By Francisco Martinez, Principal and Co-Founder, Sovereign Good
When the news is frightening, Mr. Rogers said, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." Northwest Indiana just gave the country a real-time lesson in what that looks like, where the instinct to help comes from, and who the helpers actually are in our society.
On August 11, 2026, a derecho carrying two tornadoes and record flooding tore through Lake County, Indiana. Gary, a predominantly Black city in Northwest Indiana, lost power across 95 percent of the county. More than 360,000 NIPSCO customers went dark, some for nearly two weeks. Homes were destroyed. Refrigerated insulin and other medication spoiled with no way to keep it cold. Schools stayed closed. Traffic lights stayed dead through a heat wave that pushed well past ninety degrees. For more than a week, that was the story: a city of roughly 65,000 people, mostly on its own, mostly in the dark, mostly unnoticed outside Northwest Indiana.
Then a TikTok food influencer noticed.
Keith Lee grew up in inner-city Detroit, the son of a family with little to spare, and spent his first shot at a public life fighting professionally in MMA before the pandemic cut that path short soon after he reached Bellator. He rebuilt himself on TikTok instead, posting a food review every day until one broke through, then never stopped: an honest, unpaid, one-through-ten rating system that made him one of the platform's most trusted voices, especially for the independent, often Black- or Latino-owned restaurants that bigger review platforms tend to overlook. None of that history had anything to do with Gary. He is not from there. He had no organization on the ground, no advance plan, and, as far as the record shows, no formal invitation. He owed the city nothing.
He saw Gary the way most of the country eventually would: on social media, nine days into the outage, from residents narrating their own crisis because almost no one else was. "I, for one, have not seen anyone else outside of Gary, Indiana, talk about what's going on in Gary, Indiana," Lee said. "And I don't like it." He already had a Midwest stop on his food tour planned: Chicago. "How are we going to have a food tour in the Midwest and Gary ain't got no power and ain't nobody talkin' about it?" he asked.
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That was the entire strategy at the start: a man with a phone, an audience built one honest video at a time, and the plain observation that someone with no obligation to Gary had noticed what people with every obligation to Gary had not. Lee committed $15,000 and picked up the phone to Mayor Eddie Melton's office and the Salvation Army rather than building anything of his own from scratch. Within days, Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton saw what Lee had posted and matched him. "Tyrese Haliburton found out what we was doing, and he matched our contributions," Lee said. "That is amazing." On August 24, thirteen days after the storm, the two of them showed up together at Roosevelt Park Pavilion with trucks from the Salvation Army and Ace Hardware, cleanup kits, food, and, as Lee framed it, a reason for people to be around other people again. A week later, Beyoncé's BeyGOOD Foundation sent $200,000 toward Indiana storm relief.
Good Reputation + Good Intentions
That handoff, from Lee to Haliburton to BeyGOOD, is the part worth sitting with, because it's the part a foundation can actually learn from. Lee didn't have to build trust with Gary; he'd already built trust with an audience, over years, one honest video at a time, and he spent that trust in public, on a specific date, for a specific amount. Haliburton didn't have to evaluate whether the effort was credible or logistically sound; Lee had already routed the money through the Salvation Army and city hall, existing infrastructure with its own accountability, so matching the gift required trusting Lee's judgment and nothing more. And BeyGOOD didn't have to go find Gary at all; by the time the foundation was looking, there was a Monday event on the calendar, a mayor's office involved, and a public record of two people who'd already gone first. Each dollar made the next dollar easier to give. A first mover who makes the entry point legible turns strangers with resources into a funding chain — and that chain is a mechanism philanthropists can build on purpose, the same way Lee, Haliburton, and BeyGOOD built it here without ever planning to.
That funnel moved alongside the people who never left. World Central Kitchen ran meals through the second week. The City Life Center and the Gary Muslim Center cooked warm food out of buildings running on generators. Neighbors checked on neighbors' insulin and oxygen tanks door to door. The donations made headlines. The daily feeding of a city without power was quieter and just as necessary, and it came from Gary itself.
That combination (outside resources moving fast, and a community organizing its own care while it waited) is close to sixty years old.
Anchoring the Moment to History
On January 20, 1969, the Black Panther Party opened its Free Breakfast for Children Program at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in Oakland. It became one of more than sixty Survival Programs the Panthers eventually ran, including free medical clinics, sickle cell testing, clothing distribution, and ambulance service. The Panthers were explicit about the purpose. They called it survival pending revolution, not charity, but proof that a community could meet its own needs when the government meant to meet them wouldn't. The model outlived the organization that built it: Puerto Rican organizers in Chicago and New York built their own breakfast and health programs on it within the year, Mexican American organizers in Los Angeles built more through the Brown Berets, and the same instinct — see the need before the institution does, and build the fast infrastructure yourself — is what showed up at Roosevelt Park Pavilion fifty-seven years later.
None of them waited for permission to care for their own people. All of them understood something Gary, and the rest of us watching from outside it, just relearned: when the institution responsible for you moves too slowly, or not at all, the people closest to the need build the infrastructure themselves, and whoever else shows up with real resources becomes part of that infrastructure rather than the source of it.
That's the lineage Keith Lee, Tyrese Haliburton, and BeyGOOD stepped into, whether or not any of them would put it in those words.
None of this erases the harder question underneath it: why did it take thirteen days, a food influencer's video, and an NBA player's phone call before the response matched the need? A class-action lawsuit filed against NIPSCO within days of the lights coming back alleges the utility failed to maintain its lines and prepare for severe weather despite years of ratepayer money meant for exactly that. Governor Mike Braun said plainly that "NIPSCO has failed to keep its end of the bargain" and directed state regulators to investigate whether the company did what it had promised to do with that money. Gary's mayor, Eddie Melton, said the utility should have had "boots on the ground since day one." And Gary residents, in their own words to reporters, described a city that already carried a reputation for being overlooked, watching that reputation get confirmed again, in real time, block by dark block.
Whether that delay was pure logistics, a maintenance budget that never prioritized a shrinking industrial city, or something closer to what Gary residents believe it was, is a question this piece can't settle, and a state investigation will take months to answer. What can be named now is the gap in speed. The regulatory process will spend a year determining whether NIPSCO did what it promised. It took a food critic with no institutional standing about a week and one honest video to move real relief into Gary. Attention outran infrastructure. Reputation outran a utility company's maintenance schedule. That gap, more than any single donation total, is the actual lesson here for philanthropy: money that waits for a lawsuit to build the case arrives after the emergency it was meant for, while money already positioned with a trusted local partner, ready the moment someone credible says now, gets there in time to matter.
At Sovereign Good, this is the question we ask philanthropists to sit with past the news cycle. Build the relationship with the trusted local partner — the national organization already built for this, World Central Kitchen among them, the mosque running its kitchen on a generator, the mayor's office — before the emergency, not after it. Know in advance who in your community already has the standing Keith Lee had to spend: the credibility, the reach, the willingness to go first in public. Fund readiness, not only response. That's the standard community-rooted giving should meet every time, derecho or not.
Look for the helpers. Then ask who has been doing that work in your own community for decades, usually without your foundation's name attached to it, and what it would mean to fund them before the next emergency instead of after.
To think through what fast, community-rooted giving could look like for you, visit sovereigngood.org or get in contact with us at hi@sovereigngood.org