After losing her home in Malibu in the fires, Julia Phelan and her family moved to a friend’s house in Beverly Hills, where they have lived for over a month. Recently, she heard about an organization called Pair and Care through friends and went to the group’s social media page. Pair and Care operates a donation center out of a 10,000-square-foot space on the second floor of the Citizen News Building in Hollywood. For the past month, it has provided wildfire victims with immediate support in the form of clothing, shoes, personal care items and more.
The mutual-aid relief organization helps families impacted by the fires ravaging the Los Angeles area in January by pairing them with vetted volunteers who come in Tuesday through Saturday and shop from a curated selection of new and lightly used items based on specific requests and notes from their assigned family.
Launched by Aidan Cullen, co-founder of the creative networking platform Nova, Pair and Care is managed by 24LA, a wildfire relief project founded by Los Angeles natives Kenyan Armitage and Malin Smith. With the help of donations from more than 70 brands and hundreds of dedicated volunteers, 24LA x Pair and Care has been able to help over 1,000 families rebuild by offering a personalized boutique shopping experience. Through Nova, Cullen was able to enlist the help of brands like Puma, Adidas, Skims, Miaou, I.Am.Gia, Saje, Clinique and Goop to donate goods that would then be packed and delivered to people who had lost everything. “After seeing a lot of friends who wanted to help but didn’t know where to put their energy and hearing of so many families who required assistance and weren’t getting what they needed, we decided, because we know so many brands, let’s see if we can get them to donate stuff,” Cullen told the Courier. Recently, Pair and Care partnered with the LAROI Foundation, a nonprofit started by singer-songwriter The Kid LAROI, to collect donations of instruments, musical equipment, cameras, art supplies and more for creatives who lost everything in the fires.
Individuals impacted by the fires sign up by filling out an intake form located on the Pair and Care Instagram page and are then matched with two volunteers and connected via text message. Once volunteers are assigned to a family, they come into the warehouse in Hollywood and pack a suitcase for them based on their likes and needs. To provide ongoing support, volunteers often make two shopping trips for one family. The system is designed so volunteers can help those in need by communicating directly and then hand-delivering specific items they want. The warehouse space in Hollywood is divided into sections based on age and gender, with over 100 racks of clothing organized by size and style, with a separate area for shoes and personal care stocked with products from Murad, Humanrace, Verb, Starface, Crown Affair and more. Volunteers can choose from a selection of On running sneakers, eyelet SEA dresses, Puma tracksuits, Burton sweatshirts, Steve Madden children’s shoes, Honeydew pajamas and racks of vintage T-shirts.
For Julia Phelan’s family, the temporary stay in Beverly Hills has been made a little brighter, thanks to Pair and Care.
“I didn’t want to get anything for me or my husband because we can find our own things, but it’s kind of a fun thing for a 16-year-old to get a surprise care package,” Phelan told the Courier. “Right now, we’re just trying to find those small moments of some little ray of sunshine coming from somewhere. So, it just served as one of those.”
She added, “I had some folks reach out to ask for my son’s shoe sizes and if I thought he would like red shoes or green shoes, and things like that. He was delighted with what he got.”
At the end of the month, Pair and Care will transition to a biweekly pop-up in West LA. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Smith and Armitage told the Courier. “As we move forward with 24LA x Pair and Care, we hope to address each person’s evolving and specialized needs.” To learn more, volunteer or donate, visit https://www.instagram.com/pair_and_care/ or follow @pair_and_care or @24laproject on Instagram.
