Community engagement in fire preparedness: It’s how that matters

A primer for community wildfire practitioners

As wildfires increasingly affect us in Oregon, more people and organizations are working to create fire-adapted communities. A fire-adapted community is aware of its risks and takes collaborative actions to reduce the likelihood of losses. Practitioners support fire-adapted communities by connecting people to information, resources and networks. This is often described as public outreach, community engagement, communication or resident education. If this is part of your job, you may have experienced some of the following challenges:

• You have hosted educational events and put out messaging about defensible space and home hardening. Some local people have been involved, but it’s always the same few.
• There was a lot of interest in fire preparedness after a fire happened nearby, but a few years later, people seemed to have other priorities.
• Your area has harder-to-reach populations, and you are wondering how to best connect with them.
• You want to prevent community members from experiencing a trauma response, but you’re uncertain how to reach people effectively without triggering strong emotional reactions.

This primer responds to these challenges. It is for any community wildfire practitioner who wants to further develop their skills and tools for engaging people in their place. It focuses on wildfire preparedness with adult community members at local levels, although it is relevant to multiple contexts. It highlights selected concepts and practices that may help you overcome challenges, deepen relationships, support shared learning and even make the work more fun and meaningful.

After reading this primer, we hope that you will see the differences between traditional and more engagement-focused approaches, and undertake engagement that serves whole communities, uses the science of how adults learn and incorporates trauma-informed practices.

We hope this resource sparks curiosity and new ideas. While reading, you may consider:

• How might you share this information with your local colleagues and partners?
• Where might you try a new approach or technique in the next six months?
• What kinds of further training or experiences might help grow your engagement skills?

It's important to note that not every moment is right for in-depth engagement. For example, emergency communications are usually directive because they provide crucial information to protect life and safety in time-sensitive situations. Or, there may be extreme power disparities or conflicts that make it difficult for people to interact effectively, and mediation or negotiation may be more appropriate.

As you consider trying engagement approaches, you also might feel intimidated. Being a community wildfire practitioner is important and exciting, but not always easy. You are likely trying to do a lot across a large area with limited time and resources. You may feel rushed or uncertain of what approaches will be the most effective. Outreach and engagement are often not well-funded compared to on-the-ground wildfire mitigation activities. Many of us do not have special training or extensive experience on how to do engagement, and available social science about it is not always accessible or easy to put into practice. Also, local leaders or other practitioners often already have established information-delivery approaches, and some community members may be expecting and most comfortable with those.

Further factors to consider are trauma and safety. If individuals have had physically or emotionally harmful experiences with wildfire or smoke, their functioning and well-being may be affected in ways that can make it hard to engage in wildfire preparedness.

Despite these obstacles, engagement approaches are worth trying because:

• Research across numerous social science disciplines finds that engagement approaches can be inclusive and effective.
• These approaches work because they can allow participants to ask questions, test assumptions and ideas, and decide for themselves how to apply new knowledge within their social and local contexts.
• Engagement can also help bring together diverse resources and assets, accomplishing more than one or a few entities could alone.
• Engagement efforts that deliberately use a trauma-informed approach can also support participants who have had previous adverse experiences and help prevent re-traumatization.

To try new practices, you don’t have to start from square one or throw out everything you already have planned. You can consider how to incorporate a few new engagement practices, learn what fits you and your communities best, and adapt as you go.

Understanding and working with whole communities

The social and cultural diversity of wildfire adaptation:
Moving beyond the general public

In your role supporting community wildfire preparedness, who are you trying to serve? We often use the term “the general public,” but this can be an overgeneralization. Wildfire affects a diversity of populations across a range of places from rural to urban. Even within a small geographic area, there can be great differences in culture, income, livelihoods, lifestyles and connections to the land.

Engagement approaches targeted to the specific qualities of the individuals and communities at hand (the “social context”) are more likely to result in fire-adapted actions. Social context can include peoples’ characteristics, backgrounds and their personal situations:

• Demographic characteristics such as age, race/ethnicity, gender, disability, language spoken and citizenship status.
• Socioeconomic characteristics, like income level, employment status, educational attainment, geographic location and housing type.
• Motivations, values, beliefs and worldviews.
• Social cohesion, or the extent of connectedness and solidarity across different social groups.
• Where people seek information and how communication takes place.
• Level of trust in authorities such as government agencies and other organizations working on wildfire-related issues.
• Prior experience with wildfire and smoke events in the area.
• Existing knowledge of fire preparedness.

