KLAMATH FALLS — The Golden Fire in Southern Oregon’s Klamath and Lake counties burned fast and hard on the weekend of July 22-23, destroying dozens of homes and disrupting the county’s 911 service.

More than 300 homes were under evacuation notices as the fire whipped through 2,000 acres — nearly 50 homes decimated in a community where many families live on $700 to $1,500 a month.

But it wasn’t the biggest wildfire in Oregon this year. As July turned into August, other wildfires grabbed the headlines.

That leaves people like Michelle Crane behind to help with the residents who, in some cases, lost everything in the fire.

Crane, the executive director of the Klamath & Lake Long-Term Recovery Group, outlined the damage: Some of the structures destroyed were vacation homes, she said. Others were homes built by people who wanted to live off the grid. Some of the residents were running businesses out of their homes, she said, and those businesses were lost along with the homes.

“And then we had people who just moved up there a year prior to the fire, spent all their income and their retirement to move up there to have their peace, and now it’s gone,” she said.

The Long-Term Recovery Group currently is working with a caseload of about 15, but Crane expects at least another 15 cases to cross her desk. Some of those cases don’t involve rebuilds, she said; some just need cleanup crews to deal with the debris from the wildfire. But that doesn’t come cheap, either, she said — such services can cost up to $8,000 to $10,000 per dumpster load.

When all the bills are paid, Crane said, she expects the tally from the cases the Long-Term Recovery Group is dealing with to total somewhere between $500,000 to $800,000. Her group needs to raise as much of that money as it can; as of early September, it had raised about $110,000.

Two of the donations to the group came from Oregon Community Foundation’s Oregon Disaster Relief and Recovery Fund, a relatively new program at the foundation. The fund provides flexible resources for community relief and recovery.

Crane is grateful for the money, and for the assistance from the foundation.

“We’re truly appreciative for everything they have given,” she said. “Without funds from funders such as Oregon Community Foundation’s Disaster Relief and Recovery Fund, our recovery efforts to help the survivors wouldn’t be possible.”

That’s the sort of response that has foundation officials thinking about how else they might be able to respond to disasters — and boost recovery efforts — across Oregon.

Carlos Garcia, a foundation senior program officer for environment, said the organization is “looking at the best ways that we can be responsive and supportive of communities when they are not only facing the disaster, but also in the recovery phase.”

It’s work that will require Oregon Community Foundation to be even more nimble than it has been in the past, to be able to respond in real time to disasters occurring across Oregon — and to keep tabs on the hard recovery work that follows in their wake.

But it’s also work that hinges on relationships — and, after a half-century, OCF knows something about building and maintaining relationships.

Said Garcia: “Relationships are almost like infrastructure, right? You need that — and you need it at the moment when people are under stress.”

Moving fast

The relationship between Oregon Community Foundation and the Klamath & Lake Long-Term Recovery Group dates to 2020’s 242 Fire, one of the devastating fires that ripped through Western Oregon around Labor Day. The fire burned nearly 15,000 acres near Chiloquin.

Amy Drake, a program officer with Oregon Community Foundation who’s based in Southern Oregon, said the foundation also worked with the Long-Term Recovery Group after the Bootleg Fire in 2021, a massive blaze that burned more than 400,000 acres and destroyed more than 400 buildings.

So, Drake said, when the Golden Fire broke out in 2023, Oregon Community Foundation had a relationship already in place, and made a quick donation of $15,000 from the Disaster Relief and Subsequently, the foundation made a $30,000 donation to support the recovery work ahead.

Drake said the foundation was well-positioned to know which local organizations would “themselves be nimble and responsive and have the muscles to do this kind of response work,” Drake said.

She added that one of the very few “silver linings” from the Labor Day fires of 2020 was the creation of these long-term recovery groups around the state.

For her part, Crane appreciated the early grant from the Disaster Relief and Recovery Fund and said its impact would go well beyond its monetary value. She said some donors might be more inclined to support the Long-Term Recovery Group after learning that Oregon Community Foundation also had donated to the group.

And the speed with which the foundation’s grant came through also was welcome, Crane said: “It provides us the opportunity to start the recovery process sooner rather than later.”

Garcia noted that the foundation, in addition to soliciting donations for the Disaster Relief and Recovery Fund, also told donors how they could contribute directly to the Klamath & Lake Long Term Recovery Group. That helps get money flowing in a hurry. (The Recovery Group’s website is klltrg.org.)

“Really, that concern is, how can we get funding out to do the most good as quickly as possible, knowing that the needs are in place and this is unfolding pretty rapidly,” Garcia said.

Collaboration is critical

Speed is an important component of this work, but so is communication — and not just between possible funders and communities struggling with disasters and recovery, but also between funders.

To that end, Oregon Community Foundation is a participant in the Oregon Disaster Funders Network. The network, which also arose in the wake of the 2020 Labor Day fires, was launched by The Ford Family Foundation and led by Portland-based Kelley Nonprofit Consulting. The network helps guide about three dozen foundations to leverage their resources to support response, recovery and resiliency work across the state.

The network is doing important work, Garcia said.

He said philanthropic organizations needed a better way “to communicate, to identify the needs and to share information. And, frankly, so you don’t have all of us trying to reach into communities at a time where they’re just trying to navigate” the early stages of a disaster.

And Oregon Community Foundation and its partners also are trying to keep focused on what happens “when the headlines fade, six months down the line, a year down the line, and when communities are still working to rebuild, but maybe the resources aren’t there,” Garcia said.

Building relationships

Oregon Community Foundation has one big advantage as it tackles the work of disaster response and recovery: In many cases, it can rely on relationships it already has in place with other organizations throughout the state.

For example, Drake points to her colleague’s work with the McKenzie River Trust, a Lane County land trust that was pressed into service during the 2020 fires. And when the 2022 Rum Creek Fire broke out in Josephine County, the Food Bank there helped to organize response and evacuation efforts.

“We’ve already been building up organizations and communities that are then able to respond when disaster happens,” she said.

But the work has to be both “offense and defense,” Garcia said. “You have to be responsive to what’s happening in the moment. But you have to be looking forward, for the longer term, trying to build resilience: What are the things that are needed for that healthy, thriving community? The more we can do that there, the better position that community is going to be in to respond when disaster strikes.”

In some ways, investing in these networks of relationships and coordinating with other funders will be new ground for Oregon Community Foundation, to help disaster response that simultaneously supports rebuilding.

But in many other ways, Drake said, it just builds on what the foundation has been doing for 50 years:

“I think as OCF moves forward into our next 50 years, we will continue to think about how we improve the lives of all Oregonians, even as our communities change,” she said. “We look different than we did 50 years ago. But even as communities change, we’ll be looking for those leverage points where we can make the greatest impact.”