By Lorrie Kaplan, Ashland Climate Collaborative
I’m excited to tell you about a new community-wide grassroots initiative kicking off in Ashland this year to ramp up our readiness for wildfire.
But first, let’s set the stage.
Ashland has a long history of leadership in wildfire risk reduction. Our 2004 Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) was among the first in the nation. The Ashland Forest Resiliency Project, launched in 2010, became a nationally recognized collaborative model for wildfire risk reduction and forest restoration, establishing Ashland as an innovator in landscape-scale wildfire resistance.
Now, Ashland’s 2025 CWPP is helping pioneer a new generation of fire-adapted community planning by placing community-led action, equity, neighborhood engagement, and shared responsibility at the center of implementation.
We’ve accomplished a great deal—far more than most communities. But, as our new CWPP explains, “the needle needs to move significantly on this pressing issue of community wildfire safety.” Since 2004, our understanding of wildfire risk has changed dramatically. In particular, research shows that living with wildfire requires more than managing forests. We face increasing threats from urban conflagrations. We have a better understanding of how disasters disproportionately impact our most vulnerable residents. And, we have access to better science, stronger tools, and more effective approaches for engaging residents and reducing wildfire risk together.
According to the USDA Forest Service, Ashland has a higher wildfire risk than 97% of U.S. communities, calculated based on flammable vegetation, wildfire likelihood, and exposure of homes and infrastructure to wildfire and ember storms.
The west coast fires of recent years are spreading house-to-house via flying bark mulch, wooden fence panels running right up to the house, and flammable plants and debris within five feet of the house. As Chris Chambers of our Wildfire and Community Risk Reduction Division wrote in an Ashland Climate blog last year, “Ashland wasn’t built with wildfire in mind.”
And now, after the warmest winter on record, dangerously low snowpack, and expanding drought conditions, state and local fire officials are warning of a severe and challenging 2026 wildfire season.
If there ever were a time to take action to reduce our wildfire risks, it’s now.
Creating Wildfire-Ready Neighborhoods
Reducing fuels around our homes, businesses, and cherished places is an important start. The 2025 CWPP also emphasizes coordinated action among residents and neighborhoods, recognizing that resilience is built not just through infrastructure, but through relationships and connections.
In today’s post-COVID Ashland, many people don’t know their neighbors, and few neighborhoods are organized to work together. This is true even of our Firewise neighborhoods, many of which have seen limited activity in recent years.
Research shows that one of the most effective ways to prepare for wildfire is to get to know our neighbors. Social connections are also an important driver in how well we’ll be able to recover.
Some neighborhoods have taken simple but powerful steps: hosting social events to get to know each other and creating group communication channels (listservs, WhatsApp groups, or whatever works). Others are organizing clean-up projects, identifying who may need extra help, and making a neighborhood emergency plan.
June 24th Community Conversation
This summer, the Ashland Climate Collaborative is collaborating with the Ashland Community Food Bank and the Ashland Food Co-op to pilot “Wildfire-Ready Neighborhoods”—a grassroots, Ashland-specific initiative to facilitate connections and learning across Ashland neighborhoods. We’re hosting a free community conversation at the Ashland Food Co-op Community Classroom (300 Pioneer Street) on Wednesday, June 24, from 6-7:30pm. Visit AshlandClimate/WildfireReady to learn more.
Wildfire-Ready Neighborhoods will build on the successes and lessons learned from Firewise USA communities as well as other neighborhood organizing models.
It’s also inspired by the Ashland Food Project (the “green bag pick-up”)— an Ashland-born open-source program that has since spread to over 50 communities nationally. The Ashland Food Project shows that neighbors working together can achieve amazing results. In 2025, the project’s 150 neighborhood coordinators brought in more than 183,000 community meals from more than 2,400 donating households. Wow!
Wildfire-Ready Neighborhoods is not a curriculum: we will co-create it together, and it will be whatever we make it. It will be exciting to see what we can do together. Please join us to learn more on June 24th—and please help us spread the word. Register here: https://ashlandclimate.org/wildfireready/
Lorrie Kaplan is a co-founder and current Board President of the Ashland Climate Collaborative, a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Visit AshlandClimate.org for more information.