Another pitfall is assuming that community members have no or little pre-existing knowledge about wildfire risks and how to prepare. Social science research in many communities has shown that residents of fire-prone areas are often aware of their risk of wildfire.

Understanding social context

Assessing community social context helps you build the engagement strategies most likely to reach people. Whether you are a lifelong resident of your area or working in places where you do not have much history, there are ways to learn more about local characteristics. Deliberately seeking information and listening to learn can reveal new ways of seeing your community(ies). Using a combination of information sources will yield the best results. Secondary statistics alone may not tell the full story of demographics, especially in rural, remote or underserved communities. Incorporating qualitative data alongside secondary data can help create a more complete picture. Some ways to gather information include:

• Access existing data: Statistics on demographic, economic and other conditions are available at geographic scales such as counties, places, tribal areas, ZIP codes and congressional districts. The American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau provides annual data profiles that easily summarize local trends. County/community planners, social service providers and economic development practitioners may be helpful in obtaining and organizing these data.
• Gather new information: Social science data collection approaches such as interviews, focus groups and surveys can be used in numerous ways. These methods are typically best for learning about perspectives, needs, desires and areas of commonality and difference. Students and teachers from local high schools or colleges may be interested in helping with data collection projects. Think beyond natural resource and fire organizations — consider, for example, real estate agents, faith leaders, school administrators or business owners as sources of information.
• Understanding prior experiences: Learning about prior major events can help increase awareness of local concerns and the trauma history of the area. This includes wildfire and smoke events as well as other natural disasters, social unrests or crimes. Newspaper archives and oral history interviews are helpful sources for this information.
• Listening and building relationships: Building and sustaining relationships is crucial to helping communities become more fire-adapted. Relationships help create mutual understanding. This can include spending time at community events and getting to know different groups and organizations (such as faith-based, ethnicity-focused and age-based organizations). This can help you better understand who people trust, where they receive information and what their priorities are. It can especially help with reaching beyond the most visible members of a community and diversifying who you reach in fire adaptation efforts.

Working with social context: Moving beyond one-size-fits-all approaches

Understanding your community’s social context allows you to tailor your engagement approaches so they reflect different peoples’ needs, strengths, priorities and concerns. This is similar to a strategy in communications and marketing called “audience segmentation,” which uses selected criteria to divide target audiences into smaller subgroups and design targeted messages most likely to appeal to each of them. But to practice engagement, we go beyond designing messages to developing approaches that involve shared learning and decision-making.

Wildfire practitioners may opt for more generalized, broad approaches if they are trying to be efficient with limited resources, or because they don’t have a good sense of the local cultures and groups within a community and how they could best segment those. However, generic messages and strategies may fail to resonate if they are not specific enough to the audiences you’re intending to engage. Strategies that make the information personally relevant to the audience can increase information retention and lead to better results when it comes to taking action. Here are some considerations for tailoring your engagement:

Cultural values can determine different approaches

All people and communities have cultural identities that influence their values, perspectives, preferences and ways of being. When working with a community on wildfire adaptation, try to identify engagement approaches that will align with various local cultural norms and practices.

For example, prior research has found that some communities centered around natural resource-related industries may have cultural values of self-reliance, resourcefulness and individual freedom. Some landowners in these communities may want to use their own resources and expertise to voluntarily carry out fuel treatments on their properties. Rather than attending an event to receive basic information about defensible space or government assistance, they might prefer informal peer learning or resource-sharing opportunities with each other and trusted local organizations.

In contrast, some communities may be used to working with structures and rules. These can be communities with homeowners’ associations or prior experience with formal planning processes. They may be more interested in creating codes, ordinances or Firewise USA® designations.

In working with cultural values, however, it’s important to avoid too many assumptions or stereotypes. For example, a common refrain is that people new to a fire-prone community aren’t aware of the fire risk. This may or may not be true, depending on where they previously lived, or their own values around emergency preparedness. Gathering information as described above can help explore these kinds of assumptions.

