Darryl Henry was running out of time.
For years, his fiancee Kimberly Hemphill dreamed of visiting every famous attraction in Chicago. Hemphill, 50, couldn’t leave the house for more than two hours before her oxygen tank ran out, yet she still clung to the hope that the two of them would go adventuring across the city.
In March, Henry said, she broke down crying. The widening coronavirus outbreak meant Hemphill, who has chronic emphysema, was indefinitely stuck at home. The wedding in June was postponed. And Henry was laid off and furloughed from his jobs as a chef at the restaurants Kaathis in Lincoln Park and Amber’s Food Cafe in Englewood, leaving the couple without an income.
Henry waited until Hemphill was asleep and created an online fundraiser on the crowdfunding website GoFundMe. In five succinct sentences, he explained the need for $2,500 to buy a portable oxygen concentrator so Hemphill could be outside longer. Then he published their story for the world to see.
“I tried to do a GoFundMe page just to at least have a smile on her face for a minute,” Henry, 57, said. “It’s kind of depressing and saddening to me to watch her go through this and I can’t support her.”
Darryl Henry, an out-of-work chef, created a GoFundMe for his fiance’s portable oxygen concentrator.
Henry is among thousands of people who have created GoFundMe pages in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Amid record unemployment, the shuttering of small businesses and the intensifying pressures on the health care system, coronavirus-related GoFundMe appeals have made up one-third of recent U.S. campaigns and have raked in more than $120 million globally, according to a company source.
“What we’ve seen is completely unprecedented in volume,” GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan said Monday. “This is an order of magnitude different because it’s a global crisis that’s affecting everybody. And it is affecting every part of society.”
A search for campaigns associated with coronavirus relief in Chicago turns up more than a thousand results, several by families who say they lost loved ones to coronavirus and need help in laying them to rest. One of them had raised more than $20,000 as of Tuesday. They also include charitable causes such as supplying personal protective equipment or meals to hospitals, as well as fundraisers for small businesses and for people who are laying bare their grief over layoffs, overwhelming bills and housing insecurity.
“I am facing the reality of having to sleep in my car if I cannot find something,” says the description of a campaign by Rashid, a 24-year-old medical student in Chicago who did not want his first name used. Using an alias, he wrote, “After talking to people they told me it is not selfish to ask for money from people. So, if you have the means and don’t view it as a burden, then please donate.”
The setup is simple but intrusive. Before creating a campaign, users must upload a photo and state a donation goal. They are encouraged to explain their plight in detail and share the page with others. Donations go directly to the fundraiser’s creator, with an option for donors to add a tip to the GoFundMe company. The company deploys a verification team to review fundraisers for legitimacy.
“When you set up something like that, it’s your last resort,” Rashid said. “It’s actually nerve-wracking. It’s like you’re putting your heart out there, wanting to just have someone help you.”
Rashid ended up raising more than his $2,000 goal for rent money. But Henry has yet to see any donations for his campaign as of Tuesday. “It’s like a crapshoot,” Henry said. “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.”
Ashley Shannon’s culinary business, Ashley Eats Chicago, was on the upswing. The 30-year-old had toiled since 2015 to build a reliable client base for her catering, cooking classes and restaurant consulting. After her boyfriend and fellow chef Damond Patterson was killed in a car crash last June, she said he appeared in a dream and urged her to keep going. Last October, she demonstrated her beloved jerk chicken tacos at the Great Food Expo in Rosemont — in front of her three daughters.
Then the coronavirus hit, leading to a crackdown of large gatherings and a statewide shutdown of sit-in dining at bars and restaurants. Shannon saw about 80% of her income evaporate. Though she understood the necessity of social distancing, “I felt like I was being cheated.”
Used to helping others who were struggling to pay for groceries and bus fare, Shannon was nervous while making her GoFundMe page. Afterward, she tried to avoid checking it too often, worried that she’d jinx it. “I don’t have that much pride to not ask for help, especially with my kids involved,” Shannon said. “I can’t even let them down in any aspect.”
Shannon remains optimistic that she will hold onto her livelihood, whether from her GoFundMe — which has raised only $70 of its $3,000 goal as of Tuesday — or other solutions. And she loves being Chef Ashley more than ever.
“Here in Chicago, we need a lot more in all areas, from us working-class people to the homeless people,” Shannon said. “This pandemic, this era, it’s really showing us that it takes a village for all of us to unite, to lean on one another.”
The explosion of GoFundMe campaigns serves as a “living archive” of the gaps in the social safety net, according to Nora Kenworthy, who has published multiple studies on crowdfunding. With 90% of the medical-related campaigns not meeting their goal, according to a study published in 2017, Kenworthy wonders whether well-meaning GoFundMe donations are “just Band-Aids on bullet holes.”
“It certainly applies in this case where the bullet holes are truly so enormous at this point,” Kenworthy said.
Relying on a crowdfunding platform at this time means competing with many other people for crucial donations, Kenworthy said. People with deeper communications and social media expertise or who present a stand-alone, solvable problem are likelier to succeed, according to her 2017 study.
“People want to contribute to something that they feel like is going to have a positive resolution, where their donation is going to really make an impact,” Kenworthy said. “But we know that’s not how complex crisis works. That’s not how poverty works.”
Luci Lieu was eight months pregnant when she posted a GoFundMe page in March after her fiance was furloughed from his bartending job at a Gold Coast hotel. She wasn’t sure how they’d make it to May because her fiance’s unemployment check only covered one-third of their rent.
“Our income went very quickly from living comfortably to barely making it in a week,” Lieu, 30, said. “We have a government administration that’s just not for the people. … America likes to tout itself as this rich and powerful place. A lot of the citizens, we just don’t feel rich or powerful.”
As of Tuesday, Lieu had yet to net any donations for her $7,000 goal. However, five people did donate about $300 to her PayPal, Cash App and Zelle, preferring instant money transfer payments over GoFundMe.
Several other GoFundMe campaigners from Chicago who spoke with the Tribune expressed frustration with the extent of government aid efforts, including the $1,200 stimulus check from the federal CARES Act passed in March. Many said it doesn’t begin to cover their expenses.
“There’s so much more need,” said Cadogan, the head of GoFundMe. “We need, as a society, multiple ways of resolving those needs.”
Cadogan said his company is in the process of learning more about campaign outcomes and how to reach communities. GoFundMe.org, the company’s charitable arm, launched a relief initiative last month in partnership with corporations including Yelp to issue grants for small businesses.
“We want to make sure that GoFundMe is accessible and can be successful for every single person who has a need,” Cadogan said. “I am quite sure that we could do more and do a better job.”
Henry, the man trying to crowdfund for a portable oxygen concentrator, wonders if the economic damage wrought by coronavirus has led to his lack of donations. He understands others must make every penny count these days.
He and Hemphill’s future is as uncertain as it was when he first published their story on GoFundMe a month ago. All he knows is that when the outbreak is over, he still plans to marry Hemphill at a barbecue venue, like when they first met and he showed off his cooking while listening to her describe her dream of exploring Chicago.
“I’m definitely in GoFundMe at the wrong time in my life, at the wrong time in her life,” Henry said. “Sometimes it’s just not for everybody. Not everybody will get a blessing like that. You just have to wait your turn for the next time.”