Up in Flames - Workplace Solutions

Fire Prevention - It's gonna take more than Smokey Bear!

August 29, 2019 Abby Bolt & Tracy Last Season 1
Up in Flames - Workplace Solutions
Fire Prevention - It's gonna take more than Smokey Bear!
Show Notes Transcript

Check out this info from Tracy Last -

"I'm a social entrepreneur who has dedicated my entire adult life to finding better ways of implementing fire prevention education curriculum and campaigns. Over the recent years, I have founded the FireED Interactive Community Inc, an impact business that strives to create a positive social change by focusing on eliminating preventable fires worldwide.

Since my early teens, I found myself in deep contact with fire safety, however, not from school or fire station visits. My experience is rather unique over most others. My introduction to fire safety and awareness programming was through the Smokey Bear Cooperative Forest Fire Prevention Campaign, of which my father supplied educational materials since 1979.

In 1998 I signed as an official Canadian licensee for the Sparky the Fire Dog campaign which worked flawlessly, until 2005 when it was not renewed. This setback, instead of immobilizing me, ignited my passion to forge ahead blazing new public education pathways. I took to traveling to meet educators around Canada and the US to try to implement and standardize new approaches to fire and life safety education.

For every step I took on this journey, to bring social change to "the fire problem", I diligently applied my entrepreneurial skills and experience to create and market improved programs.

No sooner would I find myself slowed down by the impossibility to speed up associations and committees responsible for advancing public education approaches. Nothing was changing, yet people were still getting injured, losing their homes, and dying to preventable fires. This was the spark that motivated me to use all the data I had collected from the great minds of hundreds of fire officers and educators, putting it together to create a sound educational solution for people of all ages to learn how NOT to become victims of the fire.

This is how FireED Interactive Community Inc was born, a first of its kind public education social enterprise at www.fireedcommunity.com ... see more"

Go to AbbyBolt.com for more information on this and many other controversial subjects surrounding moral courage in the workplace and what it means to Lead with F.I.R.E.

Email me at abby@upinflames.org if you have an experience you would like to share or are in need of a resource. If I can't help, I will point you in the direction of someone who can.
 
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Abby:

Hey there and welcome back to Up In Flames with Abby Bolt. This is a special edition. It's actually a piece of a longer interview that I'm going to post later with Tracy Last from Canada about her program Fire Ed and she's bringing it to the US. That's just a little piece of our conversation that talked about being proactive, volunteering and being part of something good in your home community. And I challenge you to see what you can do in your home community. Be sure to catch the entire episode when I post it a little later next month. The fact of the matter is, I don't care if you live in the US or in Canada, we're so addicted to thinking that the government's gonna handle it. Our taxes already haven't handled. So why am I going to put out extra effort or finances to either educate my child or you know, deal with something like that. It's not my problem. My house isn't burning down. I got my yard taken care of and so it's really hard to get people to jump on board with that just because the culture we built.

Tracy:

I used to look through things, isn't there something constructive and productive for my child? And if I saw something where they can belong to something that helps community, I'd be wanting my kids to volunteer. Here's the program that is funded by a local rotary and it's to get kids volunteer and they all get a tee shirt and their lunch or whatever. So we want to put our kids into something more than just messy play painting or waterpark fun. If we saw something that would be life saving for them and it's right there to register them that easily.

Abby:

That's what would drive me crazy is even though I was working for a federal agency, I was paid a salary to think of things, you know, where to do things or to buy products or to do school programs. We didn't really have a set structure to it. There wasn't, there was a method to our madness. But it was just kind of controlled chaos because every department, every place, they all have things. We have tools we can use, we have resources we can pull from, I mean like the Ad Council alone, Smokey Bear, Cal Fire here in California. You know, all these, I'm the, there are so many great resources, but there's, there's not really just one page to follow one set of curriculum when one piece, I was just talking to somebody about this a couple of days ago and I practice it on my son all the time. He's the kid of prevention to firefighters. Every, actually every pretty much adult in his life right now is some in tight into fire somehow. But the kid still runs to run around with firecrackers. Like he's a kid! And trying to teach a nine year old what the ramifications are for that kind of carelessness. You know, it's a constant lesson and not something that you can just cruise through a Smokey Bear. But like I've been teaching people from the beginning, you know, why we hammer on the kids so hard. Why we teach them so diligently, is those kids just takes a little kid in the campsite. It takes a little kid at home, whatever, to just go up to their uncle, their dad, their friend, and be like, hey, should we do this differently or shouldn't we put the camp for out more? Or you know, kids have such a huge effect and they will call things out. And my mom, we have a, what we call fire safe council here. And in California, um, there are several different sections of those. And she was volunteering for it and she used to be a school teacher, so she started going to just on her own because she wanted to make a difference. She was making up her own curriculum. She was having challenging each class. I think she was doing the middle school, challenging them with drawing maps of their homes and having them assess their escape routes and all the different things that go along with that. If a wildfire were to come through. And I'm just, I gotta tell you this story real quick. Because it just rings so true to my heart. So we had a devastating fire come through and burn home burned down about 300 homes not too long ago. I was working for the forest service and I was doing some lead stuff with a fire tape council. My mom was volunteering for the fire safe council. And everything that we were doing was really bits and spurts. Just when you have the time and when you feel the passion, you do what you can. My mom didn't have to do what she was doing. I didn't have to do a lot of efforts that I was doing. A lot of it comes just from your soul. So she started doing these exercises with the local school and having them do all this. And so we had this just devastating fire come through, had fatalities devastated the whole community. And while the fire was still kind of on the far end, my mom and I went to a local fast food restaurant and we were sitting there and a little kid comes in around sixth grade or so and he goes, Ms Bolt, hi, I haven't seen you since you were in my classroom. And she'd been retired from the school for a long time and she'd been dealing with cancer. And so people seeing her back in was really great and the kids really lit up. And so my mom goes, oh yeah, the last time I saw you is when you turned in your, the map of your home, your hazard map and, and your escape route. And she goes to the fire, came through, it's your house, is your house okay? Did everything work out? And that kid, this boy just got this biggest tear in his eye and just looking at my mom with so much respect and he said, no, our home burned down. And he just, you could tell he was trying so hard to hold himself back. He goes, but we followed the map and the home burned down. But you know what? We saved our motorcycles and he gave my mom a big hug. And, but I think my mom, right, they'd realize like how important it is. And God, sorry, I didn't know that story was going to strike me or hit me that way. But it makes such a difference in your community and people don't understand that until it's there. And so many, what we deal with in the smaller unreserved communities are rentals and commercial properties that people don't really care about and they just, they don't really think about how important it is until the fires coming. It doesn't matter who owns the place, if it's going to come through, you don't want it to devastate your community, your home, your belongings, or your life. So the kids make a difference. You Theresa, you're making a difference by making a difference to the kids.