Engagement at meaningful scales

A common challenge in fire-adapted communities is where to focus efforts, especially if the community in question is geographically large or socially diverse. For the purposes of tailoring engagement, working at smaller or more localized scales can be effective for several reasons. One is that people often make sense of and act on new knowledge by applying it within their local contexts. This means using their networks to exchange information and work together, incorporate practices that make sense for their specific environmental and social conditions, and find local solutions to barriers. In some communities, place attachment can be a strong motivator of action. This refers to the emotional and cognitive experiences that people have with a place, their “ties” to it and how they define it.

Examples of a smaller scale are a neighborhood or manufactured home community, a sub-watershed, or a certain portion of a county, for example, where there are some commonly understood geographic boundaries around an area and some social commonalities among people within it.

Community engagement in these places could center around:

• What people like about living there.
• Shared priorities for mitigating risk across a common environmental context.
• How they define their community (social or geographic factors).
• How they prefer to communicate with each other.
• Their established trust in resident leadership systems and local fire protection districts.
• Where they often gather (someone’s house, a local Grange, a school, a church or a restaurant)

How and when people satisfy these different needs may vary depending on their social, cultural and personal contexts. The ring model can help us understand potential needs of community members and how to address barriers to their full participation in wildfire adaptation. Barriers can include struggling to put food on the table, coping with physical or mental health issues, facing the threat of deportation, or coming up with enough money to pay the rent. Although basic needs often must be satisfied before an individual can be effectively engaged in learning, this is not always the case. In communities that have had firsthand experience with fire, wildfire preparedness may be a higher priority. In these communities, individuals may be more willing to participate in wildfire adaptation even if other needs are partially or completely unmet.

Some social science research has shown that individuals can be more likely to take fire preparedness action when they are able to integrate it with their other needs. In other words, how does fire preparedness relate to their everyday lives and what they care about? Further, these studies suggest that actions that reduce uncertainty and offer specific, near-term benefits are most readily adopted. Altogether, this means that engagement focused just on reducing wildfire risk may not be effective. Highlighting other possible outcomes, such as improved disaster preparedness, cost savings, aesthetics or wildlife visibility can be helpful. In addition, people are often motivated by hearing about action and results: What is being done already? What have the results been?

Working with vulnerable communities

Wildfires don’t affect everyone equally. Some communities experience more frequent fires than others, and physical safety is a major concern for people in those areas. Some populations also have fewer resources to prepare for and recover from fire. They may be more vulnerable to adverse effects such as health impacts from smoke. Demographic and socioeconomic characteristics — like age, gender, ethnicity, race, income, wealth, health, housing type and educational level — make a difference in how people experience a fire and how they cope. Researchers often refer to this as social vulnerability to wildfire.

When engaging with vulnerable community members, keep in mind that they may not prioritize wildfire issues because they are focused on meeting their immediate needs for well-being, as described above. Activities such as wildlife preparedness involve longer-term planning for physical safety in the future. But people may not have the capacity today to deal with their safety in the long term because they are focused on their immediate safety.

We often have limited influence on the structural or bigger-picture issues that affect basic needs and immediate safety. However, there are ways to adapt your engagement to accommodate underserved individuals and families. Providing resources and services for vulnerable community members can reduce barriers and support their participation. These could include, for example, providing evacuation go-bags to take home from a training, or offering child care during a community meeting (see list below).

You may also consider how your engagement events can nurture some of the higher-level needs of your community, such as social and self-esteem needs. This can increase participation and promote learning. Importantly, a trauma-informed approach can help account for how historical marginalization and oppression may affect some community members, and establish an environment that values their experiences and needs. Making events culturally and linguistically inclusive can go a long way towards showing care for these community members. Partnering with a trusted community-based organization can help ensure that your content is suited for the people you are trying to reach. This is also important because different cultures can have different ways of learning. These partner organizations may help adapt your approach in that light.

Relational engagement: Creating long-term partnerships

Relationships are critical for fire-adapted communities. Relational approaches to community fire adaptation invite us to view residents as partners in this work, rather than passive targets of messaging. Relationships also invite us to work with residents’ strengths, skills and needs. They encourage stronger networks and connections among community members.

What does it mean to take a relational approach?

A traditional approach to wildfire preparedness might position community wildfire practitioners and other fire professionals as the main decision-makers, authority figures and responsible parties. The public, by contrast, is relegated to important yet limited roles of creating defensible space and hardening their homes. When we take a relational approach, we discover that there are more active roles for community members that can help us collectively achieve more fire-adapted communities. To invite residents into these more active roles, we need a new approach that shifts authority, responsibility and decision-making towards collaboration and shared responsibilities.

