The Living With Fire (LWF) Program is a 25-year-old public outreach and education program that focuses on teaching communities and key stakeholders about wildfire preparedness. The program was originally conceived in 2007, and quickly became a leader in fire adapted community concepts and wildfire preparedness recommendations across Nevada and ultimately throughout the United States. Since its inception, there has been a massive uprising of agency and public commitment and contribution to preparing for wildfire and becoming fire adapted. As more partners have embraced and led education efforts in this domain, LWF has been able to consider broadening its education platform, and so we surveyed our public participants and stakeholders to learn where our expertise is most needed.

While LWF is led by University of Nevada, Reno Extension, the program is an interagency collaboration that is supported by the Bureau of Land Management, the Nevada Division of Forestry, the U.S. Forest Service, and the many local fire agencies throughout the region. This interagency presence and cooperation make LWF a very effective communication lever because we are speaking with a unified voice that considers the many different objectives that agencies must negotiate. Because of our very stakeholder-driven approach, our needs assessment and evaluation needed to collect information from our partners and our audience. In so doing, this assessment provided a very robust look into our programmatic structure and future considerations.

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