Mayra Macedo-Nolan: We are multidenominational, multiracial, multiconfessional. We network clergy and other community leaders; we gather and develop and mobilize them for community flourishing. We gather people monthly for connection, information sharing. We just had a meeting this past Wednesday where we gave an update on fire recovery, things that people need to know — mainly things that clergy need to know about the fire recovery. As a result of the fire, we lost 11 houses of worship. One of them was a partial loss.
Because we are in a crossover of jurisdictions in the area, we hear reports from various community partners, like the city manager’s office, the police department chief, the sheriff’s department, the school district superintendent, the health department director, and the Altadena Town Council.
We are connecting our clergy on a spiritual level, which offers encouragement or whatever a particular pastor wants to bring [to the group]. It’s really a time of community building, being on the same page in terms of what we know and an opportunity for people to get to know each other.
We operate in four areas of advocacy — another opportunity for people to work together strategically — on specific things impacting our community: education equity, housing justice, migrant solidarity, and public safety and just policing.
F&L: Your regular January 2025 meeting took place online just as the wildfire began. The networks you had already built responded, but it also required new effort.
MMN: We didn’t know at the time that the fire was going to start that evening. And in the morning, while the city was literally on fire, 56 people showed up on Zoom. We typically have about 80 in person, but 56 is a lot when everyone’s in a frantic state and probably still trying to put fires out.
The police chief and the fire chief and the city manager — everybody showed up. I think it was because everyone knew, “This is where I’m going to get my information directly, from the leaders. This is where I’m going to be able to talk to a lot of leaders in one space.”
Everything changed from that moment on. We knew that we were going to have a role. We didn’t know exactly what it was going to be. It was clear that city leaders were going to come to us to disseminate information. Clergy and other leaders were going to come to us to get information. We needed to be in close communication and in close collaboration with our efforts, because everybody was impacted.
We had this tiny little budget to work with that our board had just very proudly approved. We were so grateful for the year before and funding to help us build our capacity. We were excited about some things that we were going to do [in the year ahead], and then this happened. We’re on a call with these pastors, and they’re already trying to troubleshoot. One of them said, “Well, the CCC is going to need help to keep us all together, so we need to find some money to hire another person to help with this.”
Two days later we had a contract [to hire someone]. I don’t know what I would’ve done this year without [Amara Ononiwu], because she is probably one of the most knowledgeable local people on fire recovery because she was everywhere.
That’s how we built this. We put together a strategy that we thought was appropriate for the CCC in these four areas of communication, collaboration, care and cash. It was all going to be for and through the faith community. That’s what we basically stuck to, making sure that we stay in our lane, because there’s a lot of things that we could do that we shouldn’t be doing, but it’s tempting when somebody’s offering you money to do it. Our cash has been directed toward faith communities, the faith leaders and the people that they are supporting.
We had a bunch of people — churches, individuals from all over the country — start giving online. It was restricted for fire relief. We set up a fund, and if a pastor said, “Hey, I have this person,” we would ask, “Do you want us to give the money to you, or do you need us to write the check to the person?”
We know that one of the key things for people’s recovery is their community and their relationships. That’s what keeps people here. We wanted to make sure we didn’t get in the middle of anything. We just enabled, facilitated, that kind of support.
We were able to replace church vans that were lost in the fire, replace clergy vestments, help clergy who lost their homes relocate temporarily, cover rent for clergy and a lot of their community members — a whole bunch of things. It was from income replacement to housing to immediate emergency needs to helping churches relaunch or beef up their ministries so that they could continue to serve the community during this crisis. It was a whole breadth of things that we were so blessed and privileged to be able to support the faith community with.
[The California Community Foundation and others] set up a wildfire recovery fund. It was a collective. They look for the networks: “Who are the conveners in the community that we need to be working with immediately?” They found us. That led to what happens in the community after a disaster. There’s a development of a long-term recovery group, and everybody works through that system, or most people will work through that system.
It’s set up to serve the people who are going to need the most help. But the funders figure out where this group is who wants to come and invest long-term. That’s where the partners come together, the whole scaffolding that is built for the community, and it’s built by the community.
I’m on the [recovery fund’s] board. It has been beautiful and horrible, really, really hard, because everyone’s traumatized. It’s probably been the hardest, or one of hardest, relational navigations that I’ve ever had to do in this community. So many leaders, so many nonprofits, and then the faith community in the mix. But the CCC has played a big role in standing up the long-term recovery group for our community.
[The fund] distributed $15 million really quickly. It went to organizations they knew were already on the ground working, and it was just for general operations. [The fund’s distribution] was this beautiful thing that landed in our lap, and it really felt like a love letter from God just saying, “It’s going to be OK. I’m going to provide.”
Prior to that, two weeks in, we didn’t have much money. We were starting to see some donations come in, but they were like $500, $20. It was starting to build up, but it wasn’t very much yet to give us confidence. So that $200,000 [from the fund] let us say, “OK, we can not worry about paying our bills for a minute while we figure out what we need to be doing.”
More followed. The Red Cross was the really big one. That conversation started at the end of January, and the funding came in May. They’ve given us nearly $1 million for the first year to beef up our infrastructure. We moved into a larger office space. We’ve hired staff. It’s all around fire recovery.