Research has shown that consistent rather than sporadic or one-time contact between wildfire practitioners and community members makes a difference in how likely people are to trust the practitioners and undertake and sustain fire-preparedness actions. Showing up repeatedly and following through on promised resources or actions demonstrates accountability. You can do this by developing a long-term engagement strategy, versus planning single events or resources. Share updates in accessible, transparent formats.

Actions that support long-term engagement

• Organizing partnership groups that meet regularly and create shared plans.
• Hiring positions and dedicating resources for community engagement, including an emphasis on trauma-informed approaches.
• Developing and sustaining multiple lines of communication with community members.
• Transparently updating plans, activities and outcomes on accessible platforms.
• Deliberately evaluating, learning and documenting lessons as you go.

You can also consider developing goals and intermediate steps that break the work of supporting communities on their pathway to fire adaptation into smaller bites. This can help you plan for and write grants. You can accomplish small wins, building off those and learning from them. This also allows you to adapt and tailor community engagement to meet evolving needs over time. Needs will naturally look different as community members grow skills and implement actions.

Community agency

When wildfire preparedness efforts feel top-down, we run the risk of making residents feel disengaged or disempowered. Community agency refers to the ability of local people to make decisions about wildfire risk reduction and share responsibility for outcomes. This means that their perspectives, values and concerns are not only considered, but that community members feel empowered to take ownership of initiatives, engage in decision-making and contribute to the overall success of the effort. Agency and power-sharing are both key trauma-informed strategies. This requires collaborating professionals to reflect critically on when and how to make space for community members to participate in decision-making and leadership of wildfire resilience efforts.

Shared learning

Another key aspect of a relational approach is that everyone involved is learning together. As science communicator Faith Kearns describes, “the practitioner is not seen as the ultimate authority but instead understands that they have much to learn from those they are working with. ... Too frequently, communicators are placed or place themselves in expert roles that do not acknowledge the understanding and wisdom of ‘nonexperts.’” Learning from each other requires active and deep listening, curiosity, reflection and a willingness to adjust existing knowledge or beliefs in response to new information or experiences.

It can help to create purposeful, task-based opportunities to learn from community members. You can do this by designing community meetings with built-in opportunities for dialogue with residents, organizing workgroups that include community member participation or creating dedicated positions such as community liaisons with the capacity to plan long-term community engagement. Over time, these efforts might help your colleagues and peers see the value in shared learning with community members.

Delivering wildfire education programs with impact

Learner-centered education: Moving beyond ‘information delivery’

In this section, we focus on best practices for developing and delivering impactful adult education programs about wildfire preparedness. In your work, you are likely asked to organize community meetings or give presentations about wildfire risk reduction. Often, we default to delivering a talk or lecture, sometimes accompanied with PowerPoint slides. We see this as an efficient method to disseminate our expertise to the participants.

There’s just one problem, though: Telling people things doesn’t always go hand in hand with learning. When we simply disseminate our expertise, we’re unwittingly employing the “information deficit model.” This assumes that if learners just had the right information, they would make decisions aligned with that knowledge. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Research in adult learning demonstrates that the process works best when it considers learner motivation, learners’ previous knowledge and the opportunity to apply new ideas in a relevant context. Another important factor is learners’ own cultures, which can shape how people receive information and if they feel included and supported in the learning experience. Educational efforts that incorporate people’s backgrounds and perspectives, rather than solely those of the instructor(s) or assumed dominant culture, may be more effective at engaging diverse cultures.

Furthermore, people make decisions about risks such as wildfire based on a long list of factors such as their understanding of the threat, their past experiences, how much they trust the information or people giving advice, their capacity to plan for future risk if they are preoccupied with daily struggle and whether they think the benefits of the change will outweigh the costs.

So, how do we help people make decisions about managing risk? It starts with moving beyond the deficit model. Thankfully, there is a robust body of educational science on how people learn that gives us ideas for different ways to approach adult engagement. Here, we will provide some context for how adults learn, and suggestions for designing effective education efforts.

How do people learn?

Learning is an active process that builds on what we already know and experience. People have existing knowledge shaped by their personal experiences, culture, values, education and more. To learn something new, one needs to connect and reshape that information to make it fit into the frameworks that they already have. Because information gets reshaped in the brain, even if you share the same information with a group of people, they may all understand and connect with it in different ways.

