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Fifteen years on a search and rescue team has shown Tim Cadogan the importance of building a trustworthy system.
Cadogan is the CEO of GoFundMe, the community-powered fundraising platform, which means efficiency and trust are key to his work. And as an Altadena, California, resident, he’s been an active member of the Sierra Madre Search and Rescue team since 2010, responding to emergencies, including the January 2025 Eaton Fire. (Direct Relief supported Sierra Madre Search and Rescue with $25,000 in grant funding, along with field medic packs and protective equipment for in-the-field response.)
“When a disaster strikes, you need help in every form you can imagine and some you can’t,” Cadogan said during a talk at Direct Relief’s Santa Barbara headquarters earlier this summer. He’s seen it firsthand now. While his family’s home wasn’t burned, neighbors and community members who weren’t as fortunate are now deep into the often years-long process of recovery.
Search and rescue, or SAR, operations are strategically developed and honed over time, and volunteers are rigorously drilled to minimize risk. At the end of the day, Cadogan said, it’s the processes that keep people safe and ensure things run smoothly.
“I think that lesson is one that carries through to a lot of parts of life,” he explained.
Cadogan recently sat down with Direct Relief to talk about his scariest SAR experience, Eaton Fire recovery, and how he stays engaged and compassionate, even when it seems needs are only growing.
Whether he’s in the field or at the helm of GoFundMe, he’s inspired by the deep-seated human desire to help others. “It’s part of us as a species,” he said, noting that people have formed communities that helped them care for one another throughout history.
Direct Relief: During your talk at Direct Relief headquarters earlier this summer, you talked about your work volunteering for Sierra Madre Search and Rescue, including being a part of the Eaton Fire response. I’d love to hear about what drew you to SAR work and what keeps you on the team even as you run a very big company.
Tim Cadogan: The motivation – and this is back in 2010 – was quite simple. I was getting older, and I thought, “I have to do other things that would be helpful in a meaningful way.” Then I asked myself, “What are my capabilities?”
I spent a lot of time in the mountains doing trail running. I knew the trails very well in our area and was able to move through them pretty quickly. I thought, “It could be really helpful with search and rescue, but there’s a lot of things I don’t know. How’s it going to work?”
I spent some time with the team, and they said they would train me on all the things I didn’t know. What they are really looking for is “the desire to help and the ability to learn.”
I spent about seven years being very active, and then I moved into an associate member role, which means I respond when I can. Because my work life got so, so busy, particularly in the last five and a half years with GoFundMe. [Cadogan joined the company in 2020.] I’m not able to respond as much as I used to. I’d love to do more, but I stay on the team because I can help. On those occasions, particularly on more complicated searches, I can be pretty helpful given my knowledge of the terrain and experience on some of the more obscure trails.
The team poses with material medical support provided by Direct Relief. (Photo courtesy of Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team)
Direct Relief: What has been your most challenging moment or maybe your scariest moment on an SAR mission? And what do you think you took from that?
Tim Cadogan: The first thing I want to say is that we spend a lot of time training and preparing not to have scary moments and to reduce the risk factors as much as possible. That is just hammered into us from the first training session onward: Manage the risk with a team, and we exist and operate in a way that reduces risk for each other and, of course, the people that we’re trying to help find and help.
That said, you are operating in an environment, often, that just has inherent risks that are hard to manage.
I’ll give you an example: There’s one kind of operation called a Stranded Hiker. This is where a person is stuck on a very steep hill or a cliffside and can’t go up or down, so you need to go and get them. The person designated to do this is lowered down on a rope system, gets down to the stranded hiker, and must very carefully attach a harness of webbing to that person. That person is then attached to you, and we lower down or raise back up, depending on the situation, to a safe place.
On this particular stranded hiker operation, I’m the person going down. I attach myself to the victim. I’ve got them. They’re strapped to me. In this case, we were being lowered down to the bottom of a steep canyon. As we were going down, there was a rockfall above us. I look up and I just hear these sounds and there’s just a big pile of rocks coming straight towards us.
That was pretty frightening. My instant reaction was to pendulum and swing to the left. And that clatter of rocks zoomed past us. That was one of those moments when there was a lot of adrenaline right afterwards. You say to yourself, “Oh, my goodness.”
So, what did I learn from that? One: You need to always be super vigilant, including constantly assessing the environment, the situation, for risks. The second [lesson]: You can trust the system. The team is there to operate in a way that minimizes risk and to build, in this case, physical systems that allow us to protect ourselves. It comes down to: You trust your operating execution, you trust your team. This means you can move quickly and be sure that system is going to hold for you.
I think that lesson is one that carries through to a lot of parts of life. You build systems, whether you’re Direct Relief shipping billions of dollars of supplies, where you have a very intricate system, or it’s us operating GoFundMe during crisis relief or every day. We can build a system that is replicable and repeatable, and we can trust it and each other.
Direct Relief: At your Direct Relief talk, you said people who have experienced a disaster need help in every imaginable form, and some you wouldn’t imagine. You live in Altadena and you’re part of a community that is still very much in recovery mode. What are some of the needs you’re seeing from your friends, your neighbors, your larger communities that you didn’t anticipate, even with years of experience behind you?
Tim Cadogan: So many, frankly. Let’s take the case of people in our community who’ve lost their homes. The list of things that you need to be navigating is almost endless: making sure in the immediate aftermath that you have a place to stay, a place to send your kids to school, the food that you need, the cash that you need to get through the situation, help navigating with your insurance. You also need to be thinking about rebuilding and how you consider those decisions.
