During a tumultuous year marked by several crises — most notably the devastating January wildfires — Californians, and Angelenos in particular, responded with generosity, being the most likely to have been repeat donors to GoFundMe fundraisers in 2025, the company announced.
GoFundMe’s Year in Help report, published Tuesday, ranked California as the most generous state and Los Angeles as the most generous community, based on the percent of repeat donors to GoFundMe charities or crowdsourced fundraisers.
Four other California counties were also ranked in the top 10, with Marin ranked second, Santa Cruz eighth, Ventura ninth and Santa Barbara 10th.
“What we continue to see is that when needs grow, individuals and nonprofits respond with even more generosity,” said Tim Cadogan, chief executive of GoFundMe and an Altadena resident.
“You never want your community to be affected in that way, but the promising part of it is when things happen, people do really step up,” he said. “We’ve seen that here. … It’s just very hopeful that when the chips are down, people do step up.”
An average of 1 in 5 California households donated to a GoFundMe fundraiser this year, the report found. Nearly 1 million Los Angeles County residents donated.
California’s unprecedented year of giving began just days into 2025 as several wildfires swept across Los Angeles County, devastating the communities of Altadena and Pacific Palisades.
Three days after the firestorm began, so many donations flowed into GoFundMe from around the globe that Jan. 10 became the platform’s most generous day of the year. Its 2025 Wildfire Relief Fund also became one of the top 15 most successful fundraisers in the platform’s history, delivering thousands of grants for those in need. Hundreds of personal fundraisers also helped families and businesses begin to recover. Charities also took part.
“I’ve worked on about 110 crises since I’ve been [at GoFundMe]. … I’ve never been in the middle of one like this,” said Cadogan, whose family fled the Eaton fire the night of Jan. 7 but did not lose their Altadena home, though it suffered severe smoke damage. “The thing that struck me the most was the emotional support that a fundraiser created for people, this sense that, ‘I’m not alone.’ ”
“I had people tell me, ‘My fundraiser represents an unfathomable amount of love,’ ” he said.
While GoFundMe has a formula to respond to major disasters, Cadogan said it was unique to see the scale of need — and support — after the L.A. firestorms. It was also new to see such high engagement from grassroots, community organizers, he said, who worked to help raise awareness or support for underserved fundraisers, such as those to support Black or Latino families who lost homes.
There has been some concern about the nation’s growing reliance on crowdfunding, especially in the wake of natural disasters, both in how the practice appears to exacerbate income inequality as wealthier recipients tend to benefit more from their inherently wealthier social networks and also how the charity shouldn’t — or can’t — replace needed government and insurance support.
But GoFundMe has continued to say its role isn’t to fix historical and systemic disparities, but provide quick, direct relief.
“Our platform is designed to help people help each other. And we were able to do that in a really unprecedented way here,” Cadogan said. “It does not replace FEMA support, it does not replace insurance, it complements those — and it’s really quick.”
In addition to several successful wildfire relief fundraisers, the company also highlighted campaigns that responded to the dramatic crackdown on undocumented immigrants over the summer in L.A., as well as other major emergencies across the region.
GoFundMe also reported that “essential-expense fundraising” rose by 20% this year, particularly for those facing food insecurity, which became a growing concern during the long government shutdown that resulted in a lapse in funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
