²ÆÉñÆåÅÆ

February 21, 2025

²ÆÉñÆåÅÆ senior, Cassandre Roos '25, used her systems engineering skills while volunteering over winter break to help lead LA Wildfire recovery and coordination efforts in a local "Helping Hub" in her hometown. 

Shortly after the destructive wildfires that affected the Los Angeles metropolitan area and San Diego County in California in early January, 2025, Roos, in a mindset to help, heard of an early stage "Helping Hub" in Venice, Los Angeles, and showed up to volunteer.

While there, originally sorting and unpacking goods, Roos quickly took on more of a managerial role, helping to organize things and make sure the whole system worked well.

"As a group we were accepting thousands of donations and sorting/organizing them as such that they resembled a store (a lot of the donation centers besides ours were just pilling things on the floor). We were emphasizing dignity and quality for our system," says Roos.

The Venice Helping Hub saw evacuees come in and shop in-person for a variety of supplies such as food, snacks, paper towels, clothing, water, child car seats, and even stuffed animals for kids (with volunteers like Roos helping to guide them around and assist them through the process). The hub also had the option for evacuees to fill out a form for supplies they needed and to have volunteers pack their orders and schedule volunteer drivers to get the supplies directly out to the evacuees.

"This group was originally established by my friend Veronica who started it in her backyard, and I joined as soon as I heard about what she was doing. I took over for her when she didn't have the time to keep leading it and I spent a while working to keep everything running smoothly," says Roos.

Roos says she eventually had to come back to ²ÆÉñÆåÅÆ for the start of classes, so wasn't able to keep up her role in-person. That didn't stop her though. 

"I've been putting in a ton of time remotely, from here on campus, to make sure everything is running smoothly. I worked on this up until the end of January, after we wrapped up redistributing all our supplies to other long-term organizations."

Roos was also in charge of this important hand-off project, which took a lot of dedication and coordination given the scale of supplies the team had at their location.

"Overall, we had hundreds of volunteers and a volunteer/driver chat with over 1000 people!" says Roos.