Steps to Becoming a Berkeley Firewise Community

 

The NFPA expects a neighborhood to be a Firewise community already before applying for certification, but doesn’t provide detailed guidance. Here’s how to navigate that first year.

 

1. Find at least 8 households in your neighborhood that are interested, including a few people who are willing to do some initial organizing. The households do not need to be contiguous, just within your eventual zone.
    

2. Set up an initial informational meeting with Kevin Revilla of the Berkeley Fire Department (KRevilla@berkeleyca.gov).
    

3. Advertise the meeting in your neighborhood, through email lists and flyers.
    

4. After the meeting, assemble a core team to conduct recruiting, decide on a boundary, make a map, and choose a name for the community.
    

5. Create an account on the Firewise website: https://portal.firewise.org/user/login
    

6. Start tracking the hours you and your team are spending on organizing a community–the time will eventually be reported on your application.
    

7. Conduct initial recruiting, to assess the level of interest as well as the scope (i.e., geographical area in which there are interested households).
    

8. Decide on the boundaries of your zone. Factors to consider:

   1. Neighborhood buy-in. There need to be some interested homeowners distributed throughout the proposed zone, and no section preferring to be a separate community.

   2. Size. CalFire likes bigger communities, and the high initial investment of organizing a community combined with the low annual requirements creates substantial economies of scale. If there’s buy-in from a bigger area of the neighborhood and people willing to be co-leaders, consider creating a bigger zone.

   3. Neighboring Firewise communities. Be sure not to leave any stranded homes between your proposed zone and a neighboring Firewise community.
       

9. Choose a name and make a map. There’s no set method for making a map, unfortunately. One apparently easy way is to take a screenshot of a google or microsoft map, and draw a boundary around it in PowerPoint. Make sure the listed number of dwellings matches everywhere on your application.
    

10. Attach the map to an email to Scott Augustine (scott.augustine@fire.ca.gov), letting him know of your intention to create a Firewise community.
     

11. Schedule a risk assessment “field trip” with Kevin Revilla, and invite all participating neighbors to attend. The purpose of the field trip is to learn how to evaluate a property for home hardening and vegetation management. Kevin will write up a report to attach to your application, in addition to your own community risk assessment.
     

12. Conduct a community risk assessment, using the questions required in the application. There is no set way to do this. One way is to create an online survey using Google Forms, and have it upload to a spreadsheet for tallying. (Note, that because you report using percentages, you don’t have to have information from each household, just a good sampling.)
     

13. Create a way for your community to log time and money spent on Firewise activities, using the categories required in the application. There’s no set way to do this, but one way is to create forms (one for unpaid time and another for monetary expenditures) on Google Forms that upload to spreadsheets for tallying. Perform a season’s worth (spring, summer, fall) of Firewise activities, as listed in the application, keeping track of time, money, and cubic yards of vegetation removal.
     

14. Draw up your 3-year plan on the California template, using the results of the community risk assessment (don’t forget to fill out the headers on each page). The 3-year plan is on a calendar year basis, beginning the first calendar year after you file your application (i.e., if you file in November 2024, the 3-year plan begins in 2025).
     

15. Send the community risk assessment and 3-year plan to Scott Augustine for review before officially filing.


GREAT RESOURCES FROM THE LOCAL FIRESAFE COUNCILS: