“The response has been incredibly quick, incredibly immediate. I think it speaks to the importance of the story, the way that Baltimore City residents and our regional members want to help this set of families,” Donegan said. “We’re just very honored to be able to provide some small measure of support inside that larger chain of support.”

Donegan said she’s been flooded with emails from churches, businesses and other organizations looking to donate or match contributions with funds that could eventually go towards things like funeral costs, medical expenses or day-to-day needs.

One thing families have already expressed they’ll need help paying for is transporting their loved ones’ bodies back to their home countries once they’ve been recovered from the water, said CASA Executive Director Gustavo Torres. CASA, which seeks to improve the lives of immigrants and other people of marginalized identities, is encouraging members to donate to the city’s fundraiser to directly help families. Torres said CASA has been working with two of those families because the victims were CASA members: Maynor Suazo Sandoval and Miguel Luna.

Torres said that CASA identified those two men by conducting wellness checks for all CASA members living in South Baltimore following the bridge collapse because “we know that it’s our community.”

“We know where our community works … they are essential workers, they are people who work in all of these very difficult and dangerous jobs,” Torres said. “We are very honored and very pleased that Miguel and Maynor and the rest of these families are building bridges to connect communities, are building bridges [and] not walls to divide them, and today and always we will honor them and their sacrifices.”

The Latino Racial Justice Circle will handle distributing the original influx of donations by partnering with city and county-run immigrant services, Barrios said; representatives from both offices were unavailable for comment Thursday.

Barrios said her organization is not in direct contact with families but the governmental offices are. She said the families gave permission for the GoFundMe and the plan is to divide up the donations amongst the six families and give checks to each victims’ next of kin once GoFundMe releases the money.

Barrios said organizations like hers can put responses together quickly because “this is what we do every day.”

“We definitely know that everybody is going to need financial assistance. Those were their breadwinners, they had children, they are going to need money,” she said. “It’s hard but it’s also reassuring because we come together, right, we come together and we feel, we see how the community — not just the Latino community, the community in the neighborhoods, Baltimore as a whole, Maryland; we all come together.”

-------

(Baltimore Sun reporter Christine Condon contributed to this story.)

-------

©2024 The Baltimore Sun. Visit at baltimoresun.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.