Three Percent. That’s All Fire Service Public Education Gets. Not A Typo.

Part 2 — Field Notes From the Front Lines: The budget problem nobody in the fire service talks about — and what happened when I did.

In many fire departments CRR (public education) gets less than three percent. In some it’s zero. And when zero becomes the norm long enough — when budget after budget passes without a line item for public education — nobody questions it anymore. Zero becomes normal. Normal becomes tradition. And tradition becomes the reason nothing ever gets built.

I had been inside that number for years. Not at the chief’s table — 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. And I had built something to fill it.

What I didn’t know was that talking about it out loud would cost me everything.

Nobody Talked About It. Until I Did.

Not publicly. Not yet. Just on the down low with people I thought were trusted colleagues in fire prevention. I was connecting dots out loud with people I trusted — naming the budget problem, identifying the gap, asking out loud why a program that saves lives keeps getting the leftover change.

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

There was a network that had already decided what I was allowed to say — and what I was allowed to build. I found out the moment my plane landed in Manitoba.

The Shark Tank I Didn’t Know I Was Swimming In.

A fire chief — a board member who had invited me to a Chiefs Conference — met me at the airport. One of the first things he said 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.

Nobody knew what to do with me. Too commercial for the educators. 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.

They had no idea what was coming.

When Someone Finally Named What I Was Building.

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.

Josh Schukman gave me that framework. Founder of Social Change Nation out of Kansas City, Josh had spent his career helping purpose-driven entrepreneurs understand who they were and what they were actually building. 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.

My father’s version of business advice was considerably more direct: shut up and sell. He had secured our family as the Official Canadian Licensee for the Cooperative Forest Fire Prevention Campaign — the Smokey Bear program — and he knew how to make money in this space. He wanted to see me keep raking in the dough. 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.

The People Doing the Work Nobody Funded.

Fire chiefs travelled for their conferences. They saw what was happening from coast to coast. Fire prevention officers and public educators — the people actually doing the community-facing work — largely didn’t. Apart from a handful of larger departments with full time educators and dedicated budgets, most stayed regional, under-resourced, and disconnected from what was happening outside their own province.

I was the one travelling to them, 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.

This is what happens when public education gets zero percent of the budget for long enough. The people doing the work disappear from the conversation. The institution stops expecting them to be there. And the programs that could have changed everything never get the room they need to grow.

What the Institution Does With Programs It Didn’t Build.

The fire service didn’t build Fire-ED. That matters more than it should.

In a world where credibility flows through institutional channels — through associations, through committees, through the right handshakes at the right conferences — a program built independently by someone outside the network carries a different kind of burden. It has to be twice as good and half as threatening just to get through the door.

Fire-ED was both. And it still wasn’t enough.

Because what the institution does with valid programs it didn’t build is not evaluate them on merit. It manages them. It delays them. It lets the right people in the right rooms decide — quietly, without accountability — that the timing isn’t right, the fit isn’t right, the person behind it isn’t right.

That’s not unique to the fire service. That’s what institutions do when something from the outside gets too close to exposing what’s been missing on the inside.

Representing Fire Prevention Canada at a fire chief conference. Two competing smoke alarm sponsors on the same floor. The aisle between them told its own story.

The Doors That Opened. Then Slammed.

Then came an introduction I hadn’t seen coming. A fire chief who had already put Fire-ED to work in his own department opened doors I couldn’t open myself — including the door to a firefighters’ charitable foundation.

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 was walked back. Some fire prevention officers 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.

A philanthropist who had looked at the full picture — the social entrepreneur, the fire service, the foundation, the community model — 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 dish up.

When You Keep Moving Because Stopping Isn’t an Option.

The pushback was real. And it was relentless. Not just professionally — and eventually, it won. From 2019 to 2025 I stopped. I tabled Fire-ED for seven years.

Not because I gave up on the mission. Because the weight of building something real inside a system determined to ignore it had finally caught up with me. It took its toll — financially, personally, in ways that don’t show up in any business report.

And the problem didn’t go away while I was gone. The gap didn’t close. The budget line didn’t appear. The delivery model nobody built stayed unbuilt.

So I came back.

Everything I had developed is still relevant. Still ready to build upon. Seven years away from the fight and the work hadn’t aged a day. Because the problem it was built to solve hadn’t changed either.

“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. I tabled it for seven years. And I came back anyway.

Apparently that meant I was right on track.

In Part 3 — the resistance stopped being quiet. The institution that had been managing me from a distance decided it was time to get personal. And the arrows started finding their mark.

READ MORE: https://www.fire-ed.com/post/community-fire-safety-education-escape-plan-doesnt-cover