For wildfire engagement, activities that use and build on what people already know can encourage them to try new ideas. This will help them learn better than just delivering information to them. It also means providing relevant examples that put information into context. This can help support the development of “shared mental models,” meaning more alignment between what the instructor is attempting to convey and what a learner interprets.

Adult learners

Adults are self-directed learners who bring knowledge and experiences that can add value to the learning experiences of their peers. They are often motivated by applied problem-solving that is relevant, practical and immediate. Additionally, adults can thrive in collaborative and interactive learning environments, valuing opportunities for discussion and sharing perspectives. Interaction allows for questions, clarifications, trust and relationship-building. Given the diversity of adult learners, teaching strategies are most effective when they meet adult learners where they are and build on their previous knowledge and experience. Adult learners tend to disengage when asked to learn things they already know. In the context of wildfire, research also suggests that adults seek information that is clear, high-quality, logical and consistent. This helps reduce uncertainty and encourages action.

Learning design: How to develop and deliver effective wildfire education programs

When developing education programs, starting with the end goals in mind can help ensure that the learning will be impactful and relevant. By first identifying the most important knowledge, skills and attitudes that you want your learners to develop, you can create a learning plan that will support learners in meeting those objectives.

1. An action word (verb)
2. Specific content that you want learners to acquire (can include knowledge, skills, attitudes)
3. The context in which learners should be able to apply the new knowledge or skill

Using the previous example, we can write a learning objective that states: By the end of this session, participant homeowners will be able to effectively prioritize (action word) home hardening recommendations (content) on their own homes (context) that will increase ignition resistance. As another example, for a field-based defensible space session, a learning objective might be: By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to systematically identify (action word) structure ignition vulnerabilities (content) in each zone of defensible space during a Home Ignition Zone assessment (context).

It is common for practitioners to focus on objectives related to understanding, increased knowledge and awareness. For example, As a result of the training, participants will gain increased awareness of available grants and resources for wildfire preparedness.

However, these knowledge-based objectives do not fully describe what a learner will actually be able to do and why. If you find yourself using “understand” in your learning objectives, ask yourself why the learners need to understand the given topic in order to put knowledge into action. Often, this can reveal a more specific and measurable action. For example, the previous example might be more actionable if modified: As a result of the training, participants will be able to select (action word) relevant grant opportunities (content) from the state database (context) and apply for them (action word) through the online portal.

Step 2: Identify ways to assess learning

Actionable objectives also are desirable because they make clear what has been learned. This means that they are relatively easy to observe and measure, which is important for assessing learning. Once you have established learning objectives, the next step is to ask, "how will we know that learners are making progress towards meeting these objectives?" In answering that question, you can develop ways to assess learning during and after your program. Learning assessment helps instructors get continuous feedback from participants about what resonates and where additional information or reinforcement is needed to achieve learning outcomes. It also supports continual improvement of education programs over time.

It is common to equate “assessment” with tests or surveys. When engaging in learning about wildfire preparedness, however, we are often more interested in action-based learning objectives, meaning that it is most important to measure what learners do as a result of the learning experience (rather than what information they retained).

Measuring skill acquisition can be accomplished organically by providing learners with scenarios or problem-solving activities, which are called “authentic tasks” in the language of learning design. During these tasks, instructors can observe if learners are demonstrating the skills that are described in the learning objectives to assess whether or to what extent they have been met. Instructors may informally note progress, or use a more formal rubric to determine the extent to which a given participant has mastered a new skill. This type of assessment is not only more tailored to skill-based learning outcomes, but it can also feel less “academic” and more appropriate for the free-choice adult learning settings that we operate in as community wildfire practitioners.

Some examples of authentic tasks that might be relevant to your programs could be:

• Conducting a mock home assessment.
• Inviting learners to prepare a short community presentation about a specific component of wildfire risk reduction.
• Providing a scenario that invites participant problem-solving.
• Hosting a work party in which learners undertake defensible space actions.
• Inviting your learners to staff a table at a resource fair and observe how they answer questions posed by attendees.

If you decide to use a survey or written test as part of your assessment process, include questions that link directly to the program’s learning objectives. This helps you ensure that results of the test or survey will help you decipher whether learning objectives were met.

