The pop culture star, advocate and entrepreneur Paris Hilton launched an initiative Monday (March 9) to support female small-business owners impacted by disasters, a nationwide expansion of her philanthropic support for women entrepreneurs after the 2025 Los Angeles fires.
Hilton is donating US$350,000 (S$445,000) to kick-start the Back in Business Recovery Fund, with a goal to raise at least US$1 million by the end of March.
“Women-owned businesses are really the heart of so many of these communities,” Hilton told The Associated Press.
“I want to be able to lift up and support them, shine a light on them and really make a difference in their lives.”
The new initiative will be a partnership between Hilton’s social impact organisation 11:11 Media Impact and GoFundMe.org, which is the non-profit partner to the fundraising platform GoFundMe and will contribute US$100,000 to the fund’s launch.
Hilton and those organisations deployed over US$1 million in cash grants to 50 women-owned small businesses after the LA fires, which destroyed her own Malibu home.
Losing the home where she was raising her young children has been “very emotional”, Hilton said, and spurred her to think of other mothers who’d lost not just houses but income to support their families.
The grants of up to US$25,000 went to owners of child care centres, bakeries, bookshops, dance studios and salons damaged by the Eaton fire, which devastated the community of Altadena.
The money helped cover rent, payroll, replacing equipment and rebuilding.
One year later, 90 per cent of the grantee businesses are still operating, according to the Pasadena Women’s Business Centre, which also received a grant to provide technical assistance and mentorship to impacted enterprises.
Grant helped floral designer
The grantees included Renata Ortega, who ran her floral design company Orla Floral Studio from a converted garage next to the Altadena home she shared with her husband and three dogs.
Ortega was unsure how she would keep her business going after flames destroyed her house and studio space, including all her floral and event equipment.
“Nothing prepares you for that amount of loss,” she told The Associated Press.
“I didn’t think I was going to be able to get back on my feet because it took me years to be able to come up with the inventory I had.”
She worried for the staff she employed and the flower market vendors who depended on her purchases, too.
The grant helped Ortega pay the deposit on a studio space and purchase a badly needed floral cooler.
Orla Floral is now “booked and busy,” she said. She was able to keep her staff and is hoping to hire another employee soon.
She credits much of her recent growth to the grant. “It directly went into getting us back into business, but actually back and better than ever,” she said.
The support also gave Ortega a motivational boost as she faced rebuilding her home and livelihood simultaneously.
“You have to keep going and you have keep pushing and fighting forward,” Ortega told herself, “because if somebody like Paris Hilton notices your story and thinks you’re important, then you have to believe in yourself and also think that you’re important.”
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Paris Hilton wanted to think bigger
Hilton supported grantees as a customer, too, proudly donning a catsuit from the apparel shop Crop It Like It’s Hot at the Coachella music festival and hiring food vendors like Carmela Ice Cream and Hot Shrimp Mami for her own parties.
Those relationships inspired her to think “think bigger” about a national initiative, Hilton said.
So did her lived experiences as a woman, mother and entrepreneur.
“For so much of my career, I’ve been underestimated,” said Hilton, a great grandchild of the hotel magnate Conrad N. Hilton.
“I’ve worked very hard to show people that there’s much more to me.”
While there are 14.5 million women-owned businesses in the US, a 39 per cent share according to Wells Fargo, women, and especially minority women receive disproportionately less investment than men through venture capital and loan financing.
“They are the most undercapitalised and under-resourced, and particularly if primary caregiving responsibilities are falling on them too, sometimes that leads to increased recovery burden,” said Rebecca Grone, director of 11:11 Media Impact.
Like the LA programme, the Back in Business Recovery Fund will distribute unrestricted grants, partnering with some of the 150 local women’s business centres spread across the US.
Collaborating with the centres will help identify impacted women quickly and opens up access not just to cash, but to a community of business owners facing similar challenges, said Amanda Brown Lierman, executive director of GoFundMe.org.
“It’s really key to the success.”
Decisions on when to activate the fund will also be informed by reaching out to the women business centres to assess impacts, Brown Lierman said.
While the money will go to owners themselves, the impact is aimed toward the whole community, said Grone.
Saving businesses can protect jobs and tax revenue, but it can also preserve the soul of communities, drawing displaced residents back home.
“You don’t want to come back if the community isn’t thriving, so as folks are rebuilding their homes, the things that are familiar and make a community feel like home are equally as crucial,” she said.
A YouTube series called Back in Business was also released Monday, highlighting some of the LA business owners.
“I hope it really inspires others to want to donate and give back,” Hilton said.
Several of the LA grantees including Ortega will join Hilton Monday afternoon to ring the New York Stock Exchange closing bell, marking International Women’s Day, which was March 8.
It will be one of her proudest moments, Hilton said, “showing the power of women when they come together.”
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