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It was a perfectly ordinary celebrity Instagram post for the first week of 2025, which is to say, it was nightmarish, but in a way that we’ve grown accustomed to.
The actor and musician Mandy Moore was one of many entertainers to lose her home to wildfire in Altadena, California, last week. In her post upon returning to the neighborhood, photos bearing the jaundiced cast of wildfire smoke reveal rubble, charred trees, and an exterior staircase on the verge of collapse. Moore’s captions cataloged further losses: her husband’s studio and instruments, her children’s school, and the home of her brother-in-law and his wife, who are expecting their first child within weeks.
But when Moore appended a link to a GoFundMe campaign that had been established on the expectant couple’s behalf – “So many have asked how to help … Please consider donating and sharing to help them rebuild” – she touched a nerve. In an age of gaping inequality and intensifying disasters, who deserves to crowdfund?
“You’re worth like 14 million – a GoFundMe is insane,” read the top comment, which received more than 1,600 likes and cited a questionable estimate of Moore’s net worth. “YOU give your brother-in-law that money! Why ask millions of Americans who are struggling just to get by?” read another. “I missed the part where you asked for help for those in [North Carolina] from the hurricane?” And, ominously: “You will never live the go fund me down.”
Indeed, Moore’s appeal touched off a media firestorm of its own, garnering headlines first for the “backlash” to her request and then again for her response to the backlash. (In a post that noted that “of course” she was also helping her family members, and that people had asked for ways to help, she wrote: “We just lost most of our life in a fire too. Kindly F OFF. no one is forcing you to do anything.” She later deleted both the GoFundMe link and the “F OFF” comment.)
Moore’s in-laws have since surpassed their initial goal of $60,000 to raise more than $200,000. It’s just one portion of the more than $100m in donations to victims of the LA wildfires through GoFundMe thus far, according to a company spokesperson. But it’s a figure that dwarfs the few thousand raised by Finster Paul on behalf of his grandmother, Nesta, who also lost her home in Altadena in the Eaton fire, or by Gregory Walker, a 29-year-old father whose appeal notes that “We just lost everything we had due to the Eaton Canyon fire and we barely had much before”.
The fire-related donations on GoFundMe in just the first few weeks of 2025 have already totaled almost half as much as the total raised for all natural disasters in all of 2024 ($235m), according to company figures. The scale of the catastrophe is an inauspicious start to the year, but perhaps a sign of our new reality.
GoFundMe is a grim monument to our neoliberal age. It has become an essential means to solicit and receive cash assistance during times of crisis – something that the government and insurance companies are increasingly either unable or unwilling to do. But alongside a demonstration of human resilience and generosity in the face of tragedy, it also produces a steady stream of evidence of the injustice that plagues our society.
The site reveals the uncomfortable truth that some peoples’s lives are simply worth more than others, at least when it comes to donations in a time of need. And rather than ameliorating this through the supposedly democratizing power of the internet, a growing body of research suggests that online crowdfunding instead exacerbates the problem.
“Crowdfunding is regressive,” says Emily Gallagher, a professor of finance at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-author of a study that examined GoFundMe campaigns following the 2021 Marshall fire in suburban Boulder. While the fire affected an economically diverse selection of Coloradans, Gallagher found that higher-income victims were more likely to have a GoFundMe and that they received more and larger donations. Beneficiaries with household incomes above $120,000 received more than 25%, or nearly $8,000, more than those earning less than $78,000. (The study controlled for the different values of property loss.)
Gallagher and her co-authors largely attribute the disparity in donations to the difference in social networks between the wealthy and the less well-off. “The campaigns of higher-income people are more likely to be organized by people outside their immediate family,” she said. “They have broader networks of people who are capable of donating, and they give a little bit more. What we have here is a system of giving that is based on your network – who you know, how wealthy your network is and how big it is.”
