After ten homes were destroyed by fire on Monday, the displaced families have already received a flood of support from Laramie’s charities, businesses and private citizens.
Volunteer organization Interfaith-Good Samaritan is one of many that has stepped up to provide assistance to those who have suddenly lost everything.
“The community, just in general, has been huge with all the outpouring of support,” Tess Holmes, director of client services, said.
Active in Laramie for about 30 years, Interfaith assists residents with costs such as food, housing and transportation and regularly gets 1,000 pounds of food out to people each day.
“Sometimes it’s just a crisis that happens in people’s lives and they’re looking at homelessness, when that crisis occurs Interfaith is around to help them,” Executive Director Mike Vercauteren said. “It’s a tremendous loss, it’s hard for them.”
The group has already received a substantial sum of financial donations in a short time.
“It’s coming in, it’s pretty incredible—as of yesterday we had about $8500 that came in to just Interfaith,” Vercauteren said. “Today, so far, we took in $4,140—that’s a total of over $12,000 we’ve taken in. We’re committed to getting all of the money we receive to the families that have been impacted.”
In addition to financial support, the citizens of Laramie have stepped up with offers of housing, food, cars, furniture, clothing and much more.
“We have [like] five apartments that people have offered to donate for at least a month,” Vercauteren said. “There might be 25 couches people have donated.”
Donations can be made directly on Interfaith’s website at laramieinterfaith.org, though the organization has asked that people hang on to physical items for the time being until the families’ needs can be assessed. In the meantime, donors are invited to call in the items they have to help form a list of what’s on hand.
Interfaith, which is supported by state funding and local contributions, has 34 active volunteers and is working in tandem with organizations such as Salvation Army, United Way, Red Cross, SAFE Project, Clothing Cottage and Peak Wellness—as well as local businesses such as Shell and ACE Hardware.
Shell manager Brittany West, who has ties to the affected community, set up several donation jars for collections at her store on West Jackson Street.
“A lot of the victims of the fire are customers of ours, some of them are very close friends,” West said. “Everyone stepped in and helped out as much as they could.”
At ACE, customers have the option to include a donation along with their purchase at check-out—a regular practice that has been re-directed for this recent cause.
“All year round, we do a round-up, every transaction that’s done we ask customers if they’d like to round up their change for a donation to the Children’s Miracle Network,” Floor Manager Tillie Duran said. “Once we heard about the fire, one of our employees mentioned it to the owner—that we should change the round-up from CMN to help the families with the fire, and the owner was completely on board with that. I believe we’re running that for two weeks.”
After two days of collecting small-change round-ups (and open donation jars), ACE has contributed $208 to the aid effort and expects to have raised significantly more by the end of the two weeks.
The fire occurred during mid-day on Monday in Wade’s Mobile Manor mobile home park during a day of high winds and gusts, which contributed to the fire’s spread across a full row of homes and five acres of grass. Nine homes burned down and a tenth was damaged, displacing eight families who took temporary refuge at the Albany County Fairgrounds emergency shelter, where the Red Cross of Wyoming provided initial aid.
“Last I knew, there were no injuries,” Albany County EMA Coordinator Aimee Binning said. “The cause of the fire is still under investigation.”
While no people were harmed, at least two pets were lost in the fire.
