Community Fire Safety Education — What the Escape Plan Doesn't Cover

Part 3 — Field Notes on Community Fire Safety Education

The children were at the window. Not because they were trained to be there. Because the fire had taken every other option away.

The neighbour had a ladder. And had been told to stay back.

I was a young mom when it happened. Living in the community where a kitchen explosion took children's lives in front of witnesses who had a ladder, and the will to use it, and were told to stand down.

I called the fire chief afterward. I wasn't calling as a supplier. I wasn't calling with an agenda. I was calling as a mom who lived in that community and couldn't reconcile what had happened with what the response seemed to be. I had genuine questions about their communication strategy — the kind you ask when something doesn't add up and you need to understand why.

He wanted to place another order for plastic fire hats.

I was the one supplying them.

I had no idea that phone call would become the driving force behind everything that came next. I was just a mom trying to understand. And what I understood, slowly and then all at once, was that there was no strategy. There was product. There was PR. There was no plan for the moment the escape route was blocked.

We tell children — know your escape route. Get out. Meet at the designated spot. Family safe and accounted for.

But nobody was teaching the harder lesson. The one that starts with: what happens when the escape route is gone?

The hall is filled with smoke. The door is hot. Every exit you planned for is blocked. And the window is all you have.

Fire safety education should be fun. That's not a contradiction — it's the whole point. Cambridge, Ontario fire safety village — escape ladder demo.

We tell children — go to the window. Signal for help. Wait for rescue.

And we tell the community — stay back. Let the professionals handle it.

Both instructions assume the professionals arrive in time.

The children were at the window because the fire had cornered them there. They banged on it. Whether by instinct or by whatever fire safety education had reached that community — it didn't matter. They banged until they could no longer breathe.

The neighbour had a ladder. And had been told to stay back.

That neighbour is still living with what they cannot unsee. That is a lifetime sentence for someone who was just following instructions.

The community had received plastic fire hats and brochures.

That's not a freak tragedy. That's a gap in the education. And I watched versions of that gap accumulate over the years — on screens, in the news, coast to coast. Communities where nobody had bridged the language barrier. Households where the cultural context was entirely different from the assumptions baked into a pamphlet written decades ago. Newcomer families navigating a country whose fire safety systems were never designed with them in mind.

On February 19, 2019, the Barho family lost seven children in a house fire in Halifax's Spryfield neighbourhood. Seven. The youngest was four months old. The oldest was fourteen. The father ran back into the burning house to save them and survived with critical injuries. The mother survived. The children did not. The fire went from first flame to fully engulfed in thirty seconds.

The Barho family had come to Canada from Syria in 2017. They had been welcomed with cheering crowds and maple leaf cutouts at the airport. They had settled into a community, made friends, put their kids in school. And then a fire moved through their rental home in the middle of the night faster than any education system had prepared them for.

When I reached out afterward — when I tried to bring Fire-ED to the newcomer community as a resource, as a bridge, as exactly the kind of culturally adaptable tool designed for this moment — the community was interested. They wanted help. They were open.

It was when I tried to bring institutional players to the table alongside me that the energy shifted. Suddenly I was capitalizing on tragedy.

I've thought about that a lot.

Fire-ED has no written language on its storyboards. No illustrated people tied to any particular culture or background. The child in the room is the program. The lesson plan is what gets translated. Every culture. Every language. Every community the standard pamphlet never reached. That wasn't a budget decision. That was the whole design philosophy — built for the gaps the system kept pretending didn't exist.

But try explaining social entrepreneurship to an institution that has already decided what you are.

I was in my thirties, two kids — ages four and nine — when I picked up the Sparky the Fire Dog licence in 1998. For those who haven't read Parts 1 and 2: my father had been the Official Canadian Licensee for the Cooperative Forest Fire Prevention Campaign — the Smokey Bear program — since the late seventies. Our family had spent decades inside the fire safety world, building legitimate relationships from coast to coast. The Ad Council offered us the Sparky licence. We had earned it.

And I walked into my first BC fire educators conference thinking I was walking into a room of allies.

I was blindsided before I got through the door.

What I didn't know was that some of those fire prevention officers had already had their own clash with the NFPA — over their attempts to develop their own educational materials. The NFPA's position was clear: use Sparky, use our brochures. The tension that created didn't stay inside that dispute. It was already in the room when I arrived. And I was holding a Sparky licence.

The politics didn't build slowly. They were there from day one.

What I was building at the time wasn't yet called Fire-ED. It started as a standalone teaching tool — a professional box of props that fire educators actually needed and couldn't build themselves. I watched educators cobbling together visual aids out of plywood. I built the professional version and some departments bought it.

And then I watched them struggle to use it.

So I went back. Added the lesson plan. Built the curriculum framework around the tool. Let the educators themselves show me what was missing and filled the gap. Fire-ED grew organically out of what real educators said they needed, in real time, over years. It was never imposed from the outside. It was built from the inside out.

What I believed — what I had believed since that phone call to the fire chief in my own community — was that this tool should be in the hands of every community in the country. Backed by the fire service. Delivered at the grassroots level. A standardized, culturally adaptable, professionally built program that actually trained people instead of handing them a pamphlet and calling it education. That was the vision. That was always the vision.