Other researchers have found similar results. A study of American GoFundMe campaigns launched during the first seven months of the Covid-19 pandemic found that of 175,000 pandemic-related campaigns, just 1% earned nearly a quarter of all the money raised, while more than 40% did not receive a single donation. Moreover, researchers found that campaigns by people living in areas with higher incomes and higher education levels attracted more donations.
“I don’t think GoFundMe is a great way of correcting for societal imbalances,” Gallagher says. “That’s really where the government needs to step in.” (This sentiment was also reflected in the comments of Moore’s Instagram post, where one user wrote, “I think you’re confusing Mandy with the federal government.”)
But Gallagher’s own research has found that government assistance after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017 was also regressive, with more money going to households that had more money to begin with. This is in line with the conclusions of a federal advisory panel set up after Hurricane Katrina, which found that Fema’s recovery programs “provide an additional boost to wealthy homeowners and others with less need, while lower-income individuals and others sink further into poverty after disasters”. Other researchers have found that the disparity is racialized, with white disaster victims and white communities receiving more government aid than Black victims and communities.
This was the fraught landscape of systemic injustice into which Moore’s Instagram appeal landed last week. Her request for help on another’s behalf was understandable; the rage of those who feel less fortunate than her is understandable too, if perhaps misdirected. Moore is by no means the first or only wealthy person to benefit from the fact that though disasters may level houses and trees, they have no such leveling effect on society.
After a devastating explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917 killed more than 1,500 people and left thousands homeless, residents of Massachusetts sent hundreds of thousands of dollars of aid to the survivors, including large amounts of furniture, says the disaster historian and New York University professor Jacob Remes. But the distribution of that aid came with certain expectations: “The attitude was very strongly that disaster relief should restore the status quo, so if you were poor before the disaster you should stay poor and if you were rich before the disaster, you should stay rich.” This translated directly into the quality of material aid provided: “People who were working class or poor got used furniture, and the people who were rich got new furniture. Very often what we are doing when we are building back from a disaster is trying the preserve the unequal status quo.”
Is it at all possible to break this cycle? With ever more climate change-fueled disasters barreling toward us, is there a chance we can conceive of recovery efforts that reduce inequality rather than entrench it, or at least that benefit the poor as much as the rich?
“It’s really hard to do within capitalism, because all of these structures and policies are focused on property,” Remes says. “When you’re trying to restore property, you end up restoring property.”
Addressing inequality at FEMA was a priority during the Biden administration, which rolled out a package of major reforms in January 2024, but the right has already latched on to FEMA’s commitment to “equity” as a target in its reactionary war against anti-racism and DEI programs. With Fox News, Elon Musk and the Christian right all taking aim, the future of equity at FEMA under a Trump administration is very much in doubt.
Remes points to activist efforts such as Occupy Sandy, which helped introduce a generation of activists to the idea of “mutual aid”, as an alternative to the regressive model of restoring property to property owners. One way this interest in mutual aid has played out since the LA wildfires is through the coordination of spreadsheets sharing GoFundMes for specific communities. A “Displaced Black Families GoFundMe Directory” features links to more than 600 fundraisers; similar spreadsheets have been created for Latino families, Filipino families, people with disabilities, and musicians.
Pete Corona, an LA-based TV executive with strong links to the Latino community in Hollywood, set up the Latino families spreadsheet with actor Mishel Prada and influencer Curly Velasquez. While their Instagram followings (101,000 and 328,000, respectively) are no match for Moore’s (5.5m), the effort has taken off like, well, “wildfire”, Corona says. After starting with just 10 names, the list has grown to more than 500. Corona and his collaborators have found themselves fielding requests for help with translating messages and appeals, verifying the fundraisers, and keeping the spreadsheet updated in real time, so that those fundraisers that have attracted the least money are placed at the top of the list.
The spreadsheets are just one aspect of broader mutual aid efforts in LA, where community groups and residents have mobilized to help those in need. But they offer a glimpse of how ordinary people can hack the systems that are available to us – from GoFundMe’s opaque algorithms to the inequities of our social media followings – to try to achieve something a little bit more just.
