SEVEN CONVERSATIONS THAT SHAPED WHAT WE BUILT
We had a question: what would it look like if technology actually supported the people organizing communities around wildfire risk? By then we had received a grounded understanding of how Boulder approaches community risk reduction through fire ambassadors. What we didn't know was whether what we'd learned there was specific to Boulder, or something communities everywhere were wrestling with.
So we went looking for a wider room. In January 2026, we attended the final presentation for the Fire Grand Challenge, a global competition looking for technical and community-driven solutions to wildfire mitigation. Colorado was well represented, and Fire Adapted Colorado, or FACO, a statewide nonprofit network that connects wildfire resilience professionals and helps communities put good practices into action, was an official partner of the event.
We introduced ourselves to Becca Samulski, FACO's executive director, and she was genuinely interested. Generous with her time, she walked us through the landscape, as someone who oversees a whole network of programs rather than just one. In the course of follow-up conversations, we realized FACO had a statewide conference coming up that April. We asked if they'd be willing to connect us with some of their coordinators beforehand, so we could walk into that conference already informed instead of starting from zero. And they agreed.
We wanted the interviews to cover the range of different types of programs. We got to speak to seven coordinators: some of these programs had been running for decades. Others were barely a year old, still being built one decision at a time. Some coordinators did this as part of a paid role at a fire department. Others volunteered. The communities looked different from each other too, in ways that mattered more than we expected. A program serving a town of full-time residents who've known each other for decades faces a different kind of engagement challenge than one serving a community where half the homes are seasonal — owned by people who show up for a few weeks a year and may not think of themselves as "local" at all.
What struck us wasn't really any single conversation. It was the pattern underneath all seven.
Almost every coordinator we spoke with, regardless of how big or established their program was, circled back to the same handful of things. They didn't always use the same words for it, but the shape of the problem was strikingly consistent.
The first was visibility. Coordinators running programs with more than a handful of volunteers often wished it could be less cumbersome to get a picture of what their ambassadors were up to day to day. One coordinator explained that he keeps close track of who's done an assessment recently and who hasn't, because the skill fades if it isn't practiced regularly, and someone who hasn't been out in six months may quietly stop volunteering rather than say so directly. Knowing who's active isn't just bookkeeping — it shapes who he pairs together and who might need a nudge before they drift away for good.
The second was what we started calling the paperwork tax. On the one hand, some ambassadors send in their accounts of what they did on paper, and it would be up to the coordinator do the data entry. On the other hand, sometimes the same information — who did what, when, for how many hours — would need to be manually reshaped into different formats for different reports. One coordinator put it simply: a lot of the people doing this work are retired and not particularly keen on technology, so what she sometimes gets back are handwritten notes. It tells her they did something — just not what a grant actually needs to know. And paper isn't going anywhere, she said, because a lot of these properties don't have reliable internet.
The third was a kind of low-grade worry about what happens if the coordinator burns out, moves on, or simply needs a break. In more than one conversation, it became clear that an entire program's institutional memory lived in one person's head.
Two things surprised us enough to change how we thought about the whole problem.
The first was how much of this work is really about accountability, not just organizing. Coordinators aren't only managing volunteers — many of them are also responsible for justifying public or grant funding, and for being able to tell a coherent, honest story about what the program actually accomplished. "We did good work" isn't enough when someone is asking where the money went. Being able to show it, clearly and credibly, turned out to matter as much as doing it in the first place.
The second was the sheer ingenuity we saw. Coordinators were stitching together spreadsheets, group texts, paper sign-in sheets, whatever was on hand, to solve problems no one had built a real tool for. Nobody was waiting around for the perfect system. People were making do, cleverly, with what they had.
By the end of these seven conversations, we understood the coordinator's problem far better than we had going in — and we had a good answer to the question that sent us looking for FACO in the first place. This wasn't just a Boulder problem. But we were also starting to sense something we hadn't expected — that this wasn't a problem that lived only inside individual programs. It connected outward, to funders, to fire departments, to a whole ecosystem of organizations we barely knew existed yet.
That ecosystem is what the conference — in the next post — made impossible to ignore.
Next: the FACO conference, where it became clear that ambassador programs are one piece of something much larger — and the idea that ended up anchoring everything we built afterward.