While many nonprofits focus on food and shelter, Altadena Girls provides overlooked essentials—like nail polish, pimple patches and stylish jeans—to help teen girls feel like themselves again after losing everything.
With 40,000 acres burned and more than 13,000 buildings destroyed in the SoCal wildfires, which have decimated whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles over the last two weeks, most recovery efforts have focused on providing shelter and food for the 10,000-plus people evacuated from their homes.
Fourteen-year-old Avery Colvert, whose school was destroyed in the fire, started the donation drive Altadena Girls to help young girl survivors find less obvious (but equally comforting) items. While GoFundMe has countless pages of drives for individual families who lost their homes, Altadena Girls sent out a call on Instagram for supplies like nail polish, pimple patches and curly hair products.
“When disaster strikes, people only focus on basic survival needs,” according to a statement from Colvert on the Altadena Girls’ Instagram account, which has grown to over 55K followers since it started on Jan. 11. “But for teenage girls who have lost everything, feeling like ourselves again is also really important for our mental health. Things like basic hygiene products to the makeup we wear every day help us feel normal in a time when everything else feels chaotic.”
As donations piled up, Altadena Girls collected items in a warehouse in Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights neighborhood, where teenagers affected by the wildfires could pick up brand new items like earrings, sunglasses and trendy jeans free of charge. The drive is currently moving to a new location in Pasadena and is asking supporters to wait until the new address is announced before shipping more donations.
Eighth-grade Colvert lost her school, Eliot Arts Magnet, when the devastating Eaton Fire burned much of Altadena and sections of Pasadena, two neighborhoods in eastern Los Angeles. Altadena is also a historically Black area of L.A. where many multigenerational families have made their homes.
While Colvert’s own home survived, many of her friends lost theirs, according to an interview Colvert gave in TIME magazine. “I envisioned my own bedroom and I was thinking about how my clothes, makeup, and shoes—everything—is my identity and it’s my sense of self. And it’s the same thing for all of my friends and all these girls who lost everything in the fire,” she said.
“I was like, okay, Pasadena Civic Center has the necessities, but I want specific items for these girls so they can feel like themselves again and get their confidence back.”
It didn’t take long for celebrities—including Sofia Coppola and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle—to start pitching in. Charli XCX has sent boxes of beauty supplies from Sephora, while YouTube-famous makeup artist James Charles has brought his own donations. Professional stylists from Aritzia and other brands have also lent their expertise at the warehouse, asking teen girls about their personal aesthetics and suggesting clothes to match.
Altadena Girls’ dozens of volunteers include Hollywood producers and fashion industry professionals, whom Colvert organized after getting in touch with the Hollywood Beauty Awards (HBAs) organization. The HBAs are an annual event that recognizes talent in hair, makeup, styling and photography for film and TV.
Volunteer Ruby Burns, quoting a post she saw on Instagram, said, “In a city with a million production coordinators, did you think that the response to this disaster was going to be shit? Of course not.”
Altadena Girls accepts donations online as well as shipments of clothes, beauty products and other items.
