Partners and Funders
Building community resilience requires high caliber collaboration across sectors and disciplines, as well as the courage to articulate a bold vision and the management skill to design and implement the strategies and actions needed to achieve it. Over the past 18 months, this Regional Priority Planning process has been a beautiful example of what that kind of a community initiative looks like. It has been a highly collaborative undertaking from its inception through the production of this website.
The RPP team itself is a collaboration of community partners who have come together to lead and implement the planning process. But more importantly, it has depended on the active engagement and full participation of dozens of other community leaders whom we think of as core partners to this effort. It takes collaborators throughout the county to do this work, and we are grateful to everyone who shared their insights, wisdom, ideas and guidance throughout this process. None of this would exist with their engagement!
Not all of our partners’ logos who participated in this process are included in the partners gallery below. However, this gives a sense of the breadth of this effort.
The Core Regional Priority Project - Team
The RPP was led by a core group of Santa Barbara community members and organizations who have committed themselves to making sure this project represents the beginning of a collective effort to build resilience. It was our goal that this not be an end in and of itself. Anna Olsen of the Cachuma Resource Conservation District designed the project and has ably managed its implementation and fiscal management. Sharyn Main of the Community Environmental Council helped shape the project, stewarded its launch through the Wildfire and Smoke Climate Resilience Roundtable, and has helped guide its progress. Rachel Couch and Tom Gandesbery of the State Coastal Conservancy helped shape the project and its funding. Christina McGinnis of McGinnis Environmental led the team’s extensive community engagement efforts and has been a primary contributor to this site and its content. Carl Palmer and the team at LegacyWorks Group provided process design, facilitation and community engagement support and designed and produced the project deliverables, except for the mapping and modeling related analysis and reports, which were completed by John Gallo, Zachary Canter, and the team at Conservation Biology Institute. Special thanks to Isabella Clark of LegacyWorks for her amazing work on the website design and flow.
Funding
The Santa Barbara RPP was possible thanks to our strategic partnership with the California Coastal Conservancy. The Coastal Coastal Conservancy funded the project via the California Climate Investments Initiative that directs Cap-and-Trade dollars towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions to strengthen the economy and improve public health and the environment. California Climate Investments include a variety of projects covering aspects of social inequities and environmental restoration, and much of the work they fund takes place in disadvantaged communities. The RPP team identified dozens of projects that benefit disadvantaged communities including these 10 projects with direct Equity impact including projects focused on indigenous burning practices on the immediate fire resilience needs of communities like Lompoc and Guadalupe. We are deeply indebted to the Coastal Conservancy and California Climate Investments for their support of this critical work.
Mapping and Modeling
The project invested significantly in the aggregation of existing spatial data in the county through our community engagement efforts and the creation of an online repository of that data on the Santa Barbara County Conservation Blueprint, itself a collaborative project. We are grateful for the Blueprint for this role in the project and to our many community partners who provided datasets for inclusion herein. Using this data, the Conservation Biology Institute team modeled fire risk and developed a spatial decision support system to enable the community to ask key questions about where and how to implement risk mitigation projects on the landscape. You can learn more about that work on the Maps section of the site. Finally, members of the Spatial Decision Support Consortium provided important contributions to our efforts to build the interactive stakeholder map, for which we are grateful for their contributions
Other Key Contributors
We are grateful to the many individuals and organizations who contributed in exceptional ways to this project. We can’t thank them enough for their time, thought-partnership and sincere interest in the project and its success.. We are especially indebted to Santa Barbara County Fire Department Division Chief and Fire Marshall and Santa Barbara County Fire Safe Council board member Robert Hazard who dedicated far more time to informing this process than anyone else spending dozens of hours with us over the past 18 months. Rob and many other partners who contributed to this project are many of the most informed individuals in Santa Barbara County when it comes to the past, present and future of wildfires, wildland fire prevention, building wildfire resilience, and learning to live with wildfire and making better decisions in the face of that reality.
Conservation Blueprint
The Santa Barbara County Conservation Blueprint is a collaborative effort that has unfolded over the course of the past seven years to create a shared platform to make publicly available data on our resources readily available to decision makers, organizations and community members. The Blueprint makes data and technical support available to support in-depth conversations and informed decisions about the management, stewardship, restoration and protection of Santa Barbara County’s ecosystems, land, agriculture, water, flora and fauna. The mapping and modeling outputs of the Regional Priority Plan are hosted on the Blueprint’s website, known as the Atlas. The RPP team is deeply grateful to the Conservation Blueprint partners and funders for this important community resource and the role it plays in the success of this undertaking. Special thanks to RPP partner and CEC Climate Resilience Program Director Sharyn Main for her role while at the Santa Barbara Foundation as a champion and key partner in making the Conservation Blueprint happen as part of the Foundation’s LEAF Initiative.
Climate Resilience Roundtable Series
Between November 2019 and March 2021, the Community Environmental Council, guided by a steering committee of local climate leaders and community partners, held a series of Climate Resilience Roundtables that examined Santa Barbara County’s climate threats and explored ways to protect and strengthen communities in the face of climate change. Each event was a community listening and idea generating session organized around the key climate threats to our region and the inequities that impair climate action and resilience work. The over 580 participants ranged from government agency and community-based organization leaders to social justice and environmental advocates and frontline workers impacted by climate change. The RPP was launched with the first Resilience Roundtable on Wildfire and Smoke and was informed by all five roundtable events and the community priorities, resilience-building principles and insights it raised and reported out on in the Community Solutions to Climate Change report.
To view the opportunity matrix created by Climate Resilience Roundtable then click here.
To read more information about the Community Environmental Council, please click here to open their website.