When Etienne Maurice saw how massive, out-of-control wildfires were decimating large swaths of Los Angeles, including the historically Black neighborhood of Altadena, he couldn’t just watch things happen.
He had to help.
A Los Angeles native with deep ties to the city — his mother is actress Sheryl Lee Ralph — Maurice, 33, knew he couldn’t just watch things happen. And as CEO and founder of the nonprofit organization WalkGoodLA, Maurice knew which levers to pull to get that help.
“We saw so many members of the community feeling lost and couldn’t just watch without offering a sense of direction,” Maurice says. “Our city wants to serve and it wants to figure out how to help those who are in need. And ultimately we not only offer a space of rest but a space of service.”
The Palisades Fire on L.A.’s westside and the Eaton Fire in the northeast suburbs have killed dozens of people, destroyed thousands of homes, displaced tens of thousands of residents, and scorched more than 40,000 acres — three times the size of Manhattan. One of the hardest-hit communities is Altadena, an unincorporated area in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, just north of suburban Pasadena. The town of 42,000 is 21% Black, and home to one of the first middle-class Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles County.
WalkGood, AfroPunk, Spill, and other organizations also worked with the writers Cierra Black and Leslie Vargas to coordinate “Community Aid Dena,” a list of verified GoFundMe campaigns that had been circulating for Black families in Altadena and Pasadena who lost everything in the fire.
Overwhelming Demand
Founded in 2020 amid the uprisings following George Floyd’s murder, WalkGoodLA serves 3,000 to 5,000 people per month through its donation-based wellness programs, ranging from yoga classes to urban hikes.
In 2023 it received funding from Propel Fitness Water and the actor Michael B. Jordan, to open the WalkGood Yard, the nonprofit’s multipurpose wellness studio. There, the organization offers fitness classes, creative workshops, community events, and live performances.
Within 24 hours of the first evacuations from the fires, WalkGoodLA began collecting food and clothing to distribute to the hundreds of residents who quickly began lining up outside their office on Pico Blvd in L.A.’s Arlington Heights neighborhood.
Using what Maurice describes as a “conveyor belt and Soul Train line combined,” WalkGoodLA has fed hundreds, if not thousands of people who queued up in cars or walked into the organization’s yoga studio for help. Families and individuals who signed up were able to have items delivered to safe locations.
Within a week, WalkGoodLA had delivered collected donations to roughly 140 families and helped untold numbers of walk-ins. The need is so great, Maurice says, that at one-point hundreds of cars wrapped around the block, with people who had waited hours for help.
Jan. 14 was their last day for distributions and donations. They finished by sending a 26-foot truck filled with two weeks’ worth of goods to a local business — Thee V Suite, in Pasadena — that will continue distributing the items.
The work, however, is far from over.
Recovery for residents affected by the fire “is not going to happen in a day—we’re not going to fix this in a weekend,” Maurice says. “This recovery is going to take years.”
