This year’s summer is the hottest on record, as was last year’s. Across the U.S., communities are being inundated by another season of fires, floods and monster storms. These things should not be seasonal, or normal. And yet here in Seattle, we now plan our lives around the seemingly inevitable wildfire smoke that is predicted to blanket our beautiful city in summer, posing severe health threats.
Our responses to these crises are even more predictable. Horrified by the loss and destruction, emergency response quickly gives way to painstakingly slow and inequitable recovery efforts. People talk about building back stronger, better. More and more, people must turn to crowdfunding to do so. One hundred and sixty million dollars was raised on GoFundMe in response to disasters in 2023, and already this summer the website features campaigns in response to wildfires in California, New Mexico and Colorado, tornadoes in the Midwest and flood relief across the U.S.
Crowdfunding campaigns offer the promise of faster, and more direct, aid for those impacted than the typical government responses. But research shows that crowdfunding may not be the panacea people hope it to be. Only 12% of health-related campaigns meet their goals, and according to my research with Mark Igra, many raise no money at all. When researchers studied the crowdfunding response to Colorado’s devastating Marshall Fire in 2021, they found that those with higher incomes raised more than those with lower incomes. This finding echoes ample research that demonstrates that crowdfunding provides the least help to those most in need, amplifying existing social, economic and racial disparities.
And in a time when many of our social, geopolitical and ecological problems seem particularly intractable, crowdfunding can offer us something we can actually do. But this social media-enabled, knee-jerk reaction to crisis does little to prevent these tragedies from happening again in the future. Crowdfunding tends to focus our attention on singular stories of rescue, at the expense of helping us address root causes.
Companies like GoFundMe are aware of this challenge. Earlier this month, GoFundMe launched a Weather Resilience Fund to try to get ahead of the many downstream campaigns it sees for climate-related disasters. While GoFundMe’s efforts to redirect attention to prevention are laudable, it has also spent more than a decade profiting from, and associating its brand with, the aftermath of crises, both large and small.
As public health professionals know all too well, it’s hard to get the public excited about prevention. Since launching in April, the Weather Resilience Fund, despite a large initial grant from the company, has only had 27 donations. Prevention is boring, slow-moving, technical and unlikely to attract the fleeting fame of online crowdfunding. That’s why these interventions require long-term government investment.
As Americans struggle through another summer of climate crises, I hope we will take some time to turn our energies and attention upstream. This is hard to do, when we are surrounded by crisis and the root causes seem so intractable. But investing in better protecting our communities — and especially those who are most marginalized in them — from climate events is a far better use of our resources than trying to crowdfund in the aftermath of disasters. And advocating for the kinds of political commitment that will radically lower our carbon emissions and help us meet our climate commitments is a far more impactful use of our time and attention.
If studying crowdfunding has shown me anything, it’s that a large number of Americans feel deeply impacted by these crises, and want to do something, anything, to help. But we need to direct more of that attention, concern and political power upstream in order to enact real change.
