Wildfire smoke fills the air over the 110 freeway in Los Angeles.
Credit: AP Photo / Etienne Laurent
Before the Eaton fire this January, Alexander Ballantyne lived in Altadena, just a few minutes away from his Pasadena City College campus.
That all changed on Jan. 7 when the fire reached the home he’d lived in the past three years with his aunt and uncle, forcing them to quickly evacuate. He left with only the clothes he was wearing and the school backpack he had left in his car.
The home burned down later that day, and he was suddenly homeless, a situation he’d been in just a few years prior.
Among the people who lost their homes, livelihoods, and lives in the fires that ravaged Los Angeles early this year is a subset of young people who are in the foster care system and already knew the trauma of losing a home.
Ballantyne’s recovery from the devastation of the fire has not been easy, but it has been remarkably quick, a feat that highlights how imperative it is to pair stable housing with consistent, individualized support.
“I had stable housing with my legal guardians (in high school) and I had stable housing with my aunt. If it was just the stability, theoretically, I should have gotten through all of high school amazingly, flying colors,” he said. “I think it’s more so the type of support you get — you know it’s unconditional.”
Ballantyne, 25, was in the final stretch of transfer applications as the Eaton fire started. He was preparing the supplemental application for UC Berkeley’s business school, a highly competitive program. Less than 24 hours after it became available, however, he was fleeing from his family’s home, pushing finishing the application down his list of priorities.
“I almost felt like I was in my element, in the sense that it really wasn’t the first time I had nothing,” Ballantyne said in a recent interview. “And even though I say it feels pretty similar to how it was when I was homeless at 18, just having the support of my family … I feel like I landed on my feet.”
As soon as his friends and network found out that he had lost his home, they stepped in to help him rebuild. A friend started a GoFundMe donation page for him, and it quickly reached its goal. One Simple Wish — an organization that directly funds any need or want a foster youth might have — crowdfunded additional money to replace the school and office supplies he’d lost.
This quick support came from networks that Ballantyne had built over the years. He’s been part of organizations like First Star, a college readiness program for foster youth, where he met people like the founder of Jenni’s Flower, an LA-based organization that organizes events to empower foster youth. He is part of the foster youth programs at Pasadena City College, and he’s on the board of two nonprofits.
What mattered to Ballantyne, more than anything else, was that the support he received came with no strings attached and from people he knew truly cared for him.
“It’s really not the money that will get a foster kid through school or training or whatever they want to do,” Ballantyne said. “It’s the support, it’s the human connection, and it’s the feeling like they have somebody to lean on. That’s the most important part.”
In the months since the fires, One Simple Wish has provided thousands in funding to 12 foster youth in Los Angeles alone, including Ballantyne.
“Especially for minor children moving through the system, there’s not a lot of choice. You don’t often get to choose the neighborhood or the church you go to, the school you go to, the friendships that you can or can’t maintain, whether or not you get to stay with siblings; there’s just so much choice already being removed,” said Danielle Gletow, founder of One Simple Wish.
Her organization’s mission is to fill the gaps that other groups might leave: Instead of asking someone if they need a backpack, her team leaves the question open-ended, asking, “What would you like to put your belongings in?”
“Our goal is to just make sure that … what an individual needs in a time of crisis or challenging times, we put that power back in their hands,” said Gletow, who said the majority of funds come in as donations from supporters across the country.
Ballantyne knows that lack of choice firsthand. He entered the foster system during middle school after an unstable childhood, andmoved through four placements during his freshman year of high school, before being placed with a family who became his legal guardians until the age of 18. He said that despite having housing stability through most of high school, he earned a 2.9 GPA.
Today, weeks after his home burned down along with all of his belongings, coupled with the stress of waiting to hear back from colleges he applied to as he finishes his spring semester, he has maintained a 3.6 GPA.
It’s all in the support
At 18, shortly after graduating from high school, Ballantyne said he was kicked out of his foster home of three years and was homeless, couch surfing and working four jobs to get by, until he landed in transitional housing.
He enrolled in community college shortly after, but left before the semester was over, right as the Covid-19 pandemic was starting. He fell into a deep, long-lasting depression, and for the next three years, he spent most days playing video games, drinking, smoking weed and taking pills, he said.
His “wake-up call,” as he calls it, came in March 2021, when he received a text notifying him his grandmother was dying in the hospital. “I just remember feeling so helpless. I didn’t have the money to get an Uber to go see her,” he said. “I didn’t drive. I was doing nothing with myself.”
Ballantyne’s grandmother had been like his mother, he said, and she’d just died in the same hospital he’d been born in about two decades earlier. She was his champion, always reminding him how much she loved him.
While in the foster system, he had been estranged from his family for years, but as he helped his aunt prepare his grandmother’s home for sale, he told her about his living condition.
It was around this time that Ballantyne’s life started turning around. His decision to get a job at a Best Buy “changed everything.” He initially wanted the job just for the discounts on video games, but he came away with companionship, which he needed after having been isolated in his depression for years.
His aunt soon invited him to move in with her rent-free as long as he worked or attended school full-time and helped out around the house. He grabbed the opportunity and enrolled at Pasadena City College, where he is now just months from transferring to a four-year college.
He learned what it was like to receive unconditional support when he moved in with his biological family as an adult.
“I don’t think I was ever dumb,” he said, referring to the many years in which he didn’t excel academically. “I just don’t think I ever was in a situation where I truly, 100% felt comfortable and secure with where I was at.”
Ballantyne is currently living in Burbank, renting a room in a classmate’s apartment, while his uncle and aunt are staying with family farther north in Los Angeles County.
He’ll be there through the end of the summer, at which point he’ll be moving to whichever university he chooses among the four that accepted him so far. His rent is paid through August, thanks to the funding he received after the fires.
The network of friends and resources that stepped up to support Ballantyne is there for all other foster youth, both he and Gletow emphasized.
“We really do stress the importance of making connections wherever you can because it will matter as you get older. And as you become an adult, you have less and less of a network or safety net,” said Gletow, whose organization also has an educational wish fund where school staff can submit requests for flexible funding to use as needed.
Ballantyne did eventually submit his supplemental application to UC Berkeley’s business school on time when he was sheltering at a family member’s home. The application had a video component requiring applicants to record themselves answering prompt questions, but the desk in the room he was staying in was inside a closet — not an ideal setting for such an important video.
But Ballantyne knew he had everything he needed, including a newly replaced laptop, thanks to his friends and network, so he hit the record button and got to work making his goals a reality.
