ATLANTA — A metro Atlanta man who is a restaurateur in Maui is trying to keep his staff safe and warm after the devastating wildfires ripped through the island.
Caleb Hopkins is originally from Macon but has spent a good amount of his life in Atlanta working at Atlas and the Druid Hills Golf Club, before he and Javier Barberi started the Hana Hou Hospitality Group back in 2015.
“We’ve got about 240 employees and right now only about 20 have a job still because one of our restaurants survived up north," Hopkins said. "But the rest of them are out a job right now and 80% of them have lost their homes."
When the fires broke out, they lost two of their four restaurants, but their employees lost everything.
“We’re not worried about ourselves right now you know? We’re smiling through the pain and laughing when it laughs. The first week there weren’t any laughs honestly," Hopkins explained. "The first week was really horrible."
Hopkins and Barberi launched an online fundraiser to raise money to build tiny homes and provide other essentials for their displaced workers.
Scott Riley has known Hopkins since his days at Druid Hills Golf Club and immediately started pitching in to help.
“We started Venmoing him money and about three hours later I started getting pictures from Caleb of a guy holding a generator that we had bought him for his auto repair shop," Riley said. "We bought another generator for a family who’d lost electricity in their house."
There’s a long road ahead, but Hopkins is hoping to start building these tiny structures soon.