u/Beneficial-Fennel888

I met Dee at the bus station in Eureka while I was waiting for my own bus south.

At first he just seemed like another tired traveler carrying too much with him. But over hours of talking, I realized this guy had been through an unbelievable amount in life while somehow still staying kind, funny, respectful, and genuinely easy to talk to.

Eventually he told me about family in Los Angeles he hasn’t truly seen since the early 70s. Life split everyone apart over decades between Oregon and California, and homelessness slowly made reconnecting feel impossible.

But he still talks about them with love.

You can tell this isn’t just nostalgia to him. It matters deeply.

At one point he mentioned how badly he wished he could go see his cousin again before it’s too late. I could tell he meant it, so I bought him a ticket to help get him part of the way there.

I’m dealing with my own struggles right now too, and honestly I know what it feels like to feel isolated, stuck, and disconnected from life. Maybe that’s part of why this hit me so hard.

This fundraiser isn’t about luxury or some weird hustle. I just want to help Dee safely reconnect with family, get food, a safe place to sleep for a few nights, and have a chance to feel human again instead of just surviving outside every day.

If anyone wants to help, thank you. And if you can’t donate, even sharing it means a lot.

Support Dee’s journey here: https://gofund.me/d446db342

Main goal: crowdfunding to help our community members and make sure everyone is accounted for and represented fairly.

Mission: create a community wide GitHub

Who’s involved?: whoever the fuck wants to be

I think we need to start building community systems ourselves instead of waiting around for institutions and officials to eventually respond while families are stuck dealing with these situations alone.

There is already a massive amount of public immigration court data out there, but most normal people have no idea where to find it, how to understand it, or how to use it to actually help people.

Right now, public databases already track things like:

• Unaccompanied minors released to sponsors by county
• Immigration court backlogs
• Whether people — especially minors — have legal representation or are forced to represent themselves
• Organizations receiving funding for youth legal services

Some of these public sources include:

• ORR / HHS datasets
• TRAC Immigration Data tools (Syracuse University)
• Vera Institute legal representation dashboards
• California CDSS Youth Legal Services directories

What I want to help build is a community-run website that organizes this information into something people can actually use.

A place where families can stay informed.
A place where representation gaps become visible.
A place where the community can help fund legal support.
A place where minors and vulnerable families are less likely to disappear into a system nobody understands.

One of the biggest goals is helping ensure minors are not navigating immigration court alone without fair access to legal representation. If direct tracking information is unavailable for privacy reasons, then we can still organize around the known gaps and create community legal aid and crowdfunding systems to help support them.

Long term, I’d like this to become a larger civic-tech collaboration that Santa Cruz builds together — something open-source, transparent, community-driven, and expandable to other counties facing the same problems.

And to be clear:

You do NOT need to be a professional developer to help.

If you care about helping people and want to contribute, there’s a place for you here.

We need:

• People willing to learn
• Organizers
• Writers and researchers
• People who can help collect and organize public data
• Frontend and backend coders
• Designers
• Anyone interested in transparency, civic-tech, legal access, or community systems

A lot of this can be learned and built collaboratively together.

We can start simple:

• GitHub
• Replit
• Termius
• Supabase
• Open datasets
• Whatever helps us move quickly and organize effectively

I genuinely think Santa Cruz could build something meaningful here that other counties could eventually adopt and improve together.

If you want to help build it, comment or DM me.

Meet Dee, he’s just some cool dude that could use some help to go see his family

A call for help for an ambitious project