Step 3: Develop learning activities

Now that you have strong learning objectives and a way to determine the extent to which learners meet them, it’s time to develop the “meat and potatoes” of the education program: learning activities.

We have established that disseminating information does not always lead to learning, so when designing a learning plan, it’s helpful to think about how you teach through activities, discussions, scenarios and other opportunities for active participation. In fact, some of these learning activities might also double as a way to assess learning, as described in the prior section.

To develop a learning plan using this cycle, you can break your content into subtopics using your learning objectives. Then, you’ll use the four phases of the experiential learning cycle to work through each subtopic:

1. Exploration: In this phase, instructors invite learners into a self-directed activity that allows them to get curious about the topic and connect with their prior knowledge. They are encouraged to ask questions, reason and converse with colleagues. Instructors may facilitate this activity through prompting questions and listening, but mostly refrain from delivering content.
2. Concept invention: Once learners are focused on the topic and curious to learn more, instructors can present or otherwise share information. This phase may look like a traditional lesson or could be a hands-on activity like a mock home assessment in which instructors deepen participant knowledge of topic concepts.
3. Application: To solidify learning about new concepts, participants then need to apply what they’ve just learned to a relevant context. For adult learners, it’s valuable if they can apply new concepts to real-life situations or scenarios that will help them make decisions about wildfire preparedness outside of the context of the class. For example, you might ask them to take what they’ve learned about structure ignitability and identify the ignition vulnerabilities of their own house, and mitigation options to address those.
4. Reflection: In this final phase, learners are invited to reflect on what they’ve learned and situate new ideas into their existing frameworks for understanding a concept. It can also be a time to uncover remaining questions or misunderstandings. Reflection can be accomplished through discussions with partners or small groups, written activities or time for individual thinking.

This cycle can be repeated multiple times throughout an education program, focusing on one subtopic at a time, with each cycle building on what was learned in the previous. When your learning plan has covered all the material needed to meet your learning objectives, you will know that it is complete.

Trauma-informed approach: Supporting mental and emotional well-being

Another important aspect of community wildfire education is addressing emotional and mental well-being around the topic of wildfire. This requires a shift away from a fear-based approach, which has long been used to get people to change their behavior or take action.

Potential downsides to fear appeals can be:

• Desensitization: When people encounter frequent fear appeals, they may become less responsive over time, reducing the impact of subsequent messages.
• Backfiring: If the threat seems too extreme or unrealistic, individuals may dismiss it. They may see it as implausible or insurmountable.
• Negative associations: Presenting a product, service or cause with fear can create negative associations. People may avoid engaging with fear-inducing content altogether.
• Emotional overload: Fear appeals can evoke strong emotions, which may overwhelm individuals. High levels of fear can impair decision-making and lead to avoidance behavior rather than action.
• Flashbacks: Fear-based approaches can trigger flashbacks to a traumatic event or experience.

Sustaining behavior change to become more fire-adapted can benefit from a trauma-informed approach that supports the emotional and mental well-being of community members.

In many circumstances, these nervous system responses are helpful and ensure our survival. However, when the threat has passed but our nervous system remains in survival mode, it can negatively impact daily life. For example, if a community member experienced a trauma response due to losing their home in a wildfire two years ago, their nervous system may still be in an activated state. If they come to a community outreach meeting, they may exhibit symptoms of a flight response: unable to sit quietly through the presentation, restless body language, zoning out during group discussions or getting up and going outside. They may also not have access to their rational brain and not be able to problem solve, reason or have impulse control. As you can imagine, this could lead to disruptions during the meeting. However, if the person is experiencing a trauma response, these symptoms are involuntary and out of their control. Reprimanding them for it could be re-traumatizing.

Types of trauma

There are a few different types of trauma depending on the nature of the adverse experiences, who was affected and how they were affected.

• Acute trauma results from a single event.
• Chronic trauma results from a repeatedly occurring event or circumstance.
• Complex trauma can be a result of various diverse events and circumstances, both acute and chronic.
• Individual trauma, wherein the event or circumstance affects only one individual.
• Collective trauma refers to two or more people experiencing a trauma response from the same event or circumstance. Collective trauma often can affect community culture as well by changing beliefs, values, stories and even language.
• Vicarious trauma can occur when a person experiences a threat indirectly through other means, such as supporting a loved one, family member or friend who is directly affected; having a personal connection to a community or region that is threatened; watching a news report; or reading a news article or social media post. The mental health impact of vicarious trauma can be similar to firsthand trauma.

