<div>The first 6-10 months after the Eaton Fire was longest stretch of trauma I ever endured and that's truly saying something. It started with the miracle of my home being spared because it was at the center of a micro-climate where the wind swirled around it like the eye of a storm, but 60% of my town did not make it. I then chose to stay the very next day fighting fires by joining my neighbors to save what was left with buckets of swimming pool water. The first night after barricading myself in my home, I thwarted an attempted looting, then as time went on, I found myself spending days sandbagging to prepare for the first two of half a dozen mudslides that year, evacuating from a flood the second time and just trying making it work at home without power until mid-February. Then going without running water for five-six months, I had to live off microwave food, have water delivered to my studio, wear a mask to sleep and a respirator while riding around town everyday on my motorcycle in toxic air.
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<div>As the months went by, I endured, always having to leave to the gym for showers, installing cameras and security barricades everywhere, always with a weapon by my door. Seeing the crumbled remains of what was left of my neighbors homes every day around me, riding home in pitch blackness with my house the only lit object let alone the only occupied object on my street and then having to evacuate again in May when the debris removal made the air too heavy. The health and psychological impacts have been complex and difficult, directly impacting my vocal cords which has truly been a frightening ordeal as someone who was a full-time voice actor before the fire. The endlessness is something I'll never forget.
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<div>And yet... somehow throughout it all, I still managed to use my background as a community organizer to mobilize "Altadena: Not for Sale" into an online movement and creating the character of Mr Sale that went viral educated and satirizing the issue of predatory developers preying on my neighbors that still continues to this day. I then became an Altagether block captain for my zone guiding my neighbors through the rebuilding process. I co-organized one of the first builder fairs at the Pasadena Convention Center called the Altadena Future Fair that drew 800 attendees. I ran a convention-wide fundraiser with Furries raising over $2000 for the Altadena Eaton Fire Relief Fund.
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<div>I traveled to the capital in Sacramento with Housing Now to advocate for the needs of my town with local and state representatives. With the help of a new friend, we delivered 170 boxes and bags of donations from Santa Clarita in the largest U-haul we could get. And I also worked on the planning committee for our fourth annual Altadena Pride and still made it happen despite being only six months out from the fire. I even ran for town council in my census tract. In time, I started to see myself as a little bee going around cross-pollinating countless efforts and organizations, helping them grow and connecting them with each other; honestly, too many to name in this story.
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<div>Now in 2026, I have found myself in the role of "Information Central" for my town. Having been involved with so much at this point, I've made it my job to know everyone and everything they’re doing for Altadena so I could know how to help ANYone. I am responsible for creating the "Central Info-Hub", where I put the entire post-fire town and everything happening in it on one webpage in the form of hundreds of organized links with every org, resource, database and tool you can imagine on it. I also run Altadena Community Recovery Calendar, or ACRC, which I call the most comprehensive community calendar in town that I've been adding to it every hour of every day since February; now used by many major orgs as their main calendar.
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<div>In March of 2025, I also took over a WhatsApp community of 500 survivors called Altadena Forever. I even have two resource-info streams on Facebook and WhatsApp and two other Facebook groups where I connect displaced survivors with nearby rentals and another where they connect survivors with grants. You can also find me constantly everything on a public "Resources for Eaton Fire area residents" page on Facebook. At this point, I feel so knowledgeable and capable of connecting survivors with ANY resources their looking for that I've started doing "Ask me Anything" pop up booths at Rebuild Fairs. My activism has helped thousands and hundreds have directly depended on me for their needs.
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<div>The Eaton Fire is by far not the first time I had to endure an existentially life-shattering event which is how I'm able to fight so hard for my community while my heart drags on the floor and I fear for my future everyday; especially as the world descends into chaos and my surviving neighbors who look like me are kidnapped off the streets.
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<div>I grew up in a bigoted rural part of Nebraska, targeted for being who I was, all while I was the caregiver for my elderly father for the better part of a decade who suffered from an unpredictable and violent dementia, Alzheimers and Parkinson's. When moving to Los Angeles in 2013 to be an actor, I later fell into 3-5 years of chronic homeslessness fighting for that dream in such a hard city which ended with my mom succumbing to covid in a small comfortable room we had finally found for ourselves. A check from my first commercial one month later then made it possible to move to Altadena where after I had finally moved through the hardest grief, the Eaton Fire struck my town destroying the loving and accepting community I fought so hard to find all those years lost in Los Angeles.
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<div>I've still barely worked a few gigs since the fire and somehow every aspect of my life is defined by it. It can be paralyzing, constantly exhausting, endlessly demanding, all consuming or just too complex to define just how hard it still is for me one year later. If you believe in my story, in my work, in how special I say Altadena is as a community, any and all support is deeply appreciated. It will go to the purpose of simply keeping me afloat while I serve my community and find myself again. Altadena is of the most connected, quirky and wholesome communities anywhere and through this whole experience, I've had to ask myself "What is a home worth fighting for?" Well... it all depends on the community and based on that, it's worth everything I have to give.
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<div><a href="https://couragetheactor.com/altadena" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">My "Central Info-Hub" for Survivors &amp; Organizers</a>
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