Around that same period I was doing consulting work for the Fire Prevention Officers Association of BC — the FPOABC — helping update their fire safety brochures and communication tools. Two streams running simultaneously. Keeping the lights on while Fire-ED kept growing.

Part of that consulting work meant reaching out to the sponsors whose logos sat on the back of those brochures. Someone on the executive suggested just removing the logos. I pushed back — these were sponsors who might still want to participate. When I made those calls, the response stopped me cold.

It had been so long since anyone had picked up the phone for those sponsors that they had all but forgotten the relationship existed. One after another — yes. We're interested.

I surfaced that value. Did the work. Rebuilt those relationships from scratch. And not long after, someone from the BC Fire Commissioner's office called asking — who are these sponsors? Give us the names.

I did just so, reluctantly.

Next I watched those sponsors align with the province.

It's not complicated. Sponsors don't want to be associated with an independent operator when they can put their logo next to a government crest. Advertising is expensive. Institutional cover is where it’s at. The big smoke alarm companies are still doing the same thing today with the rebranded Ontario distribution centre — the one that was forced to return monies to the fire service after the story told in Part 1. The names change. The pattern doesn't.

The pioneers take the arrows. The institution walks the path they cleared. And collects the credit.

Meanwhile the bigger picture — the teaching tool, the vision, the program that should have been in every community's hands — was still fighting for a seat at the table.

I got the FPOABC brochures as far as Alberta through my consulting work with the association. The fire commissioner's office there worked closely with me — fine tuning the content, adding their logo, preparing for a print run of their own. It felt like progress. And because the relationship had opened a door, I took the opportunity to send the teaching tool as well. Not yet called Fire-ED. Just the thing I had been building.

They agreed to receive it.

The box sat in their office.

When I followed up, the courier came to collect it.

They hadn't opened it.

Their response: go find another cause. Like childhood obesity.

From a fire commissioner's office. Whose entire mandate is public fire safety.

Years later I met a fire prevention officer in a northern Alberta community. Not at a conference. At a local event — the kind where his department had their own table, handing out plastic fire hats.

We talked. Really talked. He took Fire-ED for a test drive. The community reception was, in his words, incredible. He knew it worked. He spent two years trying every angle he could find to get management to fund it. Every one was shot down.

No mandate. No teeth. No framework that said: this is your job and here is the standard that requires you to do it.

He was doing everything right. He just had no standard behind him, no institutional support above him, and no one who could hand him the language for why every angle kept getting blocked.

A top educator in my network — someone who trains fire and life safety educators — stands in front of rooms full of firefighters and says something that lands like a hammer every time:

You didn't sign up to pull dead bodies from buildings.

The room goes quiet. Because it's true. And they know it.

She says it because they need to feel the full weight of what public education is actually for — not as a PR exercise, not as a community relations checkbox — but as the thing that means the family is standing outside, safe and accounted for, when the truck pulls up.

That's the job. The whole job.

NFPA 1300 finally said so — in writing, with a mandate. Community risk reduction. Public education. Not optional. Required. The standard that the fire service's own profession now uses to say: this is what we are supposed to be doing.

Fire-ED was built for exactly that mandate. Years before the mandate existed.

Josh Schukman — founder of Social Change Nation out of Kansas City, a man who spent his career helping purpose-driven entrepreneurs understand what they were actually building — had a name for what I was doing long before I did. Social entrepreneur. A business where the social and commercial missions don't compete. They're symbiotic. People before profit — not as a slogan, but as an operating model.

The institution never had the capacity to understand that model. Every door that slammed, every box that got couriered back, every sponsor redirected to the province — all of it driven by the assumption that I was a vendor with an angle. That I was capitalizing.

They were looking at a social entrepreneur and seeing a salesperson. Those are not the same thing. And that confusion cost the fire service decades of a working solution while the problem kept showing up on screens coast to coast.

That's exactly why part of the Fire-ED curriculum teaches our Community Safety Facilitators what social entrepreneurship actually means. The thing they used against me becomes the thing we pass forward.

And those facilitators? We want them young. Graduation age. Caught before the real world gets to them first — before the pizza box goes in the oven to warm up, before the charger stays plugged into the wall all night, before they move into a rental with a landlord who never installed a smoke alarm. The education gap doesn't end at childhood. It follows people into their first apartments, their first households, their first communities where nobody is watching out for them.

The younger generation already understands social good business. They seek it out.

They'll choose the company that gives back over the one that doesn't, every time. They get it intuitively — that you can make a dollar and make a difference at the same time. These are exactly the people we want standing at the front of a community and saying: I know what to do. And I'm going to teach you.

Fire and life safety educators have something I never did. A network. A support system. Colleagues who understood the weight of what they were seeing. Counseling for when the grim accumulated faster than any one person could carry it.

When I tried talking about it, more doors slammed.

There is a particular kind of darkness that comes from being alone in a space like this. From carrying what you've seen — community after community, tragedy after tragedy, coast to coast — with nowhere to put it and no one willing to receive it.

This is why the Community Safety Facilitator curriculum exists — designed for the next generation of changemakers who put people before profit in the fire safety space. The framework is built. We're looking for the people who want to buy in, help complete it, and run it.

I had a different kind of smoke. The kind that accumulates when you've been fighting for the same thing for decades in a room that keeps running out of air.

The pioneers take the arrows. Part 4 is where they got personal.