Wildfire can lead to any of the above types of trauma because it can affect people and communities in multiple ways. For example, the 2020 Labor Day fires in Oregon likely caused a range of types of trauma. The fires killed nine people and destroyed more than 4,000 structures. They also had economic impacts on the timber and forestry sector, agricultural sector, wine industry, tourism and many other businesses that provide livelihoods for people living in Oregon. The fires also affected the cultural resources of many Indigenous peoples, and smoke created unhealthy conditions across the entire state. Family and friends who did not live in the region but were worried about their loved ones may have been impacted vicariously. The same is true for those who had ties to fire-affected areas through activities such as recreation or foraging.

Trauma-informed tools and strategies

In community-engagement or educational settings, the main goals of a trauma-informed approach are to create an interaction or environment in which participants as well as the facilitators/educators feel that they are in control of their well-being, do not feel threatened, and can maintain relaxed or regulated nervous systems.

A trauma-informed approach also consciously seeks to prevent trauma responses from happening in the first place and prevent re-traumatization. Re-traumatization is reliving a reaction to a traumatic event by facing a new but similar incident. For example, this could happen if a community member who lost their house to fire was shown a video of a house being engulfed in flames in a community meeting.

Applying a trauma-informed approach can benefit everyone, regardless of people’s trauma history. While therapeutic interventions and treatment strategies are best left to trained mental health professionals, many trauma-informed strategies and tools can be applied universally. They include:

Self-regulation

To prevent a stress response during a community meeting or outreach event, it is important for the speakers/facilitators themselves to have a relaxed nervous system. Stress is contagious, and so is calmness. Speaking in a steady, even tone, breathing slowly and deeply, smiling with calm facial expressions and a relaxed body posture set a calm, inviting tone for all.

You can also provide participants and the facilitators with ample opportunities to regulate their nervous systems before, during and after a meeting. This may look like going for a walk, connecting with nature, breathing exercises, mindfulness, offering plenty of stretch breaks, time to snack and hydrate, tasteful humor and opportunities to stimulate the creative brain (doodling, music, etc.).

In addition, you can create an agenda and distribute it in advance to set the expectations for the shared time. Use a clock that is visible to all so participants can orient themselves to time and know when the next break is.

Language and messaging

Using inviting instead of directive language can counteract the feeling of having no control. Inviting language includes phrases such as “you are welcome, you are invited, you are encouraged.” For example: “You are invited to turn to your neighbor on the left and share any concerns you may have, if any, about creating a defensible space.” In contrast, directive language is framed as “you have to, you should, you will.” We have sought to model this approach in this primer.

Striving for safety

Guaranteeing a safe space is impossible, since safety looks different for everyone. However, we can implement measures that provide choices, opportunities, and experiences that give people agency over their well-being and demonstrate that their voice and experience matters. Invite participants to make proactive choices that meet their needs for safety. For some, that might be sitting near the emergency exit or taking care of their basic needs (food, water, bathroom breaks) during the event. If our basic needs are unmet, our nervous systems automatically become dysregulated.

Processing

This means providing participants with opportunities to process information and experiences. This may look like:

• Verbal processing, which can involve sharing stories or naming strong emotions that may be felt. Validating and normalizing emotions can help counteract feeling isolated in an emotional response. Ask, for example: By show of hands, who in this room is afraid that wildfire will impact their property in the next three years?.
• Creative processing such as drawing, writing, music, cooking, gardening or any other activity that engages the creative brain. Some can be built into the event, others can be a recommendation for participants to do outside of the event.)
• Physical processing or moving the body in any way can help regulate the nervous system. Activities such as walking, stretching, playing sports, practicing yoga or breathing exercises are examples of physical processing.

Progress, not perfection, is a good mantra to keep in mind when applying a trauma-informed approach. Using even one strategy or one tool is better than using none. This topic is complex and multifaceted, so we encourage you to continue exploring it.

Resources and references

Here, we list some of the social science studies behind this guide, as well as resources for more learning and exploration.

Working with social context and relational and engagement approaches

References

Davies, I.P., R.D. Haugo, J.C. Robertson and P.S. Levin. (2018). The Unequal Vulnerability of Communities of Color to Wildfire. PloS One, 13(11), e0205825.

