After 3 years and 200 Zone Captains Meet-ups, we are winding them down at the end of this month

On Tuesday, June 25, we will host our final weekly Survivor Meetup. It has been a wonderful and fruitful journey since May 2021 to today, more than three years later. We began hosting the virtual meetups early on at the height of the pandemic, when our local wildfire recovery was a series of challenging questions, with very few answers. How far we have come together!

Between the Tuesday meetups (which concentrated on manufactured home recovery), the site built/single family home meetups, and a run of business recovery meetups in 2022, Firebrand Resiliency Collective and the Zone Captains program will have hosted just over 200 meetups by the end of this month. Holding a regular and steady space where survivors could show up for each other week after week—troubleshooting the many obstacles, sharing the frustrations, and celebrating our joys and successes together through the recovery—has been a true honor and responsibility that our Zone Captains have never taken lightly. Many thanks to all the Almeda Fire Zone Captains past and present—especially Cass Cornwell and Katie Jackson who have hosted the meetups over the long term. We want to thank Kathy Kali, Tucker Teutsch, and Ellie Holty for creating such a powerful and meaningful space to share and heal. And to the hundreds of survivors who opened up to us and one another, we have deeply appreciated your presence and our shared ability to overcome many immense challenges in our recovery. We have taken incredible strength from this opportunity to be vulnerable together.