About HEART Altadena

Helping Every Altadenan Rebuild Together

HEART Altadena (Helping Every Altadenan Rebuild Together) is a design-centered rebuilding initiative formed in direct response to the Eaton Fire of January 2025. Our mission is to ensure that every fire-impacted household has a clear, community-rooted, financially feasible path back home. We provide no-cost spatial design services—architectural, interior, and landscape—along with personalized guidance throughout the rebuilding process.

The fire reshaped not only the built landscape of Altadena, but the social and cultural fabric that holds this community together. Insurance coverage is running out, uncertain construction costs, and many households—long-term residents, multigenerational families, retirees—are at risk of permanent displacement. The decisions made now will determine who can return, who must leave, and what future Altadena inherits.

Design is not a luxury in this context; it is a critical intervention that drives financial feasibility. Early, strategic design reduces risk, provides clarity, and prevents costly missteps that can derail a rebuild entirely. HEART was created to meet that need.

We offer two levels of FREE design support:

  1. Rebuild Design Consultations for all households who lost their homes, offering guidance on spatial planning, feasibility, and cost-related decisions that shape a viable rebuild.

  2. Full-Service Spatial Design—architectural, interior, and landscape—for households whose ability to rebuild depends on overcoming the financial barrier of professional design services. These services often represent up to $100,000 in value and can determine whether a family can stay in Altadena.

Our design work is carried forward through a growing network of local service providers—contractors, architects, fabricators, landscape specialists, artists, and tradespeople—many of whom were fire-impacted themselves. This trusted network is how families move from concept to construction, with significantly reduced rates that further reduce rebuild costs and ensure a coordinated, feasible path through the entire rebuilding process. By reinvesting recovery dollars directly into Altadena and connecting families with providers who understand the recovery firsthand, HEART strengthens local economic resilience and supports a rebuilding process rooted in community care. Our work also includes creative material approaches such as reclaiming fallen trees from the fire and using them as finish materials, returning them home in a new form that carries history, meaning, and renewal into the rebuilt environment.

Our approach is deeply personal and human-centered. We began by sitting with families after the fire—at community resource fairs, in temporary rentals, and at the public library—listening to their concerns and identifying what was missing from available recovery efforts. HEART’s role emerged from these conversations: to translate a complex, fragmented process into a clear, guided, step-by-step pathway home.

HEART is led by co-founders Miao Miao and Scott Franklin, Altadena residents of 13 years and spatial designers with more than twenty years of professional experience through their studio, NONdesigns. Their background in community-based design, complex project management, and 17 years of teaching at ArtCenter College of Design shapes the clarity, empathy, and co-authorship central to HEART’s work.

We operate with the support of a dedicated Advisory Committee composed of Altadena community members and experts in nonprofit and community leadership, architectural practice, law, education, art, and design—including fire survivors themselves. Their guidance ensures HEART remains grounded, accountable, and responsive to real community needs.

As a fiscally sponsored project of Fulcrum Arts’ Emerge Program, HEART Altadena has nonprofit structure, transparency, and the ability to grow responsibly while staying rooted in community-led work.

Altadena stands at a turning point. The window to rebuild is open—but narrowing quickly. HEART is committed to ensuring that the families who built this community are the ones who get to shape its future. Together, we can help transform loss into possibility and rebuild a future where every Altadenan has a place to come home to.