivery as well as funding design and allocations.
Moving Forward
Recovery from the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires underscores a central lesson: communities are not passive recipients of aid, but active leaders in rebuilding their futures. When given the literal and figurative space, they can define their own priorities and shape the processes that bring about a just recovery. Organizations that partner with residents as co-producers—centering trust, shared decision-making, and community-defined priorities—are better positioned to foster recovery that is equitable, accountable, and sustainable.
Santina Contreras is an assistant professor of urban planning and spatial analysis in University of Southern California's Price School of Public Policy, a faculty affiliate with the University of Southern Californias Equity Research Institute, and a nonresident fellow with the Center for Community Uplift at the Brookings Institution. Her research advances a justice-centered understanding of resilience planning through sustained, reflexive engagement with communities, organizations, and institutions operating in contexts of structural disadvantage and disruption. Situated at the intersection of urban planning and hazards research, her work examines the implementation, equitability, and underlying power dynamics associated with community engagement activities in hazard, disaster, and environmental planning spaces.