A crucial part of creating fire adapted communities is the principle that it is not up to any one organization or individual to “do it all.” Fire adaptation requires all of us to work together, engaging with partners and our whole community in inclusive and meaningful ways.
True community engagement is about more than information delivery and communication. Active engagement requires us to listen deeply and to learn as much as we teach. We, as practitioners and researchers, cannot be extractive in how we approach community members and partners. We must be supportive of a variety of lived experiences, cultural differences and language access needs. Resources like these toolkits created by the Washington State Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network help communities get a jump-start on wildfire preparation in an inclusive and accessible way.
Working with community members to further wildfire mitigation and adaptation can take many different forms. The Neighborhood Ambassador approach developed and shared by Wildfire Adapted Partnership is one example.
Regardless of the methods you use to engage your community, our approaches to community engagement must be as diverse as our communities themselves. This resource page includes tools, activities and information that will help foster and deepen partnerships and community engagement in your fire adaptation work.
The New Jersey Fire Safety Council worked with Sustainable Jersey to create an innovative partnership for wildfire resiliency. Building upon Sustainable Jersey’s successful municipal outreach program, partners worked to add wildfire adaptation actions to the menu of actions which count toward a community’s achievement of Bronze or Silver certification. This creative partnership enabled wildfire to become part of the conversation for communities working toward sustainability certification in New Jersey. With 800,000 people living near the 1.1 million acres of Pine Barrens, partnerships like these are essential to fire adaptation in New Jersey.
