The Social Entrepreneur They Didn't See Coming — Why Fire Service Public Education Gets the Leftover Change

Part 2 — Fire Safety Education in Canada

On average, less than three percent of the budget goes to fire service public education. Three percent. In an industry built on the premise of saving lives, the actual work of teaching people how to stay alive gets the leftover change. Nobody talks about it. It's the fire service's best kept secret.

And I was onto it.

Not publicly. Not yet. Just on the down low with people I thought were trusted colleagues in fire prevention. I wouldn't call anyone out unless credit was due — I was just connecting dots out loud with people I trusted.

Turns out I wasn't the only one connecting dots.

Representing Fire Prevention Canada at a fire chief conference. With First Alert as a sponsor. Not too well received with the other smoke alarm brand situated across the aisle.

I knew this. I had spent years inside their world — not at the chief's table, but deep in

the programs that chiefs don't prioritize, don't budget for, and rarely show up to discuss. I knew where the gaps were. I knew what was missing. I had built something to fill it.

What I didn't know was that there was a network that had already decided I didn't belong there.

I found out the moment my plane landed in Manitoba.

A fire chief — a board member who had invited me out to a Chiefs Conference — met me at the airport. One of the first things he said to me was this: "Tread carefully. You're in a shark tank."

That was my introduction to the old boys network.

I had been swimming in their water for years without knowing it. Building fire service public education programs, asking questions, identifying gaps, travelling coast to coast learning what educators needed. All of it happening inside a system that had already quietly decided what I was allowed to be.

They had no idea what was coming.

Nobody knew what to do with me. I was too commercial for the educators and too mission-driven for the suppliers and the associations. And in a world run by an old boys network I hadn't even been introduced to yet, that made me a problem to be managed.

Here's the thing about being a social entrepreneur — nobody hands you a business card that says so. You don't wake up one morning and declare it. You just keep doing what you can't seem to stop doing, for reasons that go beyond the bottom line, and eventually someone else names it for you.

My father's version of business advice was considerably more direct: shut up and sell. This was the man who had the foresight to contact the Canadian Forestry Association back in the late seventies, securing our family the Official Canadian Licensee rights for the Cooperative Forest Fire Prevention Campaign — the core program backing Smokey Bear. He had built something real from nothing, and he knew how to make money in this space. His advice wasn't wrong — it was working. The merch was moving. The pins were going in the map. Coast to coast and into the US. He wanted to see me keep raking in the dough, the same way the big fire safety organizations were doing in a very big way. Just sell. Don't ask questions. Don't look too hard at the system.

I couldn't do it. I kept seeing the problem. I kept building toward something bigger for fire service public education. I just didn't have a framework for it yet.

Josh Schukman gave me that framework.

Josh Schukman — founder of Social Change Nation out of Kansas City — had spent his career helping purpose-driven entrepreneurs understand who they were and what they were actually building. His whole mission was helping startups make a dollar and a difference. Not one or the other. Both. When he looked at Fire-ED, he didn't see a vendor trying to crack a new market. He saw a social entrepreneur who had been operating as one for years without the language to describe it.

"A business for which the social and business missions run in tandem," Josh would say. "Can't have one without the other — they are symbiotic. You'll see it in the marketing, the branding, and the way they measure success."

That was Fire-ED. That had always been Fire-ED. I just finally had the words for it.

What I didn't fully appreciate at the time was how invisible that problem was to the very people living inside it. Fire chiefs travelled. They had national and international conference budgets. They saw what was happening across North America and beyond. Fire prevention officers and public educators — the people actually doing the community-facing work — largely didn't. Apart from a handful of larger departments fortunate enough to have full time public educators and dedicated budgets, most stayed regional, under-resourced, and disconnected from what was happening nationally and internationally.

I was the one travelling coast to coast and into the US, sitting across from educators, asking what wasn't working, learning what they needed, building toward solutions to problems they hadn't even fully articulated yet. All of this while my business was crumbling underneath me. Still investing every effort into the movement while the ground kept shifting.

That's the part nobody sees from the outside. The old boys network was looking at a woman with great ideas and no invitation to their table. They weren't looking at someone who had spent years deep inside the programs they never talked about, learning what they didn't have time to learn themselves.

Out of all of that came the concept of the Community Safety Facilitator — the boots on the ground in a fire service led, community driven model. The course structure is built. The units exist. The framework is ready. The moment someone buys into it, we complete it together. That's how turn-key is supposed to work.

What sponsors understand — and what the fire service has been slower to grasp — is that funding doesn't flow to standalone programs. It flows to partnerships. A fire service agency with a scalable, proven program, paired with a social entrepreneur who provides the infrastructure, the curriculum, and the reach. The sponsor, the fire service, and Fire-ED. Can't have one without the other. That's the model.

It's not just millennials who get this. It's the younger generations inheriting a world that's frankly a mess — and they know it. They're already looking for ways to make a dollar and a difference at the same time. These are exactly the people we want as Community Safety Facilitators.

I recently encouraged a fire chief — one whose department didn't have the funding for Fire-ED — to point his crew to the program. The younger recruits, the junior firefighters, the high school kids coming up through the ranks. Because here's the thing about the fire service: 100 years of tradition unimpeded by progress. The younger generation coming in? They get it before the institution does. That's where change actually starts.

Fire-ED is built for exactly that moment. The work is there. Turnkey and ready.

"If you're not ruffling feathers," Josh told me, "take a second look at what you're doing. Is it really impactful enough? Because if it's not making someone uncomfortable, you have to wonder."

I had been ruffling feathers for decades. Apparently that meant I was right on track.

Then came an introduction I hadn't seen coming — the kind that rarely finds its way to people who need it the most. A fire chief who had already put Fire-ED to work in his own department , who had faced the same headwinds from the same rooms, opened doors I couldn't open myself — including the door to a firefighters' charitable group. But the resistance was growing, and he felt it coming on. What Fire-ED needed now was someone with the resources and distance to see past the politics.

The second introduction was to a man of a different world entirely — the founder of a private philanthropic foundation — a man who had built a large local business and turned that success into funding causes he believed in. Fire prevention was one of them. He had looked at the full picture — the social entrepreneur, the fire service, the foundation, the community model — and he was ready to fund the entire partnership.

He told me the frustration of watching it fall apart made him want to take a baseball bat to the whole thing. "Every working group should have entrepreneurs in it," he said. He could see exactly what was on the table. He just couldn't make the others pick it up.

I finally got Fire-ED in front of a firefighters' charitable foundation. And it worked. They didn't just express interest. They adopted it. They announced it. We were in — for a very short while.

What had been publicly announced by them was walked back. Various fire prevention officer groups across the country had already decided what they thought about Fire-ED — and about me — long before properly looking at either. That opinion travelled faster than the program did.

The doors didn't just close. They slammed. And the funding walked away with them.

I was starting to develop what I wouldn’t recognize until much later — entrepreneurial PTSD. But I didn’t know that then. I just kept moving. Not because I had a plan. Because stopping wasn’t something I knew how to do.

When you spend decades inside a market vertical as a social entrepreneur — not as a visitor, but as someone who built something real from the ground up — you don't just disappear when the network decides it's done with you. You outlast them. They retire. They collect their awards. They hand off their titles. And the problem they never solved? Still there. Waiting for someone who actually cares enough to fix it. When your why is as strong as providing solutions that save people's lives, you don't get to walk away from it.

What came next is a story for Part 3. And the arrows kept coming.