Invest in People and Community Resilience Will Follow

With funding from the California Department of Conservation’s Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program (RFFC), the Watershed Research and Training Center (WRTC) successfully stewarded more than $1 million as subawards to nine Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs) across California between 2022 and 2024.

The goal: to advance California’s beneficial fire goals by investing in people and community-based organizations. As leaders within the PBA movement, WRTC’s fire team combined grant management with technical expertise in beneficial fire and organizational development, ensuring efficient and strategic use of funds. 

“These subawards occurred in tandem with years of WRTC providing training/technical assistance to PBAs throughout California. Spending weeks, months in some instances, with various PBAs gave our trainers a deep familiarity with the individual PBAs and allowed us to co-develop scopes of work that resonated with both the PBA’s priorities and our observations while training them. As members and leaders of the PBA movement themselves, our trainers possess technical and operational knowledge regarding fire management, beneficial fire specifically, and PBA organizational structure, which allowed for efficient utilization of the funding and to tailor it to each PBA based on its baseline capacity. We look forward to future opportunities to support PBAs.”

-Allison Jolley, Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program Director, Watershed Center

Why PBAs?

PBAs are community-led partnerships that bring together landowners, Tribes, agencies, and community fire practitioners to plan and implement beneficial fire. They reduce wildfire risk, restore ecosystems, and rebuild community relationships with fire.

When this pilot funding program began in 2022, California had 13 operational PBAs. Today, there are more than 30 functioning statewide. This growth was fueled in part by peer learning opportunities, a growing interest from communities to steer their fire future, and investments like the RFFC pilot subaward program. 

“The intent of the funding was to provide training for PBAs to support the growth and success of the organizations needed to meet the state’s beneficial fire goals,” said Erin Banwell, Co-Director of Fire Management at WRTC.

Pilot project subaward distribution in 2022.

Counties that include one or more active Prescribed Burn Associations as of 2026.

Flexible Funding, Real-World Impact

A defining feature of the pilot was the absence of strict acreage requirements. Prescribed fire depends on weather, fuel conditions, air quality, and safety considerations that cannot be predicted on a grant timeline. Removing acreage mandates allowed PBAs to burn when conditions were right, while also building durable infrastructure for the organization of the PBA itself. Too often, grants force organizations to prioritize metrics over the workforce development and organizational capacity needed to deliver on those metrics. The RFFC approach is different: it fosters what WRTC calls “capacity-forward implementation.” This approach allows good implementation to occur while simultaneously ensuring the organization and its workforce are all the more ready to implement the next project.

Across the nine subawardees, the funding supported coordinator compensation, impactful training events, critical equipment acquisition, governance development, burn planning, and the implementation of fire.

A few examples and highlights of how PBAs leveraged their subawards:

• Amador/El Dorado PBA hired a coordinator, expanded its equipment cache, hosted burn plan workshops, and supported larger collaborative burns with tribal and non-tribal partners. By the final reporting period, more than 100 landowners had expressed interest in working with the PBA.

• Butte PBA supported a multi-week Cal-TREX that engaged more than 300 participants, logged thousands of personnel hours, and provided RT-130 refreshers, firing operations training, and cultural fire learning opportunities.

• Lassen PBA used funds to hire a coordinator, build relationships with county leadership and agricultural partners, and establish a governance strategy.

• Lake PBA, in partnership with Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance, supported EcoCultural TREX events that engaged hundreds of participants and expanded Tribal representation year over year, strengthening Indigenous-led stewardship.

• Mendocino PBA conducted site visits and outreach events while building relationships with air quality regulators, CAL FIRE, Tribal partners, and local agricultural groups.

• Plumas Underburn Cooperative expanded coordinator capacity and leveraged flexible funding to align with agency burn windows, strengthening partnerships with state and federal agencies.

• Siskiyou PBA, managed by the Shasta Valley RCD, advanced prescribed fire initiatives, formalized bylaws and a strategic plan, hosted burn boss training, and secured an additional $800,000 to continue implementation.

• Mother Lode PBA conducted site visits, hosted “Rx Fire 101” workshops, supported multiple burn events, and strengthened partnerships with local CAL FIRE units.

• Ventura PBA reestablished organizational momentum, developed multiple burn plans, hosted fire ecology talks, and deepened collaboration with regional partners and Tribes.

Each PBA started from a different baseline. Some focused on staffing and structure; others accelerated training and implementation. All built local leadership and contributed to the growing movement for community-led fire.

In 2024, within the counties that house these nine PBAs, 243 prescribed burns totaling 1,385 acres were reported in the California Community-Based Beneficial Fire Dashboard.

More importantly, dozens of trained practitioners are now positioned statewide to continue applying beneficial fire safely and strategically.

Plumas Underburn Cooperative Coordinator, Logan Krahenbuhl (far left), with Plumas County beneficial fire partners on a burn day last spring. Photo credit: Annie Leverich/WRTC.

Lessons & Looking Forward

This pilot funding opportunity reinforced key lessons:

• Invest in people first; acres follow.

• Flexibility supports safe, innovative, and capacity-forward, rather than reductive, implementation.

• Peer-to-peer mentoring accelerates the state’s beneficial fire.

• Multi-year funding is essential for long-term sustainability. For stewardship to work, people need gainful employment, and 1-2 year positions won’t retain the talent this movement needs. (Click here for more of our workforce and career development recommendations.)

Sustained public investment and innovative financing models will be necessary to ensure PBAs can continue delivering wildfire resilience, ecological health, and community benefits. As a second round of RFFC subawards is scoped, fiscal planning and organizational development will be more explicitly incorporated, while maintaining the flexible, capacity-centered approach that made this pilot successful. Future rounds of funding also have the potential to dovetail with WRTC’s emerging qualifications management system, creating even more opportunities for resource sharing, workforce development, and capacity building. 

When we invest in the development of strong organizations and skilled leaders, landscapes and communities benefit for years to come.

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The work upon which this publication is based was funded in whole or in part through a Regional Forest and Fire Capacity award from the California Department of Conservation.