Renado Ortega was halfway through arranging a cluster of peaches-and-cream roses when Paris Hilton walked into the venue and reached for a stem. The florist had spent three years building Orla Floral Studio in Altadena before the Eaton Fire erased both her business and her home in a single night. Now she was doing what she had always done: reflexing rose petals back with careful fingers, coaxing beauty from whatever she had left. That she was doing it at a grant celebration for 50 fire-affected women-owned businesses, with Paris Hilton beside her learning the trick for pulling petals on older roses, was the kind of thing that does not fit neatly into a disaster-recovery timeline.
Starting from zero when zero means everything
Ortega had run Orla Floral Studio for about five years, three of them out of her Altadena space, before earlier this year changed everything. The fire took the studio, the home, the vases, the inventory, the materials, and the irreplaceable personal items that no grant can replace. ‘If it wasn’t for flowers, I don’t know where I would be right now,’ she said, still working out of a temporary space while rebuilding from scratch. For Ortega, floristry has never been purely commercial. It is tactile, sensory, anchored to nature: the scents, the textures, the shared laughter of a team creating arrangements together. Losing the studio meant losing what she called her little safe space, and no temporary address fully substitutes for that.
What the grant from the Pasadena Women’s Business Center made possible was immediate and concrete: supplies she needed to keep operating. Not a restart, but a continuation. She used the word ‘fortunate’ more than once, which given the circumstances took a particular kind of resolve to mean.
Fifty women, one room, and a case for rethinking disaster response
The evening event brought together all the women who had won grants through the program, a gathering Paris Hilton helped organize as part of a longer commitment she described as day by day, brick by brick, heart to heart. GoFundMe’s involvement marked something of a strategic shift in how the platform thinks about community recovery. As one of the organizers reflected at the close of the night, the focus has historically been on getting money to individuals. The realization that businesses serving those same individuals were struggling just as acutely, and that supporting them was also supporting the wider community, is now shaping how GoFundMe.org plans to respond to future disasters.
Hilton put it a different way, thinking aloud about reach: ‘You know, not just in the communities, but worldwide, people can see their stories and be inspired and maybe order online or I don’t know, something.’
There were phone calls during the grant notification process where recipients screamed with joy when they heard the news. Hilton described it as a surprising thing, the kind of moment that lands harder than expected.
The rose Ortega set aside for Paris to place
At the worktable, Ortega held out a reflexed rose and told Hilton to pick the spot for it in the arrangement. Hilton hesitated and said she would let Ortega decide.
Ortega had prepared pink florals specifically because she knew Hilton loved pink. The peaches-and-cream roses, the sunflowers, the dahlias in multicolor bloom: all of it arranged in a temporary space, with borrowed time, for a room full of women who had each lost something the recovery numbers do not capture.
