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What is the Fire Foundry program?
‍The FIRE Foundry is a career pathway program designed to support community members through career exploration in the fire service and strengthen competitiveness for future employment as firefighters or related careers in medicine, public safety and environmental preservation. 
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What is a Fire Foundry Recruit? 
A Fire Foundry Recruit is a person that has been accepted into the Fire Foundry program and is working their way through any of the 4 FIRE Foundry categories. The FIRE Foundry works with recruits throughout the entire process of becoming a firefighter from the day recruits begin to express curiosity about the fire service and are accepted into the program. This process can take years to complete, but the Fire Foundry is committed to supporting recruits through the entire process!
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The FIRE Foundry program is broken down into 4 categories that identify where a current recruit is regarding the process of completing the Fire Foundry Program. You can read more about the FIRE Foundry categories in detail here  
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Category 1: A Recruit is employed full-time on a FIRE Foundry Crew
Category 2: A Recruit is working on completing their Firefighter 1 certification requirements, which are needed for entry-level firefighting in the state of California 
Category 3: A Recruit is employed as a seasonal firefighter, meaning they are fighting wild land fires during peak wildfire season. During the months they are not doing seasonal work they are employed as an Innovation Fellow at UC Berkeley, Stanford or a local fire science lab learning about emerging fire science technology. 
Category 4: A Recruit has successfully been hired as a probational firefighter or has moved from being on probation to being a full-fledged firefighter.

Who is a good candidate for the FIRE Foundry program? Fire Foundry Recruits are residents from the County of Marin or the Northern California, Bay Area. Recruits are individuals who are curious about the fire service, medical careers, public safety, technology, community engagement or preservation of the environment. 

Fire Foundry Recruits are typically from traditionally underrepresented communities within the fire service.

Current trends in the demographics of who works in the fire service show that 96% of firefighters are men and 82% are white. This means that there are not as many firefighters that are women or of other gender identities, as well as races and ethnicities. 

What does it mean to be underrepresented, underserved or underfunded? 
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Underrepresented:  Your race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, is less represented in Marin County’s fire departments than in Marin County as a whole.  

Underserved:  You are from a community that has received a lower quantity and/or quality of services from the public, private and non-profit sectors.  This can include formal services like fewer academic supports and offerings in high schools  (e.g. Advanced Placement courses, tutoring and college preparatory services, test prep services), less investments in transportation services (e.g. street maintenance, public transportation options), or public health (e.g. understaffed/overworked local hospitals).  It can also include informal/indirect gaps in services such as a lack of grocery stores offering healthy, affordable foods in low income communities and communities of color, or higher exposures to sources of air and water pollution and toxic waste. 

What is a firefighter and what kind of work do they do? What is clearance and vegetation management?

‍Vegetation management or clearance work is fire prevention work focused on clearing and maintaining vegetation to reduce fire risk.  This can include cutting grasses, bushes, low tree branches, or full trees in the wildland-urban interface, along key community evacuation routes or emergency gathering sites, or to help construct fire breaks in wildland areas.  

What is home hardening? 

Home hardening is the process of increasing a house’s or apartment’s resistance to fire.  This can include sealing vents on roofs to prevent live embers from entering an attic, using more fire resistant building materials, installing new fire suppression systems, clearing dead leaves, needles and vegetation from on top of and around homes, and providing education to homeowners and renters about access to assistance in increasing fire resilience of homes. 

Please ask any additional questions that you'd like answered by contacting us.