Youth-Engaged Fire Futures: Learning from Listening Circles with Young People to Inform Fire Workforce Development

"Youth-Engaged Fire Futures: Learning from Listening Circles with Young People to Inform Fire Workforce Development" by Meredith Jacobson, Annabelle Law, Ryan Reed, Kyle Trefny, Heidi Huber-Stearns, Matthew Guerra, Karissa Courtney, Ella Ramage, and Valentin Kostelnik presents key findings from listening circles with 70 fire-focused high school, community college, and university students, wildland firefighters, and fire practitioners across western Oregon and northern California. Part of a collaboration between the FireGeneration Collaborative and Ecosystem Workforce Program, this working paper shares experiences in the fire field, desires for future work with fire, and ideas for making change from young people, who "are the future of wildfire response, community adaptation, and landscape resilience workforces, and will inherit the impacts of today’s fire policy and investment decisions."