Editor’s note: Emery Cowan is a program manager with FAC Net and helps support our engagement in the Forest Service’s Community Navigators initiative. In this blog, Emery recaps common themes that have emerged through our Community Navigators work and from a three-part peer learning series we co-hosted focused on practitioner experiences of how the recent influx of federal investments are impacting fire resilience work in the West. To read more about the Community Navigators initiative check out our May blog post, “Resources and Relationships for Local Capacity: A Conversation with Community Navigators.”
In the winter of 2024, the Forest Service was two years into the implementation of its “Wildfire Crisis Strategy” – the agency’s most recent policy initiative for mitigating the extent and severity of catastrophic wildfires. While this latest direction has echoes of other prior Forest Service wildfire initiatives – the designation of priority landscapes for focused mitigation, encouragement of working across boundaries, an emphasis on partnership approaches – the Wildfire Crisis Strategy, had a unique bonus: it came with a historic funding increase from Congress.
Two months before the Forest Service released the Wildfire Crisis Strategy, it received $5.5 billion for ecosystem restoration and wildfire mitigation through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, informally called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). Eight months later, it received another $5 billion for hazardous fuels reduction and forest health and resilience through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
As part of its initial rollout of this funding, the Forest Service selected 21 priority investment landscapes in the West where wildfire posed some of the highest risk to community infrastructure. The agency’s investment of millions of BIL and IRA dollars to accelerate mitigation efforts in these priority landscapes has become a defining feature of its implementation of the Wildfire Crisis Strategy.
Creating Shared Learning Opportunities
That brings us back to winter of 2024 when FAC Net partnered with the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition, a close partner working on landscape stewardship and rural community benefit in the West, to facilitate a series of peer learning conversations. With the Forest Service’s priority investment landscape approach well underway, we hoped to encourage peer to peer sharing about how practitioners in these landscapes were experiencing the rollout of the Wildfire Crisis Strategy and this giant surge of funding. What challenges were emerging, how were people adapting, where were their signs of promise or success? And, given the similarities with other policy and funding efforts, what lessons could translate to improvements in the future? We reached out to people working in nearly every priority landscape and organized a set of three peer-learning sessions from January through March to allow people to connect with one another and explore these questions.
At around the same time, the Watershed Research and Training Center and FAC Net joined with five other nonprofits in a partnership with the Forest Service called the Community Navigators initiative. The effort aims to build capacity for communities to better access new federal funding with a focus on support for people and places where federal investments have been lacking – a goal of the Biden Administration’s Justice 40 Initiative. The initiative allows us to work with communities across the country in applying for federal funding, implementing Forest Service programs funded through BIL and IRA, and building capacity for undertaking wildfire and climate resilience work.
Both of these roles have provided us a unique perspective on how high-level policy and funding initiatives manifest at the local level and how they are experienced and implemented by folks working on the ground.
What We Learned
The following are some of the themes that have emerged from the peer-learning discussions and our first year of Community Navigators work. We hope they serve as nuggets of validation, reflection, or helpful perspective about how federal wildfire policy initiatives are playing out for local communities and landscapes.
- Equitable outcomes and building readiness. Under the Justice 40 initiative, the Forest Service and other federal agencies have been tasked with ensuring a substantial portion of the BIL and IRA investments are reaching underserved communities and new partners. While federal program managers have adjusted evaluation criteria and made other efforts to make grants more accessible, we have continued to hear that communities need much more support and longer on-ramps to build the staff teams, fiscal and administrative systems, partnerships and partner networks, and other capacities needed to apply for and successfully manage federal funding. The Community Navigator initiative has a central goal of building this readiness, as do capacity-building funding programs like Northern Colorado Fireshed Fund and the Community Catalyst funding offered by our Community Navigator partner Coalitions and Collaboratives, but the need is still great. Longer term investments in collaborative partnerships – a core strategy of the Fire Networks and other programs like the Forest Service’s Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program – also help build collective readiness and prepare communities for funding opportunities. As a case in point, when the Forest Service had just a few months to select its first batch of priority landscapes in 2022, it was looking for places with collaboratively developed priorities, ready-to-implement projects, and opportunities to leverage partner investments – all elements that only come about through long-term commitments of focus, time, and money.
- Playing to partners’ strengths. In our community navigators work, we have seen many times when communities’ diverse goals and strengths are mismatched to the specific requirements or emphases of BIL and IRA funding opportunities. Similarly, there was a repeated sentiment during our peer-learning discussions that the directives and priorities associated with the Wildfire Crisis Strategy “landed on top of” existing efforts and partnerships, rather than serving to bolster them. We’ve continued to hear about the value of creating leeway within funding streams and prioritization strategies to be more responsive to the values, assets, and needs identified by people in place.
- Community mitigation garnering greater policy focus. The Wildfire Crisis Strategy’s focus on mitigating impacts to community infrastructure (rather than wildfire risk reduction more generally), along with the rollout of the BIL-authorized Community Wildfire Defense Grant program, have contributed to stronger momentum around community-focused planning and outcomes. In several of the 21 priority landscapes, this has spurred new “all-lands” collaboratives or an expanded community focus among landscape-focused collaboratives. Many places are also looking to better integrate Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) with landscape level planning, bolstering the opportunity – and need – for robust CWPP engagement and development processes that can serve as a cornerstone for these larger scale strategies.
- Building place-based capacity in the face of funding booms and busts. Many of the peer-learning discussions, as well as our Community Navigator interactions, circled around the challenge this pulse of BIL and IRA funding has presented for organizational planning and hiring. Scaling up to take advantage of these dollars is requiring agencies and partners alike to grow staff teams without a clear sense for how to support new positions after this historic funding falls away. Continued peer learning will be helpful to work through what it looks like to sustain and/or “unwind” after ramping up to meet this moment.
For those interested in delving deeper, a more comprehensive report-out from our Wildfire Crisis Strategy peer-learning sessions is available on RVCC’s website. The strong engagement in those discussions underscored the value of creating places and platforms for people to trade notes, share advice and experiences, and evaluate approaches to the rollout of major policies and investments. If that sparks your interest, The Fire Networks – the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network, Indigenous People’s Burning Network, Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges and Fire Learning Network – are places where those types of conversations can and do take place.
FAC Net and the Watershed Center’s engagement with the Community Navigator initiative is also ongoing and we are always excited to connect with communities looking to build capacity around engaging with federal funding and partnership opportunities. To connect with a Community Navigator or subscribe to our newsletter, visit the Watershed Center’s website.
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