How GoFundMe Is Redefining the Business of Disaster Relief
Hewitt Bauguss Sr., 95, worked for most of his life as a ranch foreman in a tiny desert town in West Texas, population 837. His children settled 500 miles east, in greater Houston, and Bauguss, a World War II veteran, decided to join them in 2001. He moved into a trailer home in the suburb of Brazoria and established a routine: grocery shopping with his children and grandchildren; long talks with men of his generation at a local diner. Bauguss was living in the trailer when Hurricane Harvey began to pummel the Gulf Coast in August. As the floodwaters rose, he evacuated, not long before neighbors spotted alligators swimming outside his door.
Kourtney Rodefeld, Bauguss’s granddaughter, visited the trailer two weeks later. “At first you drive up and it looks okay,” she recalls. “But when you open the door it just hits you: Mold everywhere, and the carpet still wet weeks after. The smell would really knock you over.” Knowing her grandfather’s savings were limited, Rodefeld jumped into action. She wrote to
