The Palisades and Eaton fires ravaged Los Angeles, burning down homes and displacing more than 150,000 residents – thousands of which were students.

The disaster put HopSkipDrive Inc. in a lurch. The downtown-based transportation company worked for more than 10 years to create fast and efficient routes for schools and their students. After the fires, HopSkipDrive had to scramble to identify schools that burned down, locate displaced students and assist their drivers with any post-fire aftereffects they were reeling from.

“The ability to stay with your teachers and your friends, that’s really important as these kids go through this challenge of loss,” Chief Executive Joanna McFarland said.

The fires, and the consequential mobilization of the public and private sectors highlighted the infrastructural and economical effects of collaboration between public and private entities, whereby the county or various cities will partner with companies to supplement essential public services, like transportation and housing, or to further economic interests. The company helped organize school supply drives to help students restock on learning materials.

“A lot of these things arise out of crises to begin with because it forces these sectors to figure out how to collaborate,” said Frank Zerunyan, a professor of practice of governance at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. “It’s really a glorified collaboration if you think about it.”

The business shift

When McFarland, Carolyn Yashari Becher and Janelle McGlothlin founded HopSkipDrive in 2014, the goal was to create a flexible, efficient transportation system for their eight children as full-time working mothers. The company raised $3.9 million in seed funding in 2015, led by Santa Monica-based Upfront Ventures.

In 2019, HopSkipDrive underwent a massive evolution from a consumer-focused company to one that partnered directly with schools to tackle a multifaceted problem: transporting students to and from school, after-school activities, internships and tutoring sessions. If the routes took too long, children had to wake up too early and weren’t in the right condition to learn. If an entire bus was used to transport a couple kids, that bus was contributing to Los Angeles’ chronic traffic ache. For students who were transient – either because they were homeless or in the foster care system – HopSkipDrive had to find ways to bring them to their stable school environment, even if it was far from home.

Then there was the larger economic impact, like traffic jams, parents missing work and lower graduation rates.

The company began working with the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services to coordinate routes for students in the foster system and students on individualized education plans and collecting school partners across 14 different states.

Transportation “enables learning opportunities, enrichment opportunities, enables school stability in unstable housing situations, all kinds of things that people don’t think about when they think about mobility and what access mobility can provide,” McFarland said.

Another firm changes course

Upwards Care Inc. has a similar story. The Marina del Rey-based child care startup was founded in 2017 as a business-to-consumer company before changing course. Instead of having parents or daycare owners shell out cash for the service, Upwards began reaching out to employers and governments to get involved. In 2022, the company partnered with the California Department of Social Services to subsidize daycare through Upwards. Most recently, the company also announced a partnership with Pico Rivera in March.

“A lot of times it comes down to supporting families and people in their community, which includes child care providers. We basically are administering the program and are paid an administration fee to do these programs,” said founder and chief executive Jessica Chang. “Why would government employees do it? Hello – retention, right? More people at work, more tax dollars for the government.”

One of Upwards’ government programs involves emergency care for entities that have to mobilize during natural disasters, like tropical storm Milton that affected around 80,000 people. Its program with the National Guard, which was sent to the fire-affected areas in January, allowed members to quickly put their children in an Upwards child care facility last-minute.

“You suddenly get a call – it could be like 2 a.m. at night – and you have to leave. What are you going to do with your kids?” Chang said. “We trained child care providers that were close to bases on how to support non-traditional hours and how to be open 24/7.”

Organizing tech startups

Working with tech companies has long been part of California’s governmental plan to improve transit services, new housing and educational opportunities – with varying levels of success. The state announced a plan on implementing artificial intelligence training in schools and the workforce with computing powerhouse NVIDIA back in August. Santa Monica’s transit service Big Blue Bus partnered with rideshare service Lyft in 2018.

“They are really the coming together of two separate entities such as one being public the other one being private bringing what they’re strong at and to the table and to try to create a public good,” Zerunyan said.

In 1981, Los Angeles County created the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit that coordinated collaboration between the public and private sectors.

“L.A. is so big. You have 88 cities, you have 10 million people and the geography is huge with 4,700 square miles,” said Stephen Cheung, the chief executive of the LAEDC. “It’s hard to coordinate when it’s just basically left to private companies and hope for the best that they’re able to make those connections.”

LAEDC has facilitated countless programs like small business recovery efforts post-wildfires, partnerships between universities and big pharmaceutical companies, and unemployment relief. But mobilizing tech startups at large has been harder to do, given the wide reach of different industries tech companies find themselves in, and the lack of a cohesive organization that brings them together – the biotech field has Bioscience LA, the entertainment sector has the Motion Picture Association.

“The question for the tech community is right now what entity do you have?” Cheung said. “And because L.A. tech is so diverse – are you talking about biotech? Are you talking about artificial intelligence? Quantum? Cyber? All these different technology companies are pretty much on their own.”