Erica Chan remembers March 12, 2020, like it was yesterday. The pandemic. She was

sitting at home when she got an email out of the blue saying work was

canceled indefinitely. It wasn't just for me. All of my friends was getting

work canceled and so it wasn't uncommon and it kind of seemed like it was

happening to everyone. Erica works in the film industry in Los Angeles and the

pandemic hit the media and entertainment world hard. She knew work in her

industry wasn't coming back anytime soon so she decided to file for

unemployment. Something she's done before when work dried up. So I posted on my

own personal Facebook telling people that I know it's confusing and if they

need help applying that they should ask me whatever questions that they had.

Erica's Facebook got flooded but the problem was Erica didn't always have the

answers. And I decided to create a Facebook group because maybe other people

can help other people and so I started that Facebook group I think maybe

around March 17th and I think by April may it ended up growing to maybe 20,000

numbers maybe by June it was like 40,000 and as of today it's like 70,000

numbers who ended up joining so it became a really big thing unexpectedly and

I realized how much people actually really needed that help.

This is on point I'm Megna Chacrabardi. By July of 2020 about 4.4 million

Californians were receiving unemployment benefits but hundreds of thousands of

others who needed help were not. Erica was trying to help them. She says the

application's length wasn't the problem it only took about 30 to 60 minutes to

fill out the real issue it was hard to fill out

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