Communities across the country and around the world are struggling to contain the spread of wildfires increasing in both number and intensity, as they rage with virtually no season. While governments try to minimize damage and provide relief funding to communities, philanthropic organizations are working to fill the gaps and effectively distribute grant dollars. From monitoring and collecting data, as Candid does, to funding direct relief to firefighters and communities, nonprofits have stepped up, but extinguishing fires is only one piece of a complex equation. According to a joint report from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy (CDP) and Candid on the state of disaster philanthropy, a gap exists between funding for disaster relief and that for recovery and disaster prevention. Organizations across the sector face the challenge of keeping up and finding sustainable ways to bridge the gap in funding.

According to the National Interagency Fire Center, six million acres have burned in the United States in 2022. In Europe, the European Forest Fire Information System reports that between 1.9 million and 2.1 million acres have burned in 2022. In July, the Oak Fire started in California’s Mariposa County and dominated news cycles, as conservationists worried about its proximity to Yosemite National Park and the historic Redwood Forest. The fire burned more than 19,000 acres over nearly a month. With the fire officially contained, the state isn’t getting a break; the McKinney Fire burned inside the Klamath National Forest just south of the Oregon border and has killed four people; as of September 3, the fire is 99 percent contained.

As of late August, there were still 20 large, uncontained fires burning across the United States. According to the New York Times, more than 100 notable fires were active across the western U.S. as of September 9.

In the past, nonprofit organizations and relief services on the ground could expect and prepare for the wave of fires during the typical wildfire season, but climate change and human interference have led to fires that rage almost without pause. Rather than strictly fund immediate aid, organizations are working smarter and harder by supporting efforts to build resilience.

Wildfire philanthropy moves toward resilience

When it comes to wildfire funding, resilience has become a catch-all term for grant dollars that fall outside the category of immediate relief. Resilience can include small-scale funding that helps communities minimize the risk of fires with debris collection and fire safety education, as well as larger-scale funding that targets policies and regulations working against the larger issue of climate change. As fires continue to rage before and after what was traditionally considered the wildfire season, resilience also means equipping communities with knowledge and tools to combat fires year-round.

Since 2010, CDP has been monitoring all disasters, including wildfire activity, serving as a one-stop-shop for disaster information and action for organizations and individuals. Recently, the organization added a pretext to its 2022 North American Wildfires tracking profile that reads: “Typically, the Center for Disaster Philanthropy starts its North American wildfires profile in the summer or even fall. However, as climate change increasingly has a more significant impact, we have been losing the concept of disaster seasons.”

CDP director of domestic funds Sally Ray said the organization believes “all funders are disaster funders” and encourages an array of funders to help combat the continual presence of wildfires by extending support beyond typical immediate relief nonprofits. “If you’re funding in a space, help fund their resilience and mitigate against the impact of a disaster on those organizations or those groups that you’re trying to support, because when a disaster comes, those marginalized populations are the ones most disproportionately affected by a disaster,” she said.

According to Ray, CDP’s work flows into three buckets: education and information, consultation with funders and organizations, and grantmaking. Each bucket informs the next, from gathering information on a targeted population to helping funders create and implement a philanthropic disaster strategy, she explained. Through conversations with funders, Ray said she’s seen a shift toward resilience efforts, which include advocacy for policy changes that address climate change and mitigation efforts.

Some funders have heeded that advice. In 2019, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation established a wildfire funding strategy. Jennee Kuang, currently a program officer at the Resources Legacy Fund, took the reins on the project at Hewlett, which turned into a three-year funding strategy. Overall, the foundation determined that funding several forms of wildfire resilience was the best path to success, specifically to put the limited funding of about $2 million a year to the best use.