We’re able to have a strong back office to support the funding and support our surged operations. [The Red Cross] usually invests for about three years in a community, so we’re hoping that that funding will continue through 2027.
F&L: You were less than six months into fire recovery when demands skyrocketed in your work with immigrants.
MMN: Both things were happening even early on. It was very clear that the ability to access recovery resources was different for people in mixed-status families. We were like, “OK, there’s this whole other layer. We need to really pay attention to this.”
Right away, anyone who was working with immigrant communities was strategizing about how to navigate the recovery and the immigration issues that these families are facing.
We started meeting together with some local pastors and planning some things. We had planned a migrant solidarity event before the raids started kicking up in June. We had about 150 people — clergy and impacted community members — in this church gym doing some training, some know-your-rights.
We had the mayor and the city manager there; we had some immigration attorneys. We were trying to help people understand the history, the politics, the economics and theology of immigration, while we’re dealing with the impacts on actual people in that room.
While we’re there, we hear sirens outside. Everyone’s traumatized by sirens. You hear the firetrucks go by, and everyone’s triggered. We’re also getting text messages about a woman who was just taken in Pasadena. It was already happening, and we’re all together. It’s happening right outside the gates, and that’s just what we’ve had to deal with. We’ve been very, very involved with that and want to make sure that the church is paying attention and knows what it needs to know and is prepared.
F&L: The church will have to be prepared to respond to a cycle of crises; you all have been living that. What does sustainability look like from your experience?
MMN: We were told to tell everyone to make their medical appointments in March [2025], because that’s about when they would start to feel sick, just the lack of sleep by itself. That has been the common connector for everyone: Nobody sleeps well; it’s just a shared experience. We’ve been trying as much as possible to pay attention to those things and remind clergy to check in.
A lot of our work has been checking in, one-on-ones: “How are you doing? What do you need? What does your team need?” From that, we’re able to figure out what kinds of things we can try to put together to offer that a lot of people require. We’ve been able to offer solo retreats, counseling grants, peer support spaces for clergy to process together. We’ve been working really, really hard, because we’re not going to be able to do anything if leaders are not well.
We’ve learned a lot, but we’re still learning, and it still feels heavy. It doesn’t feel less heavy than it did in January or February [2025]. We’ve had ebbs and flows of intensity. The first three months were super intense. We were super adrenalized, and then it didn’t slow — it changed.
The intensity became more relational intensity, a lot of challenges with relationships. We were all traumatized people trying to work together, and it was all coming out in how we worked together. Then it shifted to the immigration enforcement intensity.
We were told by outside agencies that have a lot of experience [with disaster recovery] that the one-year mark [is] really hard in a different way: mental health crises, divorce, suicide — just a lot of things happen during that time. People realize where they are and often are devastated by how little progress they’ve been able to make in a year, especially the most vulnerable people who have the least access to resources. If you were well-off before the fire, you’re going to be fine. It’s all the folks who don’t have the resources who were struggling before.
In our community, Black Altadena is an anomaly because it has such a high homeownership rate among Black residents. Historically, it was one of the few places in the LA area where you could actually buy a home as a non-white family. A lot of those were third-generation homes that were uninsured or underinsured. That part of the community is a very, very important focus for us, to make sure that we don’t lose the Black community and Black wealth in Altadena.
We’ve learned a lot, but it’s still ongoing learning. All we can do is continue to pay attention to how people are doing and then continue to tweak our programming so that we’re able to support people where they are in their process.
I think the relationships that we’ve established, and investing in those, are really critical. We know from the research that being clergy is one of the most stressful professions; it’s a very lonely field. Most pastors don’t have close friends, or they have only a couple, and they don’t check in with their friends very often. We want to make sure that we’re encouraging relationship building and friendships.
Part of sustainability is financial. For the CCC, all of these resources started to come in, but they’re going to go away, because they’re fire-related resources. I was feeling really blessed and terrified at the same time. We’re able to do things, but in order to do them, you need people. You have to hire a staff, but you don’t want to hire a staff if, in a couple of years, you have to let everybody go.
My focus right now is how we are thinking about what we’re doing. This is the way one of my board members described it. He said, “You’re building an aircraft carrier. You’re not building a plane while flying it. It’s an aircraft carrier while you’re at sea.” So many things are launching from this effort. While we’re doing all the fire recovery, I’m also having to think about what our infrastructure needs are right now and where we are going to land.
Where is the funding going to come from for our ongoing work, which is as critical as what we’re doing right now? And it’s critical at the same time, too. As the fire recovery efforts start to decrease a bit, what does that look like, and where do we land? We’re working on a communication strategy and a development strategy to make sure that we’re paying close attention to setting ourselves up for sustainability for the long-term.
Disasters can completely undermine the community development and justice work that organizations are doing, because they take so much. Not only does it devastate a community, take out homes and structures and streets and infrastructure, but it devastates people, families, organizations and leaders.
It’s so heavy, and I think paying attention to that and having things in place, so that organizations and leaders can plug into a knowledge bank, so we can support one another, share some of the things like, “Hey, this is what’s going to come — get ready for this,” is crucial.
I’m thinking about how we create that kind of community, so that people know where to plug into when it happens to them, because it’s going to continue to happen, and the scale is going to increase. The level of devastation from disasters is going to get larger, and more disasters are going to happen, because of our environmental crisis, so we need to be more prepared for that.
