A graphic for Mina Kimes' live podcast to benefit LA wildfire relief efforts. A graphic for Mina Kimes’ live podcast to benefit LA wildfire relief efforts. (Mina Kimes on X.)

Mina Kimes is hosting a special episode of her podcast The Mina Kimes Show Featuring Lenny Monday night in Los Angeles, where she lives, to support the American Red Cross’s wildfire relief efforts.

She’s tagged in her friends from other companies, including Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald of The Ringer, Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily, and Jordan Rodrigue of The Athletic, to join her.

Tickets to this live podcast (beginning at 7 p.m. PT Monday night at The Belasco in LA) are still available for $50. All the funds raised from the show will go to the Red Cross’ California wildfire disaster relief efforts, will be matched by podcast producer Omaha Productions, and further boosted by other partners, as Kimes relayed to Awful Announcing in a recent phone interview.

“Omaha is just wonderful,” she said. “They’re matching all of the ticket sales, which is just unbelievably generous. And Omaha has a lot of employees in LA, so I think there was a lot of shared sentiment around this, but they’re just unbelievably generous partners. And I’m so, so grateful to them for this.”

Kimes said she was motivated to do this after seeing the impact on her community and looking for a way to help.

“Seeing friends and friends of friends and friends of family who have lost their houses, it’s just been so devastating to see,” she said. “And it’s not over, even though the 24-hour news cycle has kind of ended, there are still so many people who need help. So I’ve kind of just been pondering, ‘Is there anything that me or my friends could do?’ And something that popped in my head was, ‘Well, you know, I’ve had these live pods before, but maybe with the help of some of our partners and some of my friends, we could do one to raise money for the relief. It just came together really quickly, and I’m so grateful for that.”

She said her media employers at ESPN and Omaha were crucial to making this event happen.

“I’m not doing the difficult part. ESPN and Omaha are. Literally a week ago I was like, ‘Hey, can we do this?’ and then they got it up and running. And ESPN has done a lot of live pods before, including for me. We did one in Seattle and one at the Super Bowl last year. So they have just a ton of experience doing this, but they’re the ones doing all the hard work of lining up sponsors and doing all the logistics stuff.  All I have to do is what I do every day, just show up and talk about football.”

The wildfires impacted Kimes directly as she, her husband, and her young son had to evacuate their house briefly and stay with a friend. Luckily, the impact on her was minimal compared to many of her friends.

“I was really fortunate. I was only out of my house for a couple of days. While it was kind of chaotic, for me personally, the more difficult time to navigate when I was actually flying home from doing NFL Live in Connecticut on the Tuesday night that the fires got out. We were flying home and I didn’t quite understand, no one on our plane really understood, and then you could see everyone kind of figuring out, and I looked out the window and saw the Eaton Fire, which was just insane to fly over.

“And I was in the air talking to my husband, and he was like, ‘I think we have to leave our house.’ And I had to figure out, I was like, ‘Oh gosh, I’ll meet you at our friend’s house.’ And then I didn’t do our show for a couple of days because I was trying to figure out, you know, where my family was staying and if our house would be okay.

“But it feels wrong for me to even emphasize ‘Oh gosh, I was displaced for a couple of days and concerned.’ Because I have friends who lost their entire houses. And it’s such a small thing compared to what so many people here have gone through.”

There was another notable impact for Kimes personally when it came to the NFL Wild Card game between the Los Angeles Rams and Minnesota Vikings that got moved to Arizona. NFL Live was supposed to air live from LA but eventually moved to Glendale along with the game. She said she gave her castmates a heads-up that something along those lines might happen.

“It was really driven home for me actually when the Wild Card game was moved. Because NFL Live was supposed to be on-site for that game in Los Angeles, right? And in the days leading up to it, I was sharing photos with my castmates in our group chat saying, ‘Guys, I don’t think this is happening.’ Because I was literally parked in traffic and you could see smoke. And I was driving in the direction of the west, and I was like, ‘I’m wearing a mask, we can’t go outside right now, I can’t take my kid outside.’

“And they were just in touch with me, and they were all just wonderful the whole time, but when they moved the game, my first thought was, ‘This is absolutely the right decision for a litany of reasons.’ And then we moved our whole show to Phoenix as well.”

Kimes said that showed how sports are tied into everything else in the world.

“I think it was one of those moments where you see sports kind of colliding with real life. And I know that the Rams are super grateful to the Cardinals for how they handled that. But the players and coaches were affected by it, and it was just kind of a reminder of, ‘Oh, everybody involved in this, whether it’s playing in the games or talking about sports or traveling to a location, are all people who are affected by this as well.’ And I want to be helpful not because of that, but I just want to do something in that regard.”

Kimes said this event matters because while national media coverage has largely moved on from these fires, there’s still a long road back and a lot of help needed for many impacted. As someone who works in national media, she said it was interesting to experience a national media cycle here and to have the value of local media coverage reinforced.

“One thing that really resonated with me during the week where, like a lot of folks, I was out of my house briefly, was the importance of local media,” she said. “It’s not that it surprised me or that I’d forgotten about it, but it’s so hard to get information about things in real time now on the internet and social media.

“I think that national media obviously covered this pretty closely, but I leaned so heavily on the local news here, including The LA Times. And they’ve continued to cover not only the fires themselves, but the ramifications and what everybody is doing in an ongoing effort. It only reinforced to me the importance of local news. And I just do my best to highlight that because they’re doing the best job, I think, of covering all this.”

Kimes said her hope for the live podcast is to make a difference for many people who need it, with the matching donations and other boosts helping.

“I hope that everybody has fun. And I hope that also everybody who comes is excited about the fact that not only is their contribution going to be helping some of those families I talked about and people in this place, but also that it’s being magnified by Omaha and some of our partners. It’s a cool thing where you like to donate, but your donation is actually worth a lot more.”

She added that live events like this are a nice change from some of the cynicism and criticism she regularly sees discussing the NFL online.

“I just love doing these live podcasts generally, because things feel so fragmented online. It feels like nobody likes anything. But when you have these events in person, you’re often reminded that this doesn’t really reflect the reality. The reality is most people do enjoy things, and do like community, and most people do want to help. And I think you see that when you have events like this.”

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.