“I think historically, at a broad scale, we haven’t really grappled with the need for wildfire resilience,” said Kuang. “I don’t think this is unique to fire—we are bad at investing in resilience in general, as you see across any corner of the climate world. I don’t think that means we necessarily have sufficient resources for recovery or protecting communities during the fire event, either—just that, in comparison, we’re much further behind on investing in resilience. And resilience, of course, is critical longer term to reducing the need for suppression recovery resources to begin with.”

According to Candid and CDP’s report on disaster philanthropy, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation was one of the largest funders focused on wildfires, giving more than $1.6 million in 2021. The foundation has committed to funding “upstream solutions” rather than immediate relief.

“While relief and recovery have historically represented the majority of charitable giving for wildfire, we believe there’s an important role for philanthropy to play in helping to identify, co-design, inform, de-risk, and advance upstream solutions—helping to prevent catastrophic events in the first place, rather than providing relief after they occur,” said  Moore Foundation program director Genny Biggs.

One of the foundation’s largest wildfire grants in 2021 was for nearly $600,000 to Conservation X Labs in support of innovative technology and tactics to address wildfire challenges in large, low-resource environments.

Many funders and experts view wildfires as an issue larger than the immediate danger to people around them, as they touch on issues of climate and ecosystem health as well as community resilience. Just as the fires bleed into different areas of funding, those working in wildfire philanthropy tend to get pulled between resilience and immediate relief.

A juggling act

California Fire Foundation (CFF) executive director Rick Martinez has been in the wildfire philanthropy field for 35 years. The organization has a lean staff of four and a focus area that includes the well-being of firefighters as well as the immediate and long-term relief of the communities they serve.

For instance, CFF is arming firefighters with gift cards of $250 to enable families that may have lost everything in a fire to begin to rebuild their lives, providing assistance while the crisis is still unfolding. Martinez said he’s heard of families using gift cards for a hot meal, to plan their next move, to buy new clothes for the days ahead, or even for a hotel room for a night.

“We leverage the firefighters—they’re already there. It costs us literally the postage to send it,” Martinez said. “As long as there’s a need, it doesn’t much matter. I keep saying give them out—I will go out and find money if we run out of funds. We haven’t run out of funds yet, and I don’t think we will.”

As Martinez and his team offer immediate relief, they also work alongside local governments and fire departments to find simple and effective fire mitigation efforts. Martinez said that what makes CFF unique is the simplicity of its grant application process.

“These very rural communities don’t have the administrative wherewithal to compete in the more complex grant processes that may be out there. Ours are straightforward,” he said.

Simple initiatives such as bringing woodchippers into areas to minimize possible fuel for fires can cost a community only $5,000 but require organizations like CFF to establish and fund the local program. “What we’ve seen is that communities feel safer because people get out and get engaged. There’s a synergistic effect of communities feeling like this is important,” said Martinez. In addition, the local fire mitigation efforts help keep fires small and manageable for rural fire departments. People in the community make it part of their responsibility to mitigate fires when they’re given the tools and guidance to do so.

The field of wildfire philanthropy is evolving to realize that those who work in the resilience space can’t always jump back and forth between the immediate relief space.

“One of the most important pieces is to support capacity, specifically dedicated to the wildfire resilience space,” Kuang said. “I think having people in the fire resilience space that we then pull out of that space to work on fires every season is not the type of sustained, robust capacity we need to build for wildfire resilience.”

For now, that is where collaborations come in. Martinez said he advises organizations that are just starting to grapple with wildfires, “Don’t overreach. See what resources are available but don’t duplicate efforts.”
In Santa Rosa, California, the Sonoma County Community Foundation (SCCF) views collaboration as a fundamental piece of sustaining disaster philanthropy. “We woke up on a Monday morning and 5,000-plus houses had burned, and many people lost their lives—it happened so instantly, and we had no idea what to do. The first thing I did was to call six community foundations around the country who had been through a disaster and ask for their support,” said Karin Demarest, vice president of community impact at SCCF. “That was fundamental in our success of creating the Resilience Fund in the way that we did.”