Garbis, Z., A. Cox and R.W. Orttung. 2023. Taming the Wildfire Infosphere in Interior Alaska: Tailoring Risk and Crisis Communications to Specific Audiences. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 91, p.103682.

Kearns, F., 2021. Getting to the Heart of Science Communication: A Guide to Effective Engagement. Island Press.

McCaffrey, S.M., and C.S. Olsen. 2012. Research Perspectives on the Public and Fire Management: A Synthesis of Current Social Science on Eight Essential Questions. Gen. Tech. Rep. NRS-104. Newtown Square, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station.

McCaffrey, S.M, 2015. Community Wildfire Preparedness: A Global State-Of-The-Knowledge Summary of Social Science Research. Current Forestry Reports, 1.

Modaresi Rad, A., J.T. Abatzoglou, E. Fleishman, M.H. Mockrin, V.C. Radeloff, Y. Pourmohamad, M. Cattau, J.M. Johnson, P. Higuera, N.J. Nauslar and M. Sadegh. 2023. Social Vulnerability of the People Exposed to Wildfires in US West Coast States. Science advances, 9(38), p.eadh4615.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Communicating Science Effectively: A Research Agenda. National Academies Press.

Paveglio, T.B., C.M. Edgeley, M. Carroll, M. Billings and A.M. Stasiewicz. 2019. Exploring the Influence of Local Social Context on Strategies for Achieving Fire Adapted Communities. Fire, 2(2), p.26.

Paveglio, T.B., C. Moseley, M.S. Carroll, D.R. Williams, E.J. Davis and A.P. Fischer. 2015. Categorizing the Social Context of the Wildland Urban Interface: Adaptive Capacity for Wildfire and Community ‘Archetypes.’ Forest Science, 61(2), pp.298-310.

Resources

American Community Survey data about local social context

Community Wildfire Mitigation Best Practices Toolbox. This collection of mitigation tips and guidance includes sections on community engagement and social science.

Community Wildfire Mitigation Best Practices Training

Equitable mitigation program toolkit, Washington Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network. This resource provides suggestions for including traditionally marginalized groups in mitigation.

Capacity Building Through Effective Meaningful Engagement: A Tool for Local and State Governments. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Headwaters Economics. An easy-to-use resource for generating a Census report for your community.

Fire Adapted Communities Pathways Tool. This resource describes a tool for identifying your community’s “type” and designing engagement approaches that will best fit its social context.

Trauma-informed approach

References

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Trauma and Justice Strategic Initiative. 2012. SAMHSA's working definition of trauma and guidance for trauma-informed approach. Rockville, MD.

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. 2017. Tips for Survivors of a Disaster or Other Traumatic Event: coping with retraumatization. HHS Publication No. SMA-17-5047.

Yeager K.A., S. Bauer-Wu S. 2013. Cultural Humility: Essential Foundation for Clinical Researchers. Applied Nursing Research Journal. 2013 Nov;26 (4):251-6.

Resources

Hossain, Yasmeen. 2022. Trauma-informed toolkit: A resource for educators. OSU Extension. An in-depth explanation of trauma and examples of applying trauma-informed approaches.

Bosser, Amber J. Embracing Trauma-informed Care in Fire Resiliency. 2024. Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network.

Learner-centered education

References

Fischhoff, B. 2013. The Science of Science Communication. Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 110 (Supplement 3), 14031-14032.

Halbleib, M.L., 2021. Improving Extension Curriculum Design Using Learner-Centered Templates. The Journal of Extension, 59(4), p.12.

Kopsov, I., 2019. A New Model of Human Needs. London Journals Press 19(6).

Medin, D.L. and M. Bang. 2013. The Cultural Side of Science Communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111 (Supplement 4), 13621-13626.

Taneva, T. 2023. Revisions to Maslow's Hierarchical Model of Basic Psychological Needs. Trakia Journal of Sciences 21.1: 222-230.

Wiggins, G.P. and J. McTighe. 2005. Understanding by Design. ASCD.

Resources

CAST Universal Design for Learning

Liberating Structures. Interactive facilitation approaches for community engagement activities.

The Learning Cycle Explained, The BEETLES Project, the Regents of the University of California.

Culturally Responsive Teaching in Oregon, State Regs Today. Although this is for classroom settings, much of it is applicable to nonformal adult learning.