{"id":6,"date":"2018-08-31T10:56:18","date_gmt":"2018-08-31T17:56:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/?p=6"},"modified":"2018-09-21T09:42:24","modified_gmt":"2018-09-21T16:42:24","slug":"wine-and-spirit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wine-and-spirit\/","title":{"rendered":"Wine and Spirit"},"content":{"rendered":"

One Monday morning last October,<\/strong> Chris Strieter \u201910 woke up in his San Francisco apartment and checked his smartphone, the start of a typical workweek. Instead of the usual messages from his business partners, friends and family, though, he saw a barrage of urgent texts asking him if he was safe.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were a ton of messages saying \u2018Are you OK?\u2019 and I was confused at first because I had no idea what had happened. That\u2019s how I found out about the fires,\u201d says Strieter, referring to the wildfires that ravaged California\u2019s Sonoma, Napa, Solano, Lake and Mendocino counties last fall, some of which took 20 or more days to contain.<\/p>\n

The evening before, Strieter\u2014a Sonoma County native\u2014had spoken to his sister, who is married to a firefighter and reported that blazes were starting, as they generally do every fall. But nothing prepared him for the charred ruins he saw as he poured over messages and Facebook posts from his friends across the area.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of them had only a few minutes to evacuate, and they barely escaped with the clothes on their back,\u201d he says. \u201cI knew that a lot of people would need help urgently.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born and raised in Sonoma County and a founder of a premium Sonoma Coast winery, Senses Wines, Strieter felt compelled to help. He immediately tapped into his extensive personal and professional contacts, mostly in the wine and food industries, to organize emergency assistance. An entrepreneur with a gift for management\u2014he serves as vice president of business development at Senses Wines\u2014Strieter created online resources to share updates and bring together evacuees and resources such as temporary places to stay.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone, locally and globally, was asking me how they could help,\u201d Strieter says.<\/p>\n

His relief efforts quickly snowballed. The digital resources sparked a YouCaring crowdsourcing campaign that by the end of the week had raised
\n$50,000. Building on that success, Strieter launched Senses Wines\u2019 Rebuild Wine Country, a charitable effort comprising of North Bay wine and food industry professionals, that works in partnership with\u00a0Habitat for Humanity. Together, these groups help individuals directly impacted by the wildfires repair and rebuild their homes in Napa, Sonoma, Solano, Lake and Mendocino counties.<\/p>\n

Strieter, who is the executive director of Rebuild Wine Country, says that to date it has raised more than $1 million from individual donations, corporate partnerships and fundraising events, including a 5K race last March that drew approximately 1,000 participants from across the region. Their goal is to raise $5 million.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a lot of shock,\u201d he recalls of that fateful Monday when he first learned about the extent of the damage. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know where the fire was going or who was in its path. It was clear that pretty soon that we would need a long-term effort, and we used social media to get the story out there and raise funds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every dollar collected by Rebuild Wine Country goes to local Habitat for Humanity affiliates. Working with Habitat, the board of directors at Rebuild Wine Country allocates funds to the organization, which distributes the money to teams in the five affected counties.<\/p>\n

\n

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The most pressing need, of course, is housing. More than 210,000 acres and nearly 9,000 structures burned, including 5,000 homes, displacing tens of thousands of people.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is an estimated $3.3 million in damages for the insured losses\u2014and the uninsured losses are probably higher,\u201d says Tim Leach, chair of the Rebuild Committee for Habitat for Humanity of Sonoma County, with whom Strieter works closely. \u201cIt was an expensive place to live and a tight housing market before the wildfires. Now many families have nowhere to return, and they cannot afford to.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis fund is about the bigger picture in the weeks, months and years to come, protecting economic recovery for those without a roof over their head,\u201d Strieter says.<\/p>\n

According to Leach, the losses are compounded by uninsured and underinsured homeowners who \u201care short as much as $100,000 and cannot rebuild,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

Those who were lucky enough to have adequate home insurance became the priority of insurance companies seeking shelter for their clients. The insurers offered landlords exorbitant amounts for monthly rent, effectively gouging the market. Landlords seeking to earn a quick profit evicted current tenants, most giving only a month\u2019s notice or less, and created a new homeless population across the region.<\/p>\n

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“Everyone, locally and globally, was asking how they could help.\u201d \u2013 CHRIS STRIETER \u201910, executive director, Rebuild Wine Country<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cMost are agricultural and service workers, and there\u2019s a fear they will leave the area. The families most affected by the fires are the backbone of the workforce,\u201d Leach says. \u201cIn fact, we\u2019re going into a labor shortage because we\u2019re losing the very construction workers we need to rebuild.\u201d<\/p>\n

To address the housing crisis, Habitat is broadening its usual mission of organizing volunteers and partnering with people in their own community to help them build or improve homes.<\/p>\n

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Fundraising event for Rebuild Wine Country<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With the financial support of Rebuild Wine Country, Habitat for Humanity of Sonoma County launched a pilot project, the Sonoma Wildfire Cottage Initiative, in early June. The cottages, which measure between 500 and 600 square feet, are constructed from state-of-the-art materials, and intended to house fire survivors for up to two years. The project takes its inspiration from a Habitat initiative created after Hurricane Katrina to move people from FEMA trailers to more sustainable structures.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s heartwarming to see the outpouring of support in the wine industry,\u201d Strieter says. \u201cA lot of people think\u2014wrongly\u2014that all the residents of Sonoma, Napa and surrounding counties are wealthy, and the people there can rebuild on their own. Nothing could be further from the truth, and that\u2019s why we\u2019re passionate about helping to restore our community.\u201d<\/p>\n

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On land donated by Medtronic, Habitat for Humanity of Sonoma County will build up to 10 temporary, state-of-the-art cottages for families who lost their homes directly or indirectly due to the October 2017 wildfires.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One Monday morning last October, Chris Strieter \u201910 woke up in his San Francisco apartment and checked his smartphone, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":65,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}