Education, Engagement and Neighborhood Organizing
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New
Girls Inc. of Carpinteria provides year-round programming for girls and their families at its facility which includes classrooms, a STEM lab, library, conference room, gymnasium, kitchen, offices and outdoor spaces. Girls Inc. recently opened a 24/7 community food pantry, a clothing closet for women and girls and now offers mental health services.
Resilience Hubs are a central component of ensuring that our community has the critical resources, security, and information it needs during disasters to weather and recover from even the greatest adversity.
Blue Sky provides cultural activities and economic development opportunities to the community in addition to mobilizing resources during COVID and other emergencies.
Develop and pilot a replicable process and framework for developing wildfire resilience plans for housing developments in high fire risk areas.
Build County wide capacity to cover all components of the resilience cycle: a) prevention, b) community preparedness, c) community organizing, d) short term relief, e) long term relief f) recovery and g) rebuilding and planning, in a way that reduces vulnerability. Identify and implement the best practices for resilience cycle action, understanding that we need to always be preparing for the next disaster.
In Progress
Girls Inc. of Carpinteria provides year-round programming for girls and their families at its facility which includes classrooms, a STEM lab, library, conference room, gymnasium, kitchen, offices and outdoor spaces. Girls Inc. recently opened a 24/7 community food pantry, a clothing closet for women and girls and now offers mental health services.
Resilience Hubs are a central component of ensuring that our community has the critical resources, security, and information it needs during disasters to weather and recover from even the greatest adversity.
Blue Sky provides cultural activities and economic development opportunities to the community in addition to mobilizing resources during COVID and other emergencies.
Host a series of convenings or summits to develop a framework for a community supported grazing program.
Implement a Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX) and cooperative burns to provide experiential training that builds robust local capacity for…
The Fire Wise Project is a collaborative effort among multiple agencies and institutions in the Santa Barbara area, including UCSB, Westmont College, and the SB Botanic Garden.
There are a multitude of agencies in SB County involved in fire management, and each has their own subset of relevant GIS data. They would all benefit from having the sum of all these data layers available to them…
There is a great need to keep the community interested and engaged about the risk of fire before another major event occurs. Social awareness regarding fire is generally at a high level of engagement immediately after a fire event…
Community preparedness and prevention depends on an informed and literate populace, familiar with the ecological reality of living in Santa Barbara County's high risk wildfire country.
The restoration recommendations detailed in other restoration items in the Regional Priority Plan would also require the removal of invasive and non-native species from other high priority areas in the WUI.
Partially Funded/Partially Underway
Develop and pilot a replicable process and framework for developing wildfire resilience plans for housing developments in high fire risk areas.
Establish a partnership in Lompoc for resilience related projects and begin building partner capacity to plan, coordinate …
There are many people, organizations and agencies working in the fire readiness and climate resilience fields here in Santa Barbara County, but even professionals dedicated to wildfire prevention in the county are not necessarily aware of and connected to everyone else doing this work.
While county residents generally have a high level of awareness of fire risk and high compliance with risk reduction recommendations and requirements, some community members are unable …
There is a need to help homeowners prepare their homes for wildfire across the county, particularly those in more vulnerable areas and those who lack resources or know how.
Completed
The Santa Barbara County Regional Climate Collaborative (Collaborative) has selected three sites to pilot as a part of the Resilience Hubs program. A resilience hub is a community-serving facility that can coordinate resource distribution and services before, during and/or after a natural hazard event.
The Santa Barbara County Fire Safe Council has been an entirely volunteer-run organization without paid staff up until now, but the SBC FSC is now the recipient of significant grant funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation via a new project called the Regional Wildfire Mitigation Program (RWMP).
The scope and scale of wildfires and related disasters like the 2017 Thomas Fire and the subsequent January 9th Debris Flow create an overwhelming need for community response and support in a wide variety of ways…
The first line of preparedness and response to the threat or reality of wildfires begins in the neighborhood. Although the County and law enforcement have systems in place to communicate, there is no substitute…
Recommended
Build County wide capacity to cover all components of the resilience cycle: a) prevention, b) community preparedness, c) community organizing, d) short term relief, e) long term relief f) recovery and g) rebuilding and planning, in a way that reduces vulnerability. Identify and implement the best practices for resilience cycle action, understanding that we need to always be preparing for the next disaster.
Citizens and community leaders alike struggle to find timely, relevant and validated data during times of crisis. Despite the best efforts of agencies to coordinate communications to meet this need…
The Cachuma Resource Conservation District (CRCD) plays a critical role in our community as a partner to and bridge between farmers, ranchers and other landowners and conservation groups and agencies focused on the health of our land, water, soil, wildlife, agriculture and food systems.
Community Wildfire Protection Planning is a structured process that helps communities assess their preparedness for wildfires, identify priority actions and secure policy guidance from their elected leaders so that fire protection agencies…
Throughout California and the western United States, we are experiencing intense wildfires at previously unthinkable scales and with unprecedented loss of homes and communities.
Our current fire resilience infrastructure and strategies are built on a series of assumptions that may no longer hold true. We have interior fire sprinklers designed to suppress single home fires with a deluge of water…
Home hardening increases the likelihood that a home survives a wildfire, but hardened homes do not provide a safe place of refuge in the event that a fast moving wildfire cuts off evacuation routes and forces residents to shelter in place.
During the RPP teams outreach efforts we shared a worldwide literature search produced by partners for the community of Paradise after the devastating Camp fire. Local fire personnel suggested a collaborative effort among fire agencies, community based groups ….
Santa Barbara County Fire Department (SBCFD) serves as Santa Barbara County's Cal Fire Unit and regularly produces an Annual Strategic Unit Plan as mandated by Cal Fire that inventories the fire prevention projects SBCFD has in various stages of its planning and implementation processes.
While several areas of Santa Barbara County benefit from the preparation of Community Wildfire Protection Plans, there are several areas of the County that do not currently have a plan that covers them.
Guadalupe City leaders noted that an area next to Leroy Park and adjacent to the Santa Maria River is considered a high fire risk to nearby vulnerable population concentrations.
Reducing combustible vegetation in the immediate vicinity of homes, other buildings, infrastructure and transit corridors is one of the most effective actions available for fire risk reduction in the county.
Undertake a comprehensive evacuation study countywide across all jurisdictions to review existing evacuation routes for potential improvements. This has been done for smaller areas like portions of Mission Canyon…
There is a need to enhance elected officials' understanding of the nuances and complexities of wildfire and its impact and importance in every arena of government activity. Wildfire helps define community needs…
The current countywide dispatch system for all emergency response is grouped under the Sheriff's Department including fire and law enforcement. Each fire district and law enforcement agency (e.g. Santa Barbara City Police Department)…