An Island Unto Ourselves: Activating Community-Led Wildfire Recovery in the Most Isolated Place on Earth
With Sara Tekula, Executive Director, Kula Community Watershed Alliance, Hawaii
This webinar took place on December 11, 2024.
In the aftermath of destructive wildfires, communities are often left to their own devices to pick up the pieces and support one another. But what happens if a wildfire occurs on an island in the most isolated island chain on the planet? As one might imagine, mutual aid networks become a critical, necessary part of the immediate humanitarian response. For the Kula Community Watershed Alliance (KCWA), an organization leading the Kula Fire Restoration Project on the island of Maui, addressing the long-term recovery of the landscape followed the same path. In this webinar, KCWA’s Executive Director, Sara Tekula, shares how landscape-scale restoration after a destructive wildfire begins with a hyper-local focus that surfaces and amplifies the strengths, resources, and materials that already exist within the community. Sara will share lessons learned from Kula’s unique experience, many of which are transportable to any community impacted by disaster.
If you cannot make the webinar, we suggest registering so that you are notified once the recording is available online.
Sara Tekula is a long-time Upcountry Maui resident and has spent the last 20 years working at the intersection of community engagement and land stewardship. She brings several decades of nonprofit management and leadership experience to the Kula Community Watershed Alliance, which was founded in the aftermath of the Maui Wildfires disaster of August 2023. At KCWA, Sara facilitates a Council of Neighbors–members of Kula’s fire-affected community–as they co-create long-term post-wildfire land restoration strategies. She leads fundraising efforts to support community-driven goals, and prioritizes community engagement in project implementation across 71 private properties along a 202-acre burn scar situated at the Wildland-Urban Interface. Bringing together local knowledge, place-specific ecological expertise, and community-led forestry, Sara also serves on the County of Maui Office of Recovery’s long-term recovery team as a Natural-Cultural Resources lead and is Co-PI on a National Science Foundation CIVIC Innovations research project looking at community-driven post-wildfire restoration and wildfire mitigation.