The USC Environmental Student Assembly (ESA) is set to host a volunteer day in partnership with the Anderson Munger Family YMCA this Saturday to support relief efforts for the recent Los Angeles County fires. Volunteers will sort and organize donations that will be distributed to those affected.
“A lot of people think, ‘oh, the fire is out, so it’s kind of over,’” said M. Lauren McCoy, a junior studying international relations and global business. “If you go to the beach, you can see ashes still coming up on the sand. It’s still as urgent as it was a week ago, two weeks ago, a month ago.”
The event will take place at the YMCA on 4301 W 3rd St. from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and prospective volunteers can sign up through a form on ESA’s Instagram account.
The event follows a donation drive started by the ESA on February 13 that runs until March 7, with collection locations at the Doheny Library circulation desk and the Sustainability Hub in the Student Union. Canned food items, cleaning supplies, toilet paper, paper towels and detergent will eventually be donated to the YMCA and L.A. Food Bank.
The Palisades and Eaton fires started January 7 and burned more than 37,000 acres, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). The fires displaced thousands of residents and destroyed over 9,500 single-family homes, according to a recent article by the L.A. Times.
At the height of the fires, the university created the Trojan Family L.A. Wildfire Relief Fund to aid the thousands of USC students, faculty and staff members impacted by the disaster. McCoy said she came up with the idea to host the volunteering event as a way for the USC community to get more involved.
“The administration did come out with fire relief and financial assistance to those affected,” McCoy said, “But I didn’t see anything centralized from the school to get our community involved with the L.A. community, so I basically wanted to find a way to do that.”
The upcoming volunteering event is not the first fire relief effort made by the ESA, as Executive Director Jon-Marc Burgess, a junior studying biological sciences, pointed out.
“ESA originally had an idea for one of our general meetings to be an air filter demonstration, which [Ashley Halim, assistant director] led,” Burgess said. “We had 30 people in attendance that made five or six air filters.” The six air filters were donated to Habitat for Humanity, Halim said.
“We want students of USC to be a little bit more aware of the impact that the L.A. fires have had on the surrounding area,” Burgess said. “Hopefully, by completing this volunteering event, we can help to spread awareness about the issue so that people can see that, yes, news articles may have slowed how much they’ve talked about the issue, but people are still going through it.”