FireSmart Playbook

This Playbook guides leaders and practitioners to effectively engage, coordinate, and collaborate with partners, enhancing on-ground conditions and long-term community capacity amidst ecological impacts and unpredictable climate risks. Safeguarding communities against wildfire threats, particularly in areas with significant wildlands-urban interface (WUI) where diverse landscapes and dense populations increase complexity. Focused on communities with WUI areas, it advocates for collaborative efforts and outlines a range of approaches for engaging diverse stakeholders, addressing complex ecological and social needs, and fostering community change for professionals who may not have seen themselves as needing to be a ‘collaborative leader’, ‘stakeholder wrangler’, ‘communications and outreach practitioners’, ‘change agents’, much less ‘community developers’.

The Playbook highlights some of the challenges of WUI communities due to elevated stakes and multi-dimensional and sometimes competing factors that need to be addressed when dealing with large, dense, and diverse populations. Energy-intensive processes of stakeholder coordination, community mobilization, and change to address interconnected issues – and generate multiple benefits for those involved – require intentionally managing the “people” and “change management” elements of these collective efforts. Like a Playbook it is meant to provide actions and tools to meet different needs and objectives in different situations. It’s a reference resource, not a novel to read cover-to-cover.

Download the FireSmart Playbook

Ag Innovations Project Team

ROBERT GOULD
Senior Facilitator

BRIDGET LOWRY
Project Manager

THE FIRESMART FRAMEWORK: NAVIGATING CHANGE FOR RESILIENCE

In a landscape where many interconnected challenges abound, the Fire Smart Framework fills a gap in terms of enabling large-scale community and social change. This playbook delves deep into the practices, examples, and resources that have proven effective in WUI areas and many contexts, while introducing multiple opportunities for growth and enhancement of wildfire resilience and risk mitigation. We rely heavily on the Fire-adapted Communities Network’s ‘wheel’ to organize our findings into familiar work functions. The Fire Smart Framework seeks to accelerate progress, reduce tensions, and foster positive outcomes by increasing collaborative leadership abilities.

CHARTING THE COURSE: A VISION OF COLLABORATION

Much like the sweeping climate shifts and ecological transitions at the local level, wildfire mitigation and resilience demand change on a large, community-wide scale. While useful for singular efforts like creating or updating a plan (e.g., CWPP) or pursuing a project (e.g., clearing roadside vegetation), the framework is useful as one progresses to larger community-wide endeavors that span different facets of community life that transcend boundaries and engage, and benefit multiple stakeholders. As communities increase their wildfire preparedness efforts, various entities including fire districts, local governments, tribes, fire-safe councils, environmental groups, and other community-based organizations and businesses are stepping up to help mitigate the substantial risks as well as find opportunities to improve community health and resilience.

THREE DIMENSIONS OF SUCCESS: RESULTS, PROCESS, RELATIONSHIPS

Embracing the essence of collaboration and change, we turn to the core dimensions of success when working with groups of almost any size: results, process, and relationships. With results as the destination, process as the path, and relationships as the bridge, the Fire Smart Framework provides a foundation for effective collaboration and change.

EXPLORING THE FRAMEWORK: QUESTIONS AND TOOLS

Within the Fire Smart Framework, we embrace the spirit of inquiry. It’s a journey guided by three overarching strategic questions:

Results: What are the greater goals we aim to achieve? How does our journey intertwine with climate mitigation, wildfire resilience, and adaptation?

Process: How do we craft the essential processes, structures, and practices to breathe life into a FireSmart community? What theory of change propels us forward?

Relationships: Amid stakeholders and landscapes, how do we weave the fabric of trust and connection? How does our interaction with wildfire, land, and communities evolve?

The Fire Smart Framework: Not merely a playbook, but a roadmap towards a future of resilience. Join us on this transformative journey, where change isn’t just a concept—it’s the spark that ignites safer, more harmonious communities.