Leader Toolkit
The operating manual — the annual cycle, the renewal, what counts, and every reference worth having in one place.
If you’re the Firewise team leader for one of the valley’s communities, this page is the job. It’s deliberately dense — you’re the one audience on this site that wants everything in one place rather than one thing at a time.
If you’re thinking about starting a community rather than running one, the recruitment page is the better place to begin.
Your year at a glance
Four moments that matter. Everything else is nudging neighbors.
Push residents at the Zone 0 and gutter work before fire season. This is when logging is easiest to encourage because people are already outside.
One per year is the requirement. A chipper day, a clearing weekend, a VCFD talk, or a table at an existing community event all count.
Pull your community’s totals from the dashboard. If you’re short, this is when to send the “log what you already did” email — most people have done the work and never recorded it.
Miss this and the community drops out of good standing — which means residents lose the certificate they hand to their insurer.
What counts as an activity
Almost everything counts. The problem is never that communities don’t do the work — it’s that nobody records it.
Work on your own property
Ember-resistant vents, fence and deck replacements, Zone 0 clearing, and yard work out to 100 feet each have their own box on the form, so you can report against your plan’s hardening and defensible-space targets. Residents doing their own homes is the bulk of most communities’ totals.
Time given to the community
Board and committee meetings, organizing events, newsletters, grant writing, IT and admin help all log under “Firewise committee work.” Common-area, trail and roadside projects and the planning, mapping and renewal paperwork have their own boxes, and so does simply attending an event — one box for the organizer’s hours, one for the resident’s.
Learning
Reading and watching still counts. There is no longer a separate box for it — residents log the time under “Other” with a note. Go-Kits, family evacuation plans and evacuation drills, on the other hand, now have boxes of their own. Worth saying out loud in every newsletter.
The activity form captures volunteer hours, contractor spend, and vegetation removed (in lawn bags, yard bins, pickup loads, dump-truck loads, or rented dumpsters — 3-yard bins and 25- or 40-yard roll-offs). A resident who paid someone to clear their lot has contributed real, reportable value even though they swung no tools — make sure they know to log it.
How the cubic-yard total is figured. Your dashboard converts every count for you: a lawn bag is 0.195 cu yd, a yard bin 0.325, a pickup load 3, a dump-truck load 12, and rented dumpsters count at their rated size — 3, 25 or 40 cu yd each. That total is the vegetation-removed number you report at renewal.
The dashboard and your community page
“My Community” dashboard
Once you’re logged in you get a dashboard scoped to your own community — activity submissions, volunteer signups, newsletter signups and assessment requests, all filtered to your residents, with export. The activity section defaults to the current calendar year, breaks submissions down by plan goal area (how many households did vents, Zone 0, a Go-Kit, and so on) and exports the same view as CSV. It’s where your renewal numbers come from.
Trouble getting in? Get in touch and we’ll sort out your access.
Your community page
It’s yours — it’s where you speak to your own neighbors rather than the valley generally. Send updates and we’ll put them up: your certificate, survey results, action plan, local hazards, event dates.
See the pagesThe library
Curated and kept current. Organized by what you’re trying to do rather than by who published it.
Program & renewal
NFPA · Wildfire resources — the wider research and education hub
Recruitment page — what to send a neighbor from an unrecognized community
Assessment & planning
Ventura County CWPP (2023, signed) — PDF, the document grant funding traces to
VRFSC · Free home wildfire assessments — what you send residents to
Hand these to residents
IBHS · Wildfire Prepared Home Checklist — PDF, property-wide self-assessment
CAL FIRE · Low-Cost Retrofit List — PDF, measures ranked by cost
VCFD · Ready, Set, Go! — PDF, evacuation planning (2016, still sound)
CAL FIRE · Defensible space — the zone framework with spacing formulas
VRFSC · Home hardening — structure-focused guidance
Insurance
CDI · Safer from Wildfires — the regulation, including Firewise community recognition
United Policyholders · WRAP Resource Center
United Policyholders · Ventura County
Contractors & vendors
California Fire Safe Council · Business directory — statewide, with a reviewed tier
Neither is an endorsement, and neither of those organizations guarantees the work. Tell residents to get multiple bids and check licenses with the CSLB.
Agencies & partners
CAL FIRE · Ready for Wildfire
California Fire Safe Council
IBHS · Wildfire Prepared Home
VC Alert — emergency notifications; every resident should be signed up
Renewal question, a resident you can’t get through to, an event you want help running, or something on your community page that needs changing. Ask — several of us have been through it.