March 11, 2025
Cooperative Extension Fire Peer-Learning Exchange
The UC ANR Fire Network is planning a “Cooperative Extension Fire Peer-Learning Exchange” in Wawona, California (within Yosemite National Park), April 15-17, 2025, and you are invited!
This interactive workshop is designed specifically to provide you with the knowledge, tools, and skills necessary to bring fire-related educational programming to the communities you serve. Through train-the-trainer style presentations, demonstrations, field tours, and discussion panels, attendees will gain the confidence and resources to serve as community leaders in wildfire education. Sessions during the workshop will include a panel discussion about cultural burning and partnership with tribes, a mini pile burning workshop, home hardening 101, post-fire landowner workshops, and a fire ecology hike in the nearby Mariposa grove of giant sequoias! Join us in this peer-learning exchange to learn about wildfire preparedness, mitigation, and recovery. You do not need to work in fire or have experience doing fire-related programming to join this event.
This workshop will be the second Cooperative Extension Service Fire Workshop. The first workshop, hosted by North Carolina State University Extension in 2023, was developed in response to interviews with Extension professionals in the Southeast US, which demonstrated that many desired more fire-related training and wanted to learn how to better communicate with their clientele about fire. Fifteen Extension and outreach professionals from six states attended the workshop. A majority of the workshop was hands-on and included interactive discussions about current topics in wildland fire science, live fire education demonstrations, a mini fire festival, K-12 educational exercises, home hazard assessments, and other fire outreach activities. The first workshop was a huge success, effectively increasing the knowledge of participants, with particularly strong increases in Extension education parameters. Following the workshop, participants reported a high likelihood of implementing several types of fire-related Extension programming and participants unanimously agreed that they would recommend the training to others.
This event will take place at the beautiful UC Merced Yosemite Field Station in Wawona, California and run from 12PM on April 15th through April 17th at 12PM, with an option field tour to the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias on the afternoon of April 17th.
If you are interested in joining us to learn, share, and grow together, please register at this link: https://ucanr.edu/extensionfireworkshop. The cost to register for this workshop is $275 and will cover meals and lodging throughout the event. We understand that this may make the workshop inaccessible for some participants. Please reach out to Alison Deak at aldeak@ucanr.edu if you will require travel support or need some or all of your registration costs covered to attend the workshop.
If you have any questions about the workshop, please don’t hesitate to contact Autym Schafer at autymshafer@berkeley.edu or Alison Deak at aldeak@ucanr.edu.
We hope that you will join us!