A Summary of the 2023 WRF Convening
The Wildfire Resilience Funders (WRF) convened our first official in-person meeting in Lake Tahoe May 22-24, 2023. The meeting was planned and organized by Climate Resilience Fund (CRF) staff, working closely with the WRF Design and a volunteer Planning Committee. Participation was strong, with over 40 philanthropic members attending.
The meeting was graced by the contributions of a strong cohort of local and regional experts whose presentations peppered the meeting agenda, providing context that grounded our discussions in place, reflected the focus and interests of network members, and thoroughly enriched our shared experience. To anchor our Network collaboration conversations, the CRF team shared a high-level analysis of our recent WRF Network survey with a plenary presentation and discussion, and facilitated breakout sessions that focused on building a shared understanding of the composition of Network members’ values, goals, and strategic interests.
Together, these two tracks embodied our goals for the meeting and for building a more cohesive and increasingly collaborative WRF Network:
The first is a learning agenda centered on the challenges and opportunities that define our increasingly shared sense of the threats posed by catastrophic wildfire to communities and natural landscapes across the western U.S.
The second is our need to develop a deeper and shared understanding of the seemingly aligned, but nuanced character of philanthropic goals and strategies that are represented in our
Network so that we might accelerate our efforts to collaborate, and thereby multiply the impacts of our individual efforts through shared and aligned investments.
Using Survey Findings to Ground our Work Together
During the initial session we used findings from our survey of Network members conducted in early May 2023 to engage participants via a plenary presentation and discussion focused on developing a deeper shared understanding of the goals, values, and strategies of respondents. After briefly summarizing who makes up the WRF and the geographies where members’ work, we discussed these findings with an eye towards helping us to navigate towards opportunities to work more collaboratively.
We explored the scale at which funders focus their investments, the lenses and themes that they identify with, and the strategies they use to guide funding decisions. This helped spark a conversation that highlighted some additional work that we need to do, for example, to better define key terms like “mitigation” (which can mean entirely different things in different contexts), or what we mean by “community”, or even “local”. It also revealed a clear duality of activities, reinforcing data gathered during the Network’s online meetings in March-April 2023, with gravitational centers around “landscape and forest”-centered funding and funding for “climate/wildfire resilient communities.”
We can and will do more to surface conclusions from these data. We can now organize members by interest area, cross-reference with geographic focus, scale, and by intervention category (capacity building, local implementation, policy advocacy, etc.). This is part of a process that we are building to winnow down these complex issues in ways that enable as large as possible a group of members to see themselves in a shared strategy for collaborative action.
Notably, survey respondents revealed that a significant sum of dollars are currently in play annually, over $85M, just in existing budgets. Many also suggested budgets for wildfire resilience efforts are likely to increase. There are almost twice as many funders in the WRF than respondents to the survey. It seems likely to conclude that this is a conservative estimate, and points to great potential for leveraging our combined resources.
We challenged the group to begin to think in these terms (leverage, collaboration, alignment) with a question that we returned to repeatedly in Tahoe, and which we will continue to ask:
What problems are we trying to solve individually that we can better address together?
We are likely to find more than one answer to this question, and more questions to ask. Our hope for this meeting was to create space for getting the questions right and to find answers so that we can begin to explore more intentionally about how we can work together. This is something that our survey also revealed, and which our anecdotal evidence from conversations at the meeting reinforced powerfully — there is a strong interest in collaborative action amongst those gathered and an increasingly clear sense that alignment exists, which suggests opportunity for mobilizing shared strategies. Our sense from the notes summarized below is that we have moved forward on this journey even more quickly than expected, and that we have both a mandate and ideas for moving ahead.
Many thanks to the WRF DesignTeam and the Planning Committee. The WRF DesignTeam members included Genny Biggs, Kate Dargan-Marquis, Jennee Kuang, Katie Oran, and Mark Valentine. The Planning Committee included Amy Berry and Caitlin Meyer for the Tahoe Fund; Elizabeth Söderström of the Water Foundation; Nicole Miller and Anne Graham of the Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation; Ron Milam and Mark Valentine of Smart Growth California; and Steve Frisch of the Sierra Business Council.