The Fire This Time

Rebecca Solnit’s landmark 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell evokes the communities of purpose that emerge during disaster, organic partnerships that form between neighbors and strangers that foreground the human need – and bias toward – working together. “The very concept of society rests on the idea of networks of affinity and affection,” Solnit writes about disasters like the 1906 and 1989 San Francisco area earthquakes, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 New Orleans, and New York’s 9/11. In an age of increasing natural disasters, she argues, we would be wise to learn from our natural orientation toward partnership, no matter the counternarrative of fear and divisiveness that others wish to activate.

This year feels like it has been one catastrophe after another, for Los Angeles and beyond. The January fires in Eaton Canyon and Pacific Palisades constituted one kind of disaster, after which the region experienced a federal assault on immigrant communities, as well as the unfolding of unprecedented national cuts to the safety net. Add this to an uncertain economic climate, and a growing divide within philanthropy about how or when to sunset foundation endowments, and one can easily imagine foundation and civic leadership experiencing strategic vertigo.

But in almost every conversation with civic leaders and philanthropists about this moment in time, despite a vision of darkening clouds, one word dominates the discussion: Partnership. More specifically, the ways that philanthropy and government – the private and public – can and must work together to drive change.

One focus for these collaborations in Los Angeles is the Center for Strategic Partnerships (CSP), a 10-year-old venture co-housed within both SoCal Grantmakers, a community of philanthropists and grantmakers working together to solve regional problems, and L.A. County’s Chief Executive Office.

The Center’s goal, explained Executive Director Kate Anderson, is to “help bring County and philanthropic leaders together to co-design innovative ways public systems can better serve County residents. More flexible private dollars often make an initial pilot project possible. Once the approach is proven effective, County funding can take it to scale.”

Underneath this goal is a belief that civic leaders often have the intention, but not always the flexibility, to try new things.

“We’ve met so many phenomenal County leaders who want to do the best work possible, and to make these big systems work,” said Rochelle Alley, a CSP consultant who works closely with the County on child and family well-being programs. “But there are so many structural limitations put on them. It’s a breath of fresh air to support folks when they can’t get evaluation or training funding, since philanthropy can plug that hole.”

Civic leaders and program managers, in turn, are hungry for these opportunities, especially at this moment of crisis.

Dr. Anish Mahajan, chief deputy director of Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, discussed these kinds of partnerships on a recent webinar co-sponsored by CSP and Ascend, a program of the Aspen Institute. Despite what he described as a “funding cliff” for so many critical programs, he was optimistic about “the role of philanthropy in helping us innovate and break down silos and barriers, even within our own organization.”

Along with supporting a culture of innovation, Dr. Mahajan added, philanthropic support can help public agencies do the research, data collection, and storytelling that will make the case for future funding.

Kristina Meza, executive director for Poverty Alleviation within L.A. County’s executive office, shared an example of how the County’s deep knowledge of community needs, along with philanthropy’s appetite for innovation, can create unexpected opportunities. In this case, supporting county residents who are owed money by the government, but who lack access to tax preparation tools.

“We knew that we needed to do better in L.A. County to get folks connected to free tax preparation services, and to get access to those tax credits,” Meza explained. With a little under $700,000 of funding from the W.M. Keck Foundation, and in collaboration with a number of community-based partners, “we saw over $9.5 million back in tax credits for those that were directly impacted by this outreach work.”

On the funder side, the opportunity to scale impact is one advantage of partnering with public agencies. Nani Oesterle, program officer with the Early Childhood Development portfolio at the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, spoke to their collaboration with the County’s Poverty Alleviation Initiative. Programs like their tax-prep support are “opportunities for philanthropy to come in and seed efforts that are going to take hold within a larger system, and hopefully live on beyond our grant, because then it becomes institutionalized within those entities.”

Pointing to the Future

The region’s response to the January fires exemplifies two ends of the public-private partnership spectrum – speed and flexibility on one hand, and long-term coordination on the other.

Lily Bui, PhD, the Director of Climate & Disaster Preparedness and Resilience for SoCal Grantmakers, explained how during moments of crisis the organization orients itself toward inclusiveness and flexibility. At those times, “we want to remove barriers for entry for collaboration” by opening their networks to new and diverse funders as a “learning space.”

By leading skillfully, she added, funders and their network can create “a culture of collaboration instead of duplication.” In the long run, she explained, “it’s this kind of coordination that pays off. It’s our collective power that can make or break the rebuild.”

Shawn Landres, senior fellow at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, pointed to one especially successful post-fire collaboration: the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund.

Spearheaded by the J. Paul Getty Trust, in collaboration with numerous foundations and major museums (including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Hammer Museum), the Fund quickly raised and distributed more than $15 million to 1,700 artists and arts workers. The network worked “brilliantly,” according to Landres, in part because no one institutional ego or priority dominated.

As Chair Emeritus of the Los Angeles County Quality & Productivity Commission, which oversees the nation’s oldest and largest local government innovation fund, Landres hopes to see this approach continue to take root as the region prepares for future catastrophes, as well as gears up for major events like soccer’s 2026 FIFA World Cup and 2028 Olympics.

As a public-private partnership in and of itself, LACMA’s success as a regional culture center points to the strength and flexibility of this hybrid model. Another example is the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM), with locations at Exposition Park and the La Brea Tar Pits.

Naomi Nakagama Kurata, a museum trustee focused on strategic priorities and board governance, sees the museum as a microcosm of Los Angeles, a kaleidoscopic partnership of communities that represents the city’s past, and point to its future.

Kurata explained that with private and public partnership, along with joint funding and assets, the Museum can more flexibly serve the needs of the larger community, from supporting schools with programs post-fire, to creating a new pavilion like the NHM Commons, which opened in 2024 as a free space where the distinctions between public and private start to fade.

Although Angelenos sometimes forget, Kurata said, much of L.A. County’s infrastructure over the past 150 years was built on public-private partnerships. And as world-class NHM research and exhibitions from Dinosaur Hall to Becoming Los Angeles to the Tar Pits imply, our ancient relationship to the land is the oldest public-private partnership, “putting the wildfires in the largest historical perspective.”