Better Angels supports wildfire recovery for 30,000 LA residents with AWS

This is a guest post written by Better Angels, an AWS customer

When wildfires tear through a community, the immediate crisis is followed by a prolonged, complicated period of recovery. For the thousands of residents displaced or impacted in Los Angeles, navigating resource applications, aid forms, and ever-changing information is a daunting task that can delay them from getting back on their feet. At Better Angels, we launched the LA Disaster Relief Navigator—in partnership with Imagine LA—to transform disaster recovery from a reactive process into a proactive, community-informed response. Using the agility and scale of Amazon Web Services (AWS), our team built a resilient digital platform that generated approximately 6,000 personalized recovery plans, directly reaching nearly 30,000 people in need.

The challenge: When community need outpaces capacity

Better Angels focuses on creating technology to support the complex Los Angeles homelessness ecosystem. While our mission centers on housing stability, disaster events—like the recent, devastating wildfires—can rapidly push already vulnerable residents into crisis, leaving many at risk of losing their homes and falling into homelessness.

The challenge wasn’t a lack of recovery resources, but a severe lack of access and coordination. Existing city-offered services often relied on in-person service days, which proved inefficient: attendance was low, and the aid was often too generic to meet individual needs. The organization recognized they needed a solution that was not only fast to deploy, but could confidently scale to serve tens of thousands of users simultaneously, manage a vast and constantly evolving database of local resources, and provide personalized, actionable recovery information.

The AWS difference: Scaling impact, not servers

Better Angels built the LA Disaster Relief Navigator on AWS to quickly deploy a scalable, resilient platform capable of serving tens of thousands of residents after a disaster. The platform’s goal was to collect personalized recovery data, generate individualized action plans, and provide real-time insights to local agencies and nonprofit partners leading recovery efforts.

To achieve this, our engineering team designed a fully serverless architecture using AWS managed services. This approach allowed them to focus on mission impact rather than infrastructure management—launching a complex civic platform in weeks instead of months.

A serverless architecture for rapid, reliable scale

The Wildfire Navigator web app was hosted on and distributed via Amazon CloudFront—enabling fast, reliable access to resources across Los Angeles.

On the backend, AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB captured user responses in real time, anonymously storing data about each household’s situation—from housing and insurance status to income, employment, and resource needs. This architecture handled thousands of concurrent submissions seamlessly while maintaining data integrity and near-instant response times.

To manage the constantly changing catalog of community resources, we integrated Sanity.io as a headless content management system (CMS) alongside its AWS backend. This allowed staff and partner organizations to continuously add and update resource listings—like shelters, financial aid programs, or document-replacement services—without engineering intervention. Data from DynamoDB (user needs) and Sanity (available resources) combined to generate personalized recovery plans for each resident.

Show, don’t tell: Measurable impact in Los Angeles

The power of the LA Disaster Relief Navigator lies in its proven impact. The digital platform’s reach was immediate and widespread, dramatically eclipsing the effectiveness of traditional, in-person outreach methods.

The LA Disaster Relief Navigator has:

• Generated approximately 6,000 unique, personalized recovery plans for individuals and families impacted by the fires.
• Reached an estimated 30,000 LA residents with timely, localized information about shelter, food assistance, financial aid, and long-term recovery services.
• Aggregated and validated hundreds of local recovery resources in real-time, allowing users to receive up-to-date and accurate information.

This success demonstrates a clear key message for the public sector: Digital platforms can deliver aid with a speed and scale that in-person services simply cannot match during a widespread crisis. By providing a direct digital link to resources, we helped maximize recovery efforts—connecting aid to those who needed it most, exactly when they needed it. The use of AWS helped transform our vision of compassionate technology into a tangible, life-changing reality.

Turning data into insight

Beyond individual recovery, we transformed the data collected through the LA Disaster Relief Navigator into real-time insights for decision-makers. A dynamic visualization dashboard allowed city agencies and nonprofit partners to monitor trends as they emerged—showing where residents were displaced, which neighborhoods had the greatest unmet needs, and what types of resources were most in demand.

Figure 1. LA Wildfire Relief Navigator Dashboard

By analyzing thousands of community submissions, the platform provided leaders with clear, data-driven insights into the recovery process—helping them understand evolving needs, improve coordination among partners, and identify where support efforts were having the greatest impact. This integration of technology and public service turned raw data into actionable intelligence—enabling a faster, more informed, and more equitable recovery across Los Angeles.

A future-proof platform for public service

Beyond the immediate crisis, the LA Disaster Relief Navigator’s infrastructure has provided valuable data-driven insights to partners and policymakers. The anonymized usage metrics helped local government and non-profit partners understand which services were in highest demand and which communities had the greatest unmet needs. By leveraging a third-party headless CMS, Sanity.io, alongside AWS, the team can manage evolving recovery resources in real time, ensuring that the platform remains an authoritative and accessible source of information for future emergencies.

Conclusion: Join the effort to drive digital equity

The success of the LA Disaster Relief Navigator proves that innovative, scalable technology is an essential tool in addressing complex public sector challenges like disaster recovery and homelessness. This digital model for crisis response is not only efficient but fundamentally more equitable—lowering the barrier to entry for critical aid.

What action can you take?

We invite other nonprofits, government agencies, and technologists to explore how AWS’s powerful cloud services can be applied to your community’s greatest challenges. Visit the Better Angels website to learn more about the organization and discover how you can partner with us to drive digital equity in Los Angeles—or explore the Better Angels GitHub repository to see how these systems work in practice and contribute directly to their evolution.