A San Jose woman helped raise more than $300,000 to benefit Salinas locals; some supporters have concerns.

During the pandemic, there’s been an uptick in efforts to feed, shelter and clothe people, many led by individuals and grassroots organizations that have emerged during the crisis. The idea is called mutual aid and it requires neither oversight nor nonprofit status – it’s just people helping other people.

A San Jose resident named Flor Martinez seems to be one of those people. A club promoter with an Instagram following of more than 100,000, Martinez in March filed articles of incorporation with the California Secretary of State announcing her intent to create a public benefit corporation under the name of Celebration Nation, Inc.; through that entity, she reports she will hold community events for children and their families. Separately, she has also co-launched a cannabis line of topicals and tinctures, Yeeorganics.

Since the start of the River and Carmel fires, Martinez has raised money, via GoFundMe, for personal protective equipment for Salinas Valley farmworkers, as well as backpacks and school supplies for those farmworkers’ kids. She has also started a school supply fundraiser for East Side Union High School District in San Jose.

And most recently, she helped promote a fundraiser for a Salinas mother after a picture of the woman’s daughters, sitting on a curb with their Chromebooks outside a Taco Bell in East Salinas so they could use the restaurant’s wireless signal to do remote learning, went viral – a stark example of the real and vast digital divide that exists in Salinas (see story, p. 21). As part of that promotion, she captured the attention of T-Mobile’s social media-savvy CEO Mike Sievert, who responded to a Twitter post of the viral picture by saying, “I would love to help. We’ve been working hard to close the homework gap, including schools in this area, but there’s a lot more to do.” He asked that Martinez reach out, so T-Mobile could “set them up” with gear.

For the farmworkers campaign, which launched Aug. 21 and is still active, she’s raised more than $200,000. For the San Jose school district campaign, which launched Aug. 28, she’s raised $5,600.

And for the girls and their mother, who’s known only by her first name, Juana, Martinez helped promote the GoFundMe campaign launched by Salinas resident Jackie Lopez and raise an astounding $141,000 and counting in just two days.

But as the pots of money keep growing, people are asking for transparency – at the very least a paper trail – with concerns that the money will not reach the intended target.

That’s when things get murky. The paper trail on Celebration Nation ends with the California Secretary of State filing; the Internal Revenue Service would be the next step in obtaining nonprofit status, but it can take a year to get approval and it’s not clear if Martinez has applied. As of right now, despite statements to the contrary, she does not have official nonprofit status.

Martinez has done at least some of the work. She has been recorded at numerous distribution events in Monterey County handing out backpacks and PPE to thousands of farmworkers. While early on she implied she was working with the United Farm Workers on the effort, that extended no further than asking them questions. Over the Aug. 29-30 weekend, Martinez reached out to the UFW Foundation – an organization separate from the UFW – and asked to collaborate, but didn’t offer to distribute funds she had raised to the foundation’s Essential Farm Worker Project, UFW Foundation spokesperson Leydy Rangel says.

“The UFW Foundation has a vetting process and whenever we collaborate and receive donations from organizations or individuals we haven’t collaborated with before, we take an abundance of caution,” Rangel says. “At this moment, the UFW Foundation is still vetting if we will be collaborating with this individual [Martinez] who reached out to us.”

There is clarity over the funds raised for Juana. Lopez has since relinquished running the GoFundMe campaign to a Dallas-based accountant, Jenny Ramos, of Eagle Accounting. Ramos was raised in Salinas and says immediate transfer of the money from the GoFundMe account was not possible because Juana does not have a bank account or the identification needed to open one. Ramos will hold the funds for Juana in a business account. From there, Ramos says Juana wants to buy some type of motorhome for her daughters.

Lopez says she has cut ties with Martinez. Meanwhile, Salinas Police are investigating what will happen with the money Lopez raised.

While it was reported that both police and Child Protective Services had conducted welfare checks on the children in the picture – a rumor that was repeated on TMZ and picked up by other news agencies – that, in fact, never happened.

Martinez, who had spurred that rumor, posted late on Aug. 31 on social media that she had misinterpreted something Juana told her and the police had not visited the family as a result of the picture.

“It was blatantly false. They were not only accusing us of having contacted the family, but of threatening the mother with charges of child endangerment,” Salinas Police Chief Adele Frese says.

On social media, Martinez has maintained a defiant stance. She responded to requests for comment with a text message, stating she planned on providing transparency about her fundraising efforts via a video on her Instagram – @flowerinspanish – on Sept. 1. The video didn’t happen, but she posted: “Anyone trying to talk shit and trying to call me a scammer for funds I haven’t even touched yet should use that same energy to hold these big corporations that are still underpaying and not protecting farmworkers… don’t be a sheep and look at the bigger picture while we have this attention on our people. Do better.”

Several local organizations who have promoted her events in the past, including Agents of Change 831, a collective of young activists, have disavowed her lack of transparency. A statement released Sept. 1 reads: “The fact that [Martinez] is refusing to engage with community concerns in a productive way is wrong. We do our best to assume positive intent, to operate on the idea that everyone is deserving of the benefit of the doubt. Community organizing can be slowed down by red tape and be overwhelming to even the most experience. But it has come to the point where we have to base our decisions on actions that these individuals have committed (or failed to commit), regardless of their intentions.”