Sonoma County Wild Fires - Help 40 Families in Need

Final Update !!

Hello All,

Hopefully you all are gearing up for the Holiday season. Can't believe that it's been a year since the fires, a year since the start of our small campaign and a year of great loss but also of great giving..

With all your kind support and love we were able to raise over $130,000 and help 41 families affected by the Sonoma, Napa, Lake County and Shasta fires.

Some humbling statistics of these families:
63% of these families had no insurance and the remaining had limited insurance
93% families were with kids, including 16 single parents
20% families had seniors
37% families had their income impacted due to the fires
It been a heart-breaking experience meeting these families and knowing their losses and hardships. However, it’s also been humbling to see smiles and joy on their faces with your small help. Please take a moment to see Youtube video with all the stories.
https://youtu.be/wwvEuAfJqGM

A big thank you to the 240+ donors spanning across 5+ countries. Also special mention to the Fundly team, Medtronic Santa Rosa, Multiple Corporate Sponsors (Apple, Neilmed, Dell, Chevron, Tallix, Salesforce, Yahoo, Netflix, etc), North Bay Indo American Association and the KutchValley Group for their tremendous support.

Thank You and wishing you all Happy Holidays as we officially close this campaign.

Romil & Mithun

Hello All,

Hopefully you all are gearing up for Christmas Holidays. With all your kind support and love so far, we have raised over $104,000 and we are hoping to reach our goal of $120,000 in coming days. As of today, we have helped 30 families ($90,000 distributed) and we are not stopping.

It been a heart-breaking experience for both Mithun and I talking to these families and knowing their financial difficulties and hardships. However, it’s been humbling to see smiles and joy on the faces of these families with our small help. A big thank you to our generous 215 donors spanned across 5+ countries.

Lastly, we do have more applications than we can help, so if you or your friends/family want to donate in this holiday season, please consider our campaign. Thank You and wishing you all Happy Holidays….!!

https://fundly.com/sonoma-county-wild-fire-help-10-families-in-need

We MAKE A LIVING
BY WHAT WE GET
BUT WE MAKE A LIFE
BY WHAT WE GIVE
- Winston Churchill

Thank you,
Romil & Mithun

Hi folks,
Hopefully all of you had a good 'Thanksgiving' break with your families and friends.
Here's a quick update from our efforts here in Santa Rosa.

Thanks to your generous donations, we have raised over $100,000. This from 200+ donors spread across 5+ countries. Our target is $120,000 so we still have some work to do there.

Over the Thanksgiving week, we were able to help 13 more families with $3000 each to bring the total to 25 families helped ($75,000 distributed). Through basically word of mouth we have been able to help low-income, single parent, multiple dependents and income-loss families from various neighborhoods (Coffee Park, Fountaingrove, Larkfield, Mark west, Sonoma, Kenwood and even Clear Lake).

Thank you,
Romil & Mithun

An Anonymous Business just supported us with $15,000. Just this donation will support 5 families alone !! We are so grateful. We are few dollars shy from our goal so please don't be shy in helping us help others !! We have raised over 99K and not stopping. As of today, we have already helped 18 families as such given out $54,000. Thank you !!!

Thank you all for your generous donations. As of this morning, we have raised over $80,000 and still counting. We have already helped 12 families with $3000 each. As such, we have already given out $36,000 and we are not stopping. Every story is humbling and surreal. Every day we will highlight one story on our cover page of Fundly.com campaign.

In support of our relentless efforts, Neilmed founded by Ms. Nina Mehta & Dr. Ketan Mehta of Santa Rosa have graciously donated 10,000. We certainly have more application than we can support and new applications are coming every day. With this encouraging effort by Neilmed, we have increased our goal to help 40 families with $3,000 each !!! We are here not be average, we are here to be awesome !!!

Good Morning everybody!!!

As we cross $60k collected, no, this is not a call for more donations (for now :) but an update on our second and biggest objective of the campaign - IDENTIFYING AND HELPING THE FAMILIES IN NEED

It’s been 3 wks since the fires and Romil and I have been able to quickly reach out to the COMMUNITY AT LARGE. Some details around the outreach efforts -

METHODS: Word of mouth, social media, work and community newsletters and emails, news channels

ORGANIZATIONS: Schools and colleges (Hidden valley, SRJC, Petaluma school for special needs), La Luz Center for Latinos (connected with www.undocufund.org), NBIAA (Indo-American) and various companies in north bay (Medtronic, etc)

NEIGHBORHOODS: FountainGrove, Coffee Park, Mark West, Journey’s End Mobile Home Park, Sonoma

We have already received 20+ ‘very humbling and heartbreaking’ requests for financial support from impacted families ... low/median income families with multiple dependents who have lost everything they own and on top of that have health issues or have lost their jobs.

By generously donating towards the cause, you all have enabled us to run this campaign true to our mission of helping the Sonoma County community IRRESPECTIVE OF RACE, RELIGION, COLOR OR ‘DOCUMENTATION’. Thank you for this!

We plan to start distributing the funds next week to the families in urgent need.

Update #4

We got an inspiring boost today by fundraising/technology company called "Double the Donation" as they donated $5000. With that we have raised over $55,000 to date. In talking to the number of families and their dire needs, we have decided to help more families and raised our target to $75,000. "Double the Donation" has donated the money in a good faith and hoping we can get another matching donation of $5000 in next 3 days. Irrespective, they will let us keep their donation !!! How cool is that .....

With an amazing response from around the world, we have raised our campaign goal to $60,000. They is no limit when you decide to help !!!

Our Campaign just got a boost by a generous & kind anonymous donor. The love in the air is thicker than the smoke - Thank You.

We initially started with $25,000/10 family goal, but looking at the positive response from across the world, have raised it to a $50,000 goal to support ~20 families with a minimum of $2,500 per family. Together Romil and I donated the first $2500 ourselves to kickstart this effort. Any amount is appreciated. Please help these suffering families to come back on their feet again.