HOW OTH CAUGHT FIRE: FINDING OUR WAY TO FIRE MITIGATION

Picture someone standing in a neighbor's front yard, pointing at a juniper bush growing right up against the house. It's a beautiful plant. The homeowner likes it. It's also, technically, a five-foot fuse.

That kind of conversation — patient, specific, house by house — is what fire mitigation actually looks like on the ground. Not helicopters and headlines, but someone walking a neighborhood, over and over, helping people understand risk they can't quite see yet and share resources. It's slow work. It's also, we've come to believe, some of the most important work nobody is building technology for.

This is the first post in a series about how we at OurTownHall found our way to fire risk reduction and fire mitigation — and what listening to practitioners has taught us along the way.

Back in 2023, we won an NSF SBIR grant to work on something broader: helping governments and communities engage with each other more meaningfully, and making that engagement easier to see and track. During phase 1, we worked on technology to create a mapping tool for displaying community-based organizations.

We spent the better part of two years on it, including an extension through the end of 2024, and talked with over 150 people along the way. These were government staff, community organizations, people working in wind and solar. We were trying to find a place where a real need for community engagement met real urgency.

We applied for a Phase 2 grant to take the original idea further, envisioning several pilots in different verticals, including one with the Boulder Colorado Fire Department. We didn't win the grant.

So, with our limited resources, we made a choice to focus our work from broader community engagement to one particular area where the need for sustained engagement is high and not a nice to have: Wildfires. We had already been talking with the Community Risk Reduction team at Boulder Fire-Rescue, and going into 2025 we made the decision to go deep on this one vertical.

Working closely with Boulder that year and in a series of workshops, we learned that fighting a wildfire isn't only about what happens once the flames are visible. It's about everything a community does, or doesn't do, in the years before that. Clearing brush. Hardening homes. Knowing your neighbors well enough to check on them when it matters. Additionally, wildfires are moving faster than they used to, which means there's less time for communities to rely on back-up help from other areas in the event of a fire.

It was through Boulder that we learned about fire ambassador programs, where trained volunteers working block by block, home by home, help neighbors reduce their risk one conversation at a time. It turns out that for all the data collection and fire modeling tools, there is little dedicated tech infrastructure to support the people organizing on the ground. The volunteers going door to door. The coordinators trying to hold a program together. So, we started asking a simple question: what would it look like if technology actually supported that work?

We didn't yet understand how big that question really was. It would take a statewide conference and seven exhaustive conversations with coordinators across Colorado to learn that ambassador programs weren't a standalone thing to build for — they were one piece of something much larger. More on that in the next post.

For now, here's where things stood heading into 2026: a close partnership with Boulder, a rough idea worth testing, and a growing sense that we'd found something that can save lives. What we didn't have yet was a  sense of how varied, and how human, this world actually was.

Next: Fire Ambassadors — what we learned about the volunteers doing this work, and the moment it became clear this was bigger than one city.