Wells Fargo donates $3.25 million for Camp Fire victims
Karen Woodruff Vice President of Community Affairs, Government and Community Relations with Wells Fargo broke down the distribution of the $3.25 million at a press conference Friday morning. $2 million will go directly towards housing for those displaced by the Camp Fire, while the remaining $1.25 million will go to small businesses affected in order to help rebuild Photo credit: Josh Cozine
$2 million to go towards helping Camp Fire victims find housing, remaining to help small businesses rebuild
On Friday, Wells Fargo announced that $3.25 million would be donated to support Butte County for Camp Fire relief in conjunction with the Butte Strong Fund.
The announcement took place in the Old Municipal Building, with representatives from multiple organizations connected to relief funds.
Karen Woodruff, Vice President of Community Affairs, Government and Community Relations at Wells Fargo, described the goal of the donations as being to get victims out of temporary housing and into permanent shelters.
“$2 million will help get those folks situated and into a semi-permanent housing structure,” Woodruff said. “The second $1.25 million will be focused on business recovery”.
The main focus right now is to make sure that those that are still in the shelter find more permanent shelter.
“The first goal is to obviously work with folks that are in the shelter to identify a place for them to go, because living in a congregate shelter situation is not ideal long term,” Casey Hatcher, Butte County Economic and Community Manager, said.
“We recognize that there are significant impacts, not only to the community of Chico but also to surrounding cities and Butte County and some of our surrounding counties as well. It has created a housing crisis in a situation where we already had a shortage of housing so this is going to take our community coming together.”
Julian Mendoza can be reached at [email protected].
