As the CEO of the crowdfunding site GoFundMe, Tim Cadogan is no stranger to disasters. But until the Eaton fire forced him to evacuate his own home in Altadena last month, a crisis had never landed on his actual doorstep.

He was in his home office, wrapping up work on the evening of Jan. 7 when he heard the thump of helicopters. He drew back the curtain and was greeted by a terrifying line of orange fire marching down the hillsides above his house. Moments later, Cadogan and his family evacuated.

Although their home was not burned, they cannot return for months, if not longer. That left Cadogan scrambling to file insurance claims and find a new place for his family to live, all while managing one of the biggest surges in donations ever made through his company’s platform.

“I had a mission, which is help people, help each other,” Cadogan, 54, said about his company. “I felt like it was really deep in my core. But like, now it’s like in the bones, you know?”

Since the fires broke out, people have donated more than $250 million to victims of the Los Angeles County fires as well as to charities working on relief efforts through GoFundMe — $20 million more than the company helped collect for all natural disasters worldwide last year, according to the company. More than $1 million in 160 countries have contributed to that total.

Those donations, impressive as they are, cannot begin to cover the formidable costs of rebuilding Altadena, Pacific Palisades and other areas devastated by the fires. That task, conservatively estimated in the tens of billions of dollars, will instead fall largely on insurers, private developers and the government. Crowdfunding efforts have been the subject of frequent criticism, in part because their free-market approach tends to reward those with wealthier networks of friends and family.

Still, at a moment when President Donald Trump has threatened to completely shut the Federal Emergency Management Agency and life-altering natural disasters appear ever more frequent, the need for an efficient pathway for financial support for people who need to find shelter, clothing, food and transportation after a crisis has never seemed more urgent. Crowdfunding platforms — of which GoFundMe is by far the largest — are aiming to fill some of that need.

Among those who have turned to the site for help is Catherine Ramírez, a single mother of two, who lost the house she was renting to the Eaton fire.

The campaign her friends set up for her has raised a little more than $13,000 — a small fraction of the $150,000 she estimates she will need to replace the specialized therapy equipment she needs for her son, who has cerebral palsy. Still, she said, the money has been helpful.

“I’m going to need every penny,” she said.

Damen Wright posted before-and-after photos of the three-bedroom stucco house he shared with his siblings and parents on the GoFundMe campaign he and his brother started five days after the blaze.

“In this time of need, we’re asking for your generosity in helping us meet the needs that might not be fully covered by other sources of aid,” reads the text of the fundraiser.

So far, it has raised $12,105. That is far short of the family’s goal of $30,000 to help cover rent costs while Wright’s family decides whether to rebuild, but Wright said the money had cushioned the financial toll.

“It’s definitely helped,” Wright, who works for the Transportation Security Administration, said while he and his brother Damen, in white Tyvek suits, poked at the ashes of the home they grew up in. “Every little bit counts.”

The prominent role of GoFundMe in the recovery efforts has led to some confusion, and even false claims.

“We have zero tolerance for misuse of our platform,” said Matthew Murray, director of regulatory affairs at GoFundMe. He leads a team of more than 80 employees — roughly 10% of the company’s workforce — dedicated to trust and safety, which has been using machine learning and human review to ferret out scams and to create a list of vetted wildfire-related campaigns that are highlighted on the GoFundMe home page.

More difficult to reckon with have been questions of fairness when it comes to disaster crowdfunding.

To address those concerns, curated lists of fundraisers began circulating on social media just days after the fires. One, for displaced Black families, now includes almost 800 campaigns; another, for Latino families, numbers more than 600. The goal, for those and other similar lists, was to draw more attention to those groups and potentially increase the amount of money they bring in, said Pete Corona, a film and TV producer in Los Angeles who helped organize the displaced Latino list.

“I think there’s some racial disparity that’s built into the algorithm,” Corona said. “We were hoping to address that.”

According to two researchers at the University of Washington, Mark Igra and Nora Kenworthy, the Los Angeles fires have underscored that concern.

The researchers, who have studied inequities in crowdfunding for years, found that the median fundraiser on the displaced Latino families list has raised just more than $15,000, while the median fundraiser on the Black families list took in about $17,500. A third list, for Filipino families, raised $21,000. But all three groups fall well short of the overall cohort of vetted fundraisers on GoFundMe, which have a median amount of $25,000.

Cadogan, who has run GoFundMe since 2020, said he was acutely aware of the questions about fairness. To help address them, the company has been boosting the displaced family lists on social media, at times with celebrities and social media influencers, and has provided back-end support with vetting; it has also made donations of $1,000 apiece to more than 5,000 campaigns, drawing from money it raised through its nonprofit arm.