Kindling

Being selected as a winner for the Elevate Prize would be transformative for Kindling. We are a young, lean organization and I have come to realize our most powerful asset is our ability to see the bigger picture and link people and knowledge. We do this by taking a systems-based approach and by obsessing over problems, not pre-ordained solutions. With the communities we serve squarely in the driver seat, we act as supportive co-pilots, leveraging our knowledge, skills, and network to enable scalable impact.

The Elevate Prize would allow us to scale up our operations and build a global team of interdisciplinary change makers, with skills in geospatial analysis, the social sciences, operational firefighting, and fire safety engineering. This would enable us to understand problems even more holistically and to build both deeper relationships with our existing partners and to work in more cities and settlements around the world.

I founded Kindling because I believed there was a massive gap between the fire safety industry and the people and places that need fire safety the most. It turns out this is not a gap, but rather a vacuum – and Elevate Prize will help us respond to this growing demand. 

Two days after I graduated college with a degree in Fire Safety Engineering, my house burnt down. The fire brigade arrived quickly, family and friends offered support, and my insurance eventually paid for the losses. Just a month later, I had replaced my belongings, found a new place to live, and was thriving at my new job.

Fast-forward 5 years and I found myself walking through the Imizamo Yethu informal settlement in Cape Town, South Africa, just three days before a massive fire killed 4 people and displacing almost 10,000. The juxtaposition of this community’s experience of fire and my own experience revealed deeply engrained inequalities, and the lack of social justice was palpable.

I founded Kindling because I believe everyone deserves a safe place to live and work. We work with communities to combine their local knowledge with the best science and engineering has to offer to understand and tackle local fire safety challenges. We are currently working in Costa Rica, Nigeria, India, Bangladesh, and South Africa, building momentum for local, but globally connected movements for fire safety and fire justice. Fire safety for all is not just our tagline, it is our mantra. 

Did you know 95% of global deaths from fire occur in Low- and Middle-Income Countries? Did you know fires occur every day in informal settlements and refugee/IDP camps, killing thousands of people each year, injuring millions, and destroying countless homes and livelihoods? Fire undermines sustainable development and humanitarian response. But it does not have to.

Kindling works with communities, governments, fire services, UN agencies, local and international NGOs, and academia to make fire safety accessible – because safety is a human right. We share knowledge and develop contextually appropriate strategies for fire safety. Our work is wide ranging, from supporting Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh with cooking safety advice so they can make awareness videos for their own community to advocating at the Geneva level for integration of fire safety into humanitarian policies, practices, and investments, and so much in between. We tackle fire safety inequalities head on through advocacy, research, education and training, and most importantly locally led fire safety initiatives. While fire may seem like a historic problem in the West, it is an overlooked daily risk for billions of people around the world, demanding not only attention but also a paradigm shift in how we think about fire.

In today’s cities, there are two sides to fire safety – regulation and response. Governments try to regulate the design and construction of buildings, industrial processes and more. Then when things go wrong, firefighters do their best to arrive on scene and tackle the blaze. But where does that leave the 1 billion people living in informal settlements where the benefits of regulation are irrelevant and fires often spread across entire communities before the fire services can arrive, if at all? Where does that leave the 2 billion workers worldwide without physical or social protection?

At Kindling, we have thrown the rule book on fire safety out the window. We lean into the complexities of fire in ‘informal’ environments by seeking to understand not only the unsafe conditions but also socioeconomic and political drivers that cause fire risks to emerge in the first place. We bring together people and practices from the fire safety industry, humanitarian sector, and development sector to develop strategies for, and crucially with, the most vulnerable communities in the world. Our work demands innovation and disruption at every turn, and we are just getting started. 

We work tirelessly to prevent injuries and save lives, property, and livelihoods from fire in some of the most vulnerable communities in the world. Our guiding principles of openness, agility, and collaboration lead us in everything we do, from assessing fire evacuation in the largest refugee camp in the world to studying perceptions of fire risk of informal market workers in Nigeria and the political economy of urban fire management in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and so much more. We work in close collaboration with the communities we serve, whether that is a group of refugees trying to promote fire safety messaging, a local fire safety organization looking to expand its impact, or the humanitarian sector wanting to institutionalize fire safety into their work.

We are effective in our work because we do not pretend to have all the answers. We work with local actors to define the ‘right’ problem, as holistically as possible, and then we scan our network and knowledge to identify the most relevant resources to support the project. But we do not simply make connections, we lean into some of the most complex fire problems in the world and build long-lasting relationships for locally led change.