Using AI to Sustain Palisades Fire Recovery After FEMA

Boys & Girls Club of Malibu is taking on fire-recovery cases with one Salesforce admin. Here’s how Orchestrate’s AI agents are making it work.

More than 20 months after the 2025 LA fires, recovery is far from finished. As of May 2026, nearly 30,000 households were still working through insurance claims, and close to 1,000 were still in federally funded temporary housing, according to the Office of Governor Gavin Newsom.

Many of those families had assistance managing insurance claims, housing, and federal aid. That support just got thinner. On September 30, California’s FEMA-funded Disaster Case Management Program (DCMP) for survivors of the LA fires ended, more than a year ahead of its originally planned January 2028 end date.

Across much of LA County, these cases are going to organizations funded by sources other than FEMA, including Boys & Girls Club of Malibu, which has been running disaster case management and direct relief for fire survivors.

For Boys & Girls Club of Malibu, that means families who were working with the DCMP are now coming to them. More cases, with the same headcount and the same budget.

A small nonprofit with an enterprise-sized problem

Boys & Girls Club of Malibu runs its fire recovery work with about a dozen care coordinators. Behind all of it is one Salesforce admin.

Nikki White, the organization’s Data Manager, built the org herself in 2020 to run the club’s wellness center, then extended it to after-school enrollment and attendance. She’s a classic nonprofit accidental admin: tech savvy, but not a developer. When the Palisades Fire hit, she stretched Salesforce to handle intake, verification documents, case notes, and relief disbursement, all under emergency conditions.

“I kind of duct-taped Salesforce together to make it work at the time,” she said.

But the requests came in faster than one person could build, and the backlog kept growing.

For Data & Development Director Ethan White, the question was what Salesforce and technology would cost over the long run. Grant funding could cover the build now, but not a system that would cost more to run for years after. For a small nonprofit, every dollar spent on systems is a dollar that doesn’t reach a family.

The usual paths didn’t fit. A traditional consulting engagement for an org overhaul would take time they didn’t have, on a budget they didn’t have. So, they needed another way.

Why they took the leap on Orchestrate

Nikki and Ethan came to Revecast Orchestrate for different reasons, and it covered both:

A built-in AI advisor: For Nikki, this turned out to be the biggest win. Orchestrate looks at the Salesforce instance as a whole, flags what’s out of line with best practice, and tells you what to fix first. For a team without an in-house architect, it fills a seat they didn’t have.
A full team at nonprofit cost: For Ethan, it came down to budget. From plain-language prompts, Orchestrate handles design, build, and review, with no new headcount and no agency retainer.
Every change on the record: Every Orchestrate session is logged, with token costs, estimated time saved, and a clear record of what AI built and a human approved.

What AI for nonprofits looks like in practice

The project kicked off July 2026, and the first thing the team noticed was speed.

“I’ve gotten a tremendous amount of work done in the last couple months. And not only have I done it quickly, but with best practices.” – Nikki White, Data Manager, Boys & Girls Club of Malibu

Part of that speed comes from context. Orchestrate reads the whole org before it builds anything, so each new request starts from what already exists instead of from zero. The result is visibility across the org, so nothing gets built in a silo.

Nikki explains, “It’s able to look at the system as a whole and point out bigger pictures and say, ‘So in the future we may want to make this big change, but for now, let’s do this small one and let’s make it work.'”

Weeks of work, done in days. That adds up fast when the caseload keeps climbing.

What’s next: C.A.R.A., an AI agent for care coordinators

The piece the team is most excited about is still ahead. C.A.R.A., the Care and Recovery Agent, is the next build on the roadmap.

Nikki’s goal is to let care coordinators ask C.A.R.A. what’s on their task list today, which funds a client is eligible for, or where to find a document. Today, that means clicking through Salesforce, Google Drive, and outside websites, then copying and pasting between them.

“We want to make it so that they can spend more time with the human, providing that kind of social emotional support, rather than all of these administrative and paperwork related burdens.” – Ethan White, Data & Development Director, Boys & Girls Club of Malibu

The goal is simple. Faster tools for care coordinators, so no family waits because the system is slow.

How to use AI agents for nonprofit operations

Not every organization is working on wildfire recovery, but plenty share the same basic capacity gap: a small team, a Salesforce org that’s hard to keep up with, and demand that rises faster than the budget. Food banks see it when a plant closes. Housing nonprofits see it when an eviction moratorium ends. Community foundations will see it after the next disaster. That’s where AI has the most impact for nonprofits.

Here’s what Boys & Girls Club of Malibu’s approach can teach them:

Start with an org review: Before building anything new, find out what’s already there and what needs fixing. Orchestrate’s AI assessment does that review for you and tells you what to tackle first.
Make your work easy to trace: Funders want to see where their money goes, and every AI-built change should be easy to explain. Orchestrate logs every session automatically, so the answer is one prompt away.
Get ahead of demand: Nonprofits rarely get warning before the need spikes. AI agents can turn weeks of work into hours. The time to make your org more efficient is before the next wave arrives.