Community Wildfire Defense Grant

Background

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in late 2021, allocated $1 billion for Community Wildfire Defense Grants to help communities across the nation reduce wildfire risk and bolster wildfire preparedness. 

In 2024, the Guild received a $1.3 million Community Wildfire Defense Grant to advance wildfire preparedness in the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed – a 107,000-acre landscape of public, private, and tribal lands within which multiple wildland-urban interface communities are nationally designated as at risk for wildfire. The Fireshed also encompasses the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed, which provides approximately 40% of the City of Santa Fe’s water and is threatened by the risk of high severity wildfire.

The Community Wildfire Defense Grant has enabled the Guild to: 

• Offer free home wildfire risk assessments to homeowners. 

• Run a Wildfire Mitigation Cost-Share Program that covers 60-90% of the costs of recommended thinning for wildfire mitigation around homes. 

• Provide education and outreach events related to wildfire-preparedness from the neighborhood to community scale. 

• Recruit and support volunteers (community sparkplugs) through the Fireshed Ambassador program who want to make their neighborhoods wildfire prepared. 

• Manage the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed Coalition, a grassroots group of over 20 governmental agencies and nonprofits working collaboratively to improve the health and long-term resilience of forested watersheds and communities by addressing wildfire. 

Learn more at santafefireshed.org.