Today we’d like to introduce you to Chelsea Sanabria.
Hi Chelsea, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
In 2017, the Tubbs Fire ravaged our community. I lived in Coffey Park at the time, and my family and I lost our home. It was the home that I grew up in. I had lived there since kindergarten. Every year since we have been threatened by wildfires and forced to evacuate and fear more loss. This has been our main motivation for our Wildfire Assistance Program. Our CEO Shannon Parkhurst and I met when she was dropping off a baby walker for me that she no longer needed, and it was instant friendship. We quickly realized that we share a common passion, and that is to help others. We immediately got to work building Lemon Aide Project, and we knew that we wanted the wildfires to be one of our main focuses, and that brings us to where we are today. Doing everything that we can to raise funds to help victims of wildfire evacuation and property loss.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The road has not been a smooth one! Just months after we officially became a nonprofit organization through the Secretary of State, Covid hit hard and fast. Everything shut down, and everyone was scared. This made trying to raise money through fundraisers and grants extremely difficult, especially as a brand-new nonprofit. We had to do a majority of our fundraising and the advertising of our programs via social media, letter drops in mailboxes, and interviews like this because in-person social gatherings were not allowed for so long. But it also led us to implement one of our other main programs, our Covid Relief Fund.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
We are a nonprofit organization that specializes mainly in Wildfire and Covid assistance. We are the only local nonprofit in our area that focuses on these areas and we have received so much support from our communities. We’ve had storage units filled with donations, and so many local businesses have donated towards our fundraising events.
Personally, outside of the nonprofit, I am a Patient Care Technician at Kaiser Permanente, and I start nursing school in the Fall!
What do you like and dislike about the city?
A good thing that has come from the tragic wildfires that we as a community have gone through together is how much we have all come together to love and support each other. It has been amazing to see so many people being ready and willing to help those in need as each fire season hits.
Something I like least about our city is the homeless population. It’s a topic that Shannon and I have talked many times about addressing as a project through our organization, and we still hope to sometime in the future when we have more time and can get more funding.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.LemonAideProject.org
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/lemon_aide_project_?igshid=NWRhNmQxMjQ=
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LemonAideProject/
