Episode 01
Heather Made 34 Phone Calls.
Grass Valley, August 2020. The Jones Fire jumps the west canyon and the sheriff pushes mandatory orders out to four thousand people. Heather Calderón — a nurse coming off a night shift — drives to the Nevada County Fairgrounds with a legal pad. Over the next week she makes thirty-four phone calls on her own phone, matching evacuees to family they couldn't reach. The paper never names her. A neighbor told us the story four years later.
I wanted Heather to open the Good People Exist series on Living Good Karma because Heather is exactly what I mean by the title. Quiet, useful, no show. Thirty-four families got their people back because she sat down with a legal pad and a phone in the middle of an evacuation.
We recorded in Grass Valley at her kitchen table on a Tuesday morning. Coffee. Her dog in the background. She still has the legal pad.
What you'll hear: how she got the idea, what the first call sounded like, the one that made her cry, and what she would tell someone who thinks they're too small to help.
The question for you is at the bottom of this page.
This Episode's Question Accepting answers
“Who's someone you've never met but would thank if you could? What did they do?”
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