OAKLAND — In the nearly six weeks since a fire tore through an Oakland warehouse, killing 36 people, an outpouring of help flooded in from across the country. Although at least 55 fundraising campaigns were established, raising more than $2.1 million to support people impacted by the fire, much of that money has been slow to reach its intended recipients.

Two of the campaigns — the Oakland Athletics Community Fund and the Immediate Fire Relief Fund — have already begun distributing the money raised. But representatives from several of the campaigns, including the Gray Area Foundation, which raised the most money, have said they have not yet distributed the funds, though most say they plan to do so in the coming weeks. It’s been a challenge, they said, to vet requests for assistance and reach beneficiaries. Meanwhile, many of the residents displaced by the fire have yet to find permanent housing. Roommates of victims are struggling to pay rent. And families have had to fork over money for airfare and memorials.

Swan Vega, who lived in the Ghost Ship warehouse, has been sleeping in her car, on friends’ couches and in family members’ homes in California and Denver ever since the fire swallowed everything she owns. At the Alameda County Sheriff’s substation in Oakland, Red Cross volunteers gave her a blanket and a debit card with several hundred dollars for clothes and a hotel room. But that money didn’t stretch very far, she said.

Some relief came a few weeks later, when the Oakland A’s fund, which included contributions from the Golden State Warriors and Oakland Raiders, began distributing money they raised to families of victims and displaced residents. As of Thursday, some 3,600 people had contributed $750,000 to the fund, and the Red Cross had distributed $431,000 of that money to 165 people, said Cynthia Shaw, a Red Cross spokeswoman. Shaw said they are planning a second round of distribution soon.

Vega was able to buy glasses to replace the ones she lost in the fire. She also used the money to travel to Denver, where she was able to stay with family. She said she has about half of the $3,000 she received, but it’s not enough to pay first and last month’s rent, along with a security deposit, for a new place to live.

Not that finding a new home in the competitive housing market has been easy, especially while she is grappling with trauma and grief. “Stressed” doesn’t come close to describe the level of strain she is feeling, she said.

“I’ve been biting my lips to the point of deep cuts,” Vega said. “I’m having nightmares all night. Then I wake up in the morning and my mouth is bloody. … The days are just slipping away. It’s sort of beyond my bandwidth to be able to secure housing both financially, mentally and emotionally.”

A coworker established a fund specifically to help her, called “Help Swan Today After Oakland Fire.” But Vega said she hasn’t been able to access the more than $7,000 that had been donated. She’s still waiting on the crowdsourcing website, GoFundMe, to give her access to the account.

Another displaced resident, Anthony Perrault, was able to find a temporary place to stay with assistance from Help Ghost Ship, a website that sprung up in the wake of the fire to serve as an aggregate listing of all the pro bono counseling, legal and housing resources for people impacted by the fire. But Perrault can only stay there for a week or two before he needs to find a new place, he said. Like Vega, he has not been able to work in the weeks after the fire, in part because of the transient nature of his housing, and in part because he is still struggling to shoulder the weight of his grief.

“I’ve faced homelessness already,” Perrault said. “I’ve stayed in shelters and on the streets, but I’ve never experienced anything remotely close to this. I’ve never been forced out by a horrific tragedy.”

The other fund that has been mostly distributed, called Immediate Oakland Fire Relief, raised more than $60,000. Unlike most of the other fundraising campaigns, this one is dedicated specifically for people who might not qualify for assistance as a family member of a victim, or as someone displaced by the fire.

Mike Daddona lost his brother in the fire. They weren’t blood relations, but Jason McCarty had lived with Daddona for 11 years. They played in bands together and ran a record label, Ratskin Records, for 10 years. But Daddona says he also lost more than a dozen other friends in the fire. For several days, all he could do was try to comprehend what happened.

“I didn’t even call my job for three days to tell them I wasn’t coming in,” Daddona said. “I think a lot of people were the same. (We) didn’t have the mental capacity to be around people who weren’t directly affected.”

Before he could even think about it, someone from the Immediate Oakland Fire Relief fund came by with money to cover McCarty’s portion of the rent for December, which he had not yet paid. Little more than 24 hours had passed since the fire, Daddona said. The next day, they came by again with money to cover utilities.

At the same time, some partners of fire victims said they are having trouble accessing funds distributed by the Red Cross because they were not legally married when their loved one died. McCarty’s partner, Grace Lovio, was in France when she got word he was missing. They had planned on getting engaged after she finished grad school next year, she said. But without a marriage license, Lovio said she’s essentially been shut out of his final affairs.

“It’s devastating,” she said. “He was my partner and I know he’d want me to handle his affairs the way we had discussed, but I can’t do that for him.”

Like many people who spoke to the Bay Area News Group, Lovio said she also felt uncomfortable accepting money as a result of the tragedy. But she had to dip into her tuition funds to pay for her flight from Paris, and now she said she’s having anxiety attacks that have sent her to the emergency room.

“I really feel funny, almost guilty, about accepting money,” Lovio said. “But if I could just recover the amount I used from my tuition funds, I would feel so much better.”

The single largest fundraising campaign, the Gray Area Foundation’s Oakland Fire Relief Fund, had raised more than $880,000 as of Thursday. Josette Melchor, Gray Area’s executive director, said the organization has been inundated with both requests for assistance and offers to help, and a committee of five to six people are in the process of vetting the nearly 400 claims for support from the fund.

They also had to wait for the Red Cross to provide a list of victims’ family members and displaced residents, which Melchor said they didn’t get until last week. Some of the requests have been fraudulent, she said, further complicating efforts to distribute the money. And they are in the process of determining whether to distribute the funds to just displaced residents and victims’ families, or to a larger swath of people impacted by the fire, including DIY spaces that need support making fire-safety improvements to their spaces.

“We’re being hit with people calling us and telling us false stories,” Melchor said. “We want to do the due diligence and go through each claim.”

She continued, “I am personally, and some of our staff, is personally affected by the fire. So, it’s really important for us to do right by the community. We dedicated this past month to ensuring that we’ve done the research and gone through the right process.”