LOS ANGELES — Having lost everything in the Eaton Fire, Gayle Nicholls-Ali and Rasheed Ali cherish the small things once unnoticed.
“The soap, you know, toothpaste, just to get us started. Because those are things that we were still working off of the hotel toothpaste that we had,” Nicholls-Ali said.
They were out of the country celebrating their anniversary when the Eaton Fire destroyed the only home they ever owned.
“We literally came back to this country homeless,” Ali said.
Their son was able to connect them to a rental, and although grateful for the roof, they still had nothing to fill it with. That was until they got in touch with the nonprofit A Sense of Home.
“This house went from empty to what you see now in just three days,” Ali said, pointing to his fully furnished rental.
They have everything from towels and trashcans to decorations like artwork and books.
The organization, A Sense of Home, was founded by Georgie Smith to help foster youth aging out of the system and starting their new lives. So she said they knew a thing or two about quickly furnishing a home and jumped into action soon after the fires.
“There’s a direct correlation from displacement to homelessness. So if someone’s living off of the floor and they are unable to make it function, it can begin the cycle of homelessness,” Smith said.
That is what they wanted to prevent, and since mobilizing in January, they have furnished around 100 homes for people who lost everything in the LA fires. The loss is still so profound that they have about a thousand more households on the waitlist. For Smith, she said it’s not so much about the items as it is the ability they provide for people to simply function.
“Because they can’t rebuild their lives without that foundation or feeling at home, and we understand that it takes so many items to make a home function,” Smith said.
That’s exactly how the Ali’s felt when they received their items.
“Yeah, we cried. We cried like babies. We just kept crying. We were like, we couldn’t believe it,” Ali said.
His wife saying she couldn’t believe they took care one of the biggest items on their long list of things needed to rebuild their lives.
“It’s not just that you have a place to live, but that the foundation is set, the furniture is there, the tables and things that we think traditionally that equal stability. And that is what they provided us,” Nicholls-Ali said.
They still have insurance calls and piles of paperwork to get through, but regaining that small dose of stability was freeing, and they knew they wanted to give back.
So without hesitation, they were back with the organization, this time building furniture and picking out items for other people in need.
“Somebody put something together for us. So this is really kind of a full circle experience. It feels really good to do that,” Nicholls-Ali said.
In one of the cases, they helped curate the home for Lourisa Douglas, a formerly homeless foster youth moving into her own apartment. Just like someone did with them, the Ali’s shared words of wisdom in the support circle the organization does for recipients. Those messages are then memorialized on a take home wooden heart.
The Ali’s still have their own wooden heart now hanging in their furnished home, reminding them they’re not alone.
“We see it every morning when we’re sitting down at the breakfast table, to kind of know that there are people there for us, that there’s community there,” Nicholls-Ali said.