This process is very long – years long – and goes through these different stages. Take the immediate response – for instance, Direct Relief is super involved in making sure that the folks responding to the crisis had supplies, including very generously [supporting] my search and rescue team. And then there are other nonprofits we work with who are providing food, or spiritual and mental support, or even cash grants.
Then as you get deeper into the situation, you need advice and counsel and perspective in navigating this really complex interplay of ongoing issues. I knew a little bit of that beforehand, but it was different to actually see it firsthand.
We were fortunate we didn’t lose our house, but it needed to be remediated. And I didn’t understand what’s involved in remediating a house after a fire. You don’t understand because you haven’t experienced the different stages before. I learned about the fact that recovery is a multifaceted process and there are so many different kinds of help that are needed, and they are deeply appreciated when they’re provided.
Direct Relief: You mentioned the fact that when the disaster happens – when the fire is contained, for instance – it’s really just the beginning. And you do go deeper and deeper into this process.
We’ve been thinking about this a lot in terms of compassion fatigue. We hear a lot of worries from partners about this: that there are more disasters, that they’re worse, that the impact is longer and deeper and there are fewer resources to take care of everybody because there is so much need and so much competition for public attention.
As both a SAR volunteer and the head of GoFundMe, how do you stay engaged and compassionate when there is a constant need, and it is so enormous?
Tim Cadogan: I think the simplest way to think about that is to bring things down to the individual level. The reality is yes, so many people need so many different forms of help, but every single bit of help makes a difference.
I’ll give you an example: One of the things at your HQ that I really liked was seeing the different kits that you send out. I particularly remember the midwife kit, which would assist with 50 births. To me, that’s a very practical example. Yes, there are just enormous problems, but if you fund a midwife kit, those are 50 babies who will be born more safely. That’s massive, and that is making a difference.
Direct Relief’s leadership team, led by CEO Amy Weaver and Vice President of Corporate Engagement Heather Bennett, hosted visiting executives from GoFundMe for a comprehensive tour of Direct Relief’s Santa Barbara facilities. The GoFundMe delegation included Chief Executive Officer Tim Cadogan, Chief Growth Officer Marc Ferris, and Customer Experience Executive Shanna Birky. (Direct Relief photo)
There is no world in which we can solve all problems. But we can solve a lot, and we can help a lot. That is a state of being. None of us are ever going to live a perfect life and there are always going to be challenges. But we can make it better with specific actions that have specific results for individuals.
The more we can bring those stories to life and show people, “You really did make a difference,” then I think people can stay engaged and stay connected to the impact that they’re having.
Direct Relief: For all of us who are devoted to helping, whether we are a registered charity like Direct Relief, a community advocate or organizer, or a concerned friend or family member posting on GoFundMe: How do we talk about our cause, our issue, in a way that’s truthful, that doesn’t paper over the hard stuff, but also doesn’t cause people to disconnect or lose focus?
Tim Cadogan: With a lot of realism. I’m often impressed at just how clear-headed and practical people I’ve talked to who are dealing with a tough situation are. This is usually after the initial shock of something happening. Shortly after the shock has subsided people tend to say to themselves, “OK, I need this, this, and this, and these will help me to do these things.” It’s a very realistic, practical assessment, which connects to my prior answer: That gives the person considering helping a really clear sense of how, if they do help, it will have an impact.
You’re being direct and very authentic about what is going on and what would make a difference for you.
It’s also just the reality that any of us could be in these situations. We could have been born in a different place or time. We could have had one of these events happen to us. You never know. So just understanding the practical details of, for example, what would happen if you didn’t have access to a midwife kit, is important. Simply laying out two or three examples can help people understand. Things as simple as getting clean, sanitized equipment can make a massive difference.
Direct Relief: As GoFundMe’s CEO, you’re interacting all day with the stories of people who have experienced misfortunes and constantly seeing the scale of need. What keeps you going? What keeps you optimistic?
Tim Cadogan: Very simply, the power of help. Whatever happens, people want to help each other. One of the strands of [human nature] is that we live in groups, we are a social species. Even in early societies, we lived in villages because we needed each other to do things.
And we continue to do that. We like helping each other. It’s often when people are the absolute happiest: when they’re helping someone else. If you can find a way to make that opportunity available to someone in a way that they can see the impact they’re having, it’s super powerful.
Senior executives from GoFundMe Pro made their inaugural visit to Direct Relief’s headquarters, marking an important milestone in the relationship between the two organizations. The visit provided GoFundMe’s leadership team with firsthand insight into Direct Relief’s operations, including an extensive tour of their warehouse facilities, where they could observe the organization’s logistics and distribution capabilities. (Direct Relief photo)
The fact that the smallest thing does make a difference. When you’re receiving help, the fact that someone cared about you is immensely important, and the act of caring doesn’t have to be a big act. I’ll give you an example: On many of our fundraisers, when I speak to [beneficiaries], they say, “I really appreciated the donations. I saw several people gave me $5, and I know many of those people don’t have much. It means so much to me that they gave to me and that they care about me.”
It shifts out of financial support into psychological support, and it’s immensely powerful. I think all of us can relate to that. We all want to be seen and cared for.
It’s really about unlocking these patterns of behavior; this concept of helping one another. It’s innate to us, and it’s a privilege for us to work on manifesting that as much as we can, whether that be for individuals or for organizations.
Giving is Good Medicine
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