We're gathering support for our dear friends Chris Hoogewerff and Gina Giarmo, who were forced to evacuate their home due to high levels of toxic mold. They are now faced with debilitating health repercussions from the exposure and a long road to recovery. We're heartbroken for them - what was intended to be an exciting move last year on community land to start a family has led to a series of events that have been devastating to their health, well being and finances and forced them to put their lives on hold in many ways.

Gina has been debilitatingly ill since August '24, and this period has been one of the hardest of Chris & Gina’s lives. Living with a chronic and largely invisible illness is already challenging, and the sudden decline brought on by mold exposure and worsening MCAS has made things exponentially more difficult.

After evacuating their home in June, Chris and Gina were forced to spend the summer camped in a tent in their yard with their 2 special needs dogs. As cold weather and rain arrived, sleeping outside was not tenable and they were displaced yet again to staying with friends or house-sitting, though being indoors was a logistical struggle and caused recurring mold illness for them. In a desperate effort to find housing free of mold and chemicals to which mold illness triggers high levels of sensitivity, Chris and Gina bought a tiny home shell and have spent the past several months building it into a home, which has ended up costing them close to $120k in materials and labor alone, alongside ~$20k in medical expenses to survive the immediate health impacts caused by mold illness before even beginning recovery work with mold detox doctors, expected to cost tens of thousands more.

Remediation and rebuilding of their home in Forestville would cost anywhere from $300-$600k+, likely requiring a new roof, siding, and stripping the house down to studs to get to the point where they could live in the home safely and without reaction. The cost is insurmountable, which is why the push to build a tiny home that can be immediately safe for them felt like the best first step forward.

Chris’ reactions, which have included general fatigue, flu-like symptoms and skin rashes, have been unpleasant but generally tolerable. Since moving into our home in August, Gina’s health has declined severely. She has been navigating Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) and the effects of mold exposure, and the combination has left her unable to work full time for the past year, despite all helpful medical care coming out of pocket.

MCAS is a complex immune condition in which mast cells release chemicals at the wrong times, causing inflammation across many systems in the body including the gut lining and brain. Everyday exposures like foods, chemicals, mold, and even normal levels of stress can trigger intense reactions in people with MCAS.

Mold toxins are known to trigger or worsen mast cell activation and can lead to neurological symptoms, inflammation, and extreme food intolerance & neuropathy among many other symptoms.

The mold exposure has also intensified the challenges of her lifelong struggle with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. When MCAS flares, the inflammation and immune stress can worsen joint instability, pain, and fatigue, making daily functioning much harder. Gina has experienced a significant loss of quality of life, including putting her nutritional therapy business on pause. In the meantime, returning to working with kids as a part-time nanny and substitute preschool teacher has been a deep source of joy and inspiration to keep going.

Chris and Gina are community pillars to all of us who know them - they are always reaching out, inviting, gathering, entertaining, cooking, hosting, housing, helping others and uplifting their community any way they can. They reflexively and repeatedly do all this for us. Their community is so important to them and it's who they build their lives around and with. How many times have you been cooked food by Gina or Chris? How many times has one of them gifted you a ticket to a show? How many times have they hosted you? How many times have they shown up for you, done a favor for you, helped you solve a problem, made you smile, made your life better? It’s impossible to count all the ways that they have supported us over and over again.

We’re setting up a GoFundMe to help get Chris and Gina back on their feet, to recover some of the losses from having to evacuate and build a new tiny home from scratch just one year after moving to Forestville, where they put their life savings and the inheritance from Chris’s Mom into what they hoped would be their forever home. We hope to provide some stability as they look towards their options for their main house someday. Our collective goal is: for them to recover their losses and be able to consider a future of full health and possibility.

If you’re more eager or able to offer help rather than financial support, they’ll be hosting community work-days to complete the last major projects on the tiny home, which include digging a grey water trench and building a stairway/deck and pergola for the entrance.

Click here to sign up.

They are also in need of completing "work day" hours that are owed to the HOA by the end of the year as part of living in the community. They are currently many hours in debt, and will owe $30 for each hour under quota.

Thanks so much for sending thoughts, love and well wishes their way- those who know Chris and Gina well know them to be resilient, but this is undoubtedly one of the hardest times of their lives. It breaks our hearts to know they have suffered so much on their own at this point. Being a friend of Chris or Gina’s is like winning the jackpot. Now is finally our chance to repay them some of their own medicine back. We want them to know that they are not alone and we hope that together we can help them feel the way that they always make us feel - safe and resourced and loved.