The Resilience Fund was born out of the 2017 wildfires that ravaged Sonoma County, including the Tubbs and Nuns fires. The fund quickly branched out to include support for housing, mental health, and COVID-19 response, all of which, Demarest argues, are affected by wildfires. With collaboration at its core, the relief fund heeded the advice of neighboring community foundations and, at its inception, set its aim on medium-to-long-term relief funding.

“That allowed us to kind of hold back on the relief phase and plan for the longer term needs the community would be facing, which was a really great choice because the needs continue,” said Demarest. “What we didn’t know at the time was that we would have several subsequent fires, we would have floods that caused a lot of damage, and then, of course, the pandemic. So, the fund itself continues to stay focused on the medium-to-long-term recovery, which remains important, but it has expanded to include all disasters, not just wildfire.”

Disaster philanthropy on the community foundation level can be compared to a juggling act, with three balls at play: unpredictable funding from individual donors for current disasters; funding, usually from corporations, that must be found and set aside for preparing for and mitigating the impact of the next disaster; and funding that must continue to flow for relief and rehabilitation from previous disasters. Executing this juggling act requires partnering with other organizations. SCCF created and funded Community Organizations Active in Disasters (COAD), a cohort of 17 nonprofits that frequently worked on immediate disaster relief in Sonoma County. Through COAD, the organizations worked together to create continuity plans for keeping normal operations running when disasters hit, and activation plans for when they are ready to step in.

 “Those are the organizations that we’re now poised to fund if and when a disaster happens, because we know they’re connected, they’re in partnership with us, their organizations are going to be strong after the disaster. It was a really intentional way of building strong partnerships,” Demarest said. The idea for the cohorts was born from collaboration—borrowed and modified from the Napa Valley Community Foundation.

Including Indigenous voices

Leaders in the wildfire and disaster sector of philanthropy are being intentional with their hope that the future of the field is collaborative and focuses on funding resilience. Both Kuang and Ray said the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives is crucial to success.

“Any time you’re talking about any sort of natural resource, land management, land stewardship activities, it’s really critical to engage Native voices and to support Indigenous leadership,” Kuang said. “It requires a commitment to an investment in building trust-based relationships with Indigenous entities.”

Hewlett’s wildfire strategy highlights tribal leadership for wildfire resistance as a key pathway to success. The Indigenous Peoples Burning Network  is cited as an example of Indigenous knowledge leading the way to environmental health and building local capacity for fire management. Prescribed burns have been a proven way to mitigate uncontrollable wildfires while maintaining the natural ebb and flow that wildfires bring to the environment. Indigenous communities have been practicing prescribed burns for centuries, and organizations like Hewlett are eager to learn from Indigenous peoples.

Ray echoed similar sentiments and said funders are beginning to understand. “I think it is critical that we learn from history, and we try to correct history in some way,” she said. “We’ve had a few webinars and we’ve done some education on how to engage with Indigenous communities.”

Looking forward

Whether it be collaboration with fellow community foundations, inclusion of Indigenous teachings, or the sharing of knowledge across the sector, leaders and funders are prioritizing teamwork to face an issue that will only become worse. The total number of acres burned in fires this year is above the 10-year average in the United States, according to CDP. Over Labor Day weekend, four people died in wildfires in California as 45 new fires appeared on September 4 alone, exacerbated by an intense heatwave. Immediate relief and mutual aid organizations are already on the ground offering support: A Red Cross evacuation shelter set up at Tahquitz High School already housed 45 people displaced by the Fairview fire over the weekend.

As immediate relief organizations step in, there’s no doubt that nonprofits are continuing to plan for a sustainable way to keep people and the environment safe in the long run.

“We are seeing conversations [about disaster philanthropy],” Ray said, “recognizing that it needs to be a collaborative effort—not just the government, not just philanthropy—but everyone coming to the table and having those discussions.”

Samantha Mercado is a staff writer at Philanthropy News Digest.

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Andrii Chagovets)