How LA is using tech to get wildfire victims financial help

To help thousands of wildfire victims in need of financial assistance, the Los Angeles Department of Economic Opportunity is using technology to ensure that money gets into the right hands — and quickly.

The department selected the Emergency and Disaster Response platform from AidKit, a public benefit corporation, to help administer its new LA Region Small Business and Worker Relief Funds program. The solution uses mapping, fraud detection, and real-time reporting and analytics to vet applicants for funds.

Applicants — individuals, small-business owners and nonprofit leaders — can go to a centralized website, follow some prompts, then upload basic verification documents and a selfie for identification purposes.

“We tried to make it very simple,” said Kelly LoBianco, director of the department. “There are FAQs, there are application guides in 14 threshold languages, we have video webinars in English and Spanish.” Plus, people can get in-person help at disaster recovery centers, 40 LA-run job centers and Small Business Development Centers.

When someone applies, the AidKit tool geocodes the information to compare the home or business location against fire and evacuation zones, said Brittany Christenson, the company’s CEO.

“We use the imagery of the individual properties that’s available through [the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection] to check against the database of everybody who’s applying,” she said. “Essentially, we’re helping make sure that everyone that applies and eventually receives funding is eligible, and that they are a unique human, so we do identity verification, we do residency verification. We also have some built-in admin checks so that we can see if the place of business was impacted by the fires.”

Human reviewers make the ultimate determination on releasing funds, she added. “We always have a human in the loop because we don’t want the computers to be making decisions that are so important in people’s lives,” Christenson said.

Awards are based on impact, LoBianco added, and the technology enables the department to see where need is most dire. 

“We know who completely lost their brick-and-mortar business,” she said. “We know who lost their job because they worked in a residence that burned down, and we also know among all the business and nonprofits and workers whether they had a compounding impact of losing their own home, too. We have a lot of really dynamic data that not only will help us get grants to those that need the most, but will also help us better understand the true economic impact of this crisis…to design recovery solutions for the communities.”

Another benefit of the mapping is identifying pockets where eligible people haven’t applied. “We can see that underlying Cal Fire data where there should be applications,” LoBianco said. “It’s been helping us do really targeted outreach” in those areas.

It took just over two weeks for AidKit to ready the platform, mainly by configuring its existing proprietary, end-to-end solution, Christenson said. Plus, the company is familiar with LA: It has an existing partnership with the county supporting a cash assistance program for people with HIV.

The application window for fire-relief funds opened Feb. 6 and closed March 12. Because people were still applying, LA declined to share statistics on the number of applicants, but “we’re getting large numbers of applications coming through the system, and we are also successfully catching fraudulent attempts to apply,” LoBianco said.

The LA County Economic Development Corp. estimates that 1,900 small businesses supporting 11,400 jobs were within the burn zones, although LoBianco said the numbers are likely higher. 

“If you start to look at businesses that are in other emergency zones, the evacuation order and the evacuation warning zones…you're looking at in the upper 30,000 businesses impacted, and those are small businesses, not everything,” she said.

When funds start going out later this month, small businesses will get up to $25,000; home-based businesses and independent contractors could get up to $5,000. Workers who experienced either a temporary or permanent loss of job and income will get $2,000.

Two main differences with this project compared to other relief efforts is that the department was fundraising while setting up the fund and that time was of the essence. To that end, LoBianco said, “you need a clean and simple application that people can understand, that’s written at a level that people, especially in crisis, can go through simply, and you need really robust outreach and technical assistance.”

Now, she is looking at how to create a more permanent infrastructure so that LA can activate these types of emergency relief efforts faster in the future. 

“I think we did a great job of finding AidKit, bringing them on board, getting contracts done, but there is a lag in doing that,” LoBianco said. “You have some of that in place in advance, then you’re just focusing on the audience and the application and fundraising, not the operational mechanics.”