The Official Magazine of the International Association of Fire Chiefs Going Beyond Training: Higher Education in the Fire Service Page 06 Grant Application Advice Page 10 Building Wildfire Resilience Page 16 Legislative Update Page 18 And much more! Spring 2025Published For: INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FIRE CHIEFS 8251 Greensboro Drive, Suite 650 McLean, VA 22102 Tel: 703.273.0911 www.iafc.org CEO and Executive Director Rob Brown Director of Marketing & Communications Rosario Ortiz Davis, MBA, CAE Published By: MATRIX GROUP PUBLISHING INC. 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PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE 5 A Message from the IAFC President and Board Chair COVER STORY 6 Not So Old School: The Changing Role of Higher Education in the Fire Service FEATURES 10 Demystifying Grants: Cutting Through the Chaos With An Expert’s Insight 16 A Measured Response: Redefining Resilience In Wildfire’s New Age REPORT FROM WASHINGTON 18 Legislative Update: Welcome to the 119th Congress WHAT’S HAPPENING AT THE IAFC 22 A Message from the IAFC CEO and Executive Director 21 INDEX TO ADVERTISERS 10 06 16These are the kinds of questions we’re being tasked to explore, and as a collective voice for the fire service’s leadership, the International Association of Fire Chiefs has gone all in on answering them. As society and the very nature of firefighting and healthcare themselves change, so do our priorities. As you read the articles in this edition of iChiefs, I encourage you to keep those questions and other similar ones in mind. Your own answers might take years or even decades to form — but every moment you spend educating yourself, listening to the perspectives of others in our field, or developing yourself professionally becomes a part of that self-defining process. At the end of the day, being a leader was never one thing. Our roles have always been based on the needs of the moment, because the fire service, more than any other organization, has existed from day one to serve a purpose greater than any individual responder or leader. As long as we stay true to that defining mission, no challenge will be too great for us to adapt to. Fire Chief Josh Waldo President & Board Chair Evolving Leadership // A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT involved in that leadership now. We have more perspectives to balance, more topics we need to be educated on, and more challenges to face than ever before. These changes aren’t innately positive or negative. The truth is, it takes a different kind of person to be a chief now than it did “way back when.” In a lot of ways, that’s not an easy thing for the fire service to face. We’re a profession built on deep, strongly held traditions. It’s one thing to embrace changes in technology or safety, but to change the very definition of what it means to be a leader, a firefighter? That’s a whole other story. What we’re seeing now is a negotiation, an active conversation that requires the voice of every first responder in the field. We’re engaged in a question-and-answer process that’s opening up entirely new avenues for us to explore as professionals, whether we do it as career firefighters or volunteers. Where does accountability start and end? Are we a blue-collar profession or a white collar one? What’s the baseline someone has to achieve to be qualified for leadership in a department? Who in our communities do we engage with, and how do we do it? BELIEVE IT OR NOT, fire chiefs have been around since the Roman Empire, but what exactly we do, how we do it, and who we work with has changed repeatedly throughout firefighting history. One thing that hasn’t changed is our core purpose: saving lives and property. Chiefs and officers lead because good leadership improves emergency response outcomes. It’s that simple. Or is it? In practice, our roles are about a lot more than strong principles. They’re subjective, they’re dynamic, and they’re constantly shifting based on the needs and views of the people we serve. And while those on the “outside” of leadership roles often see our positions as expressions of authority, the truth is that many of us often feel like we have less and less control over the definition of those roles in practice. Chiefs especially end up caught in the crossfire of public opinion and shifting social trends. I look back at how topics like career progression and public relations were viewed in my recruit days and am amazed at how much they’ve changed. The way we treat higher education, certifications, fiscal responsibility, and even leadership features like seniority has shifted significantly. What a person must do to get from probationary firefighter or EMT to fire chief varies a lot more than it once did. There are more pathways to leadership than ever before; there are also more responsibilities, many of them less defined or definable, It takes a different kind of person to be a chief now than it did “way back when.” Now consider the education landscape of 20 or even 10 years ago. Getting a degree used to require in-person attendance, it generally took at least two 2 consecutive years of study, and it was often prohibitively expensive. Not only that, but having a degree wasn’t a guarantee of career progression for most firefighters. Most firefighters were perfectly able to achieve their professional development goals without one. Firefighting was, by and large, seen as a strictly “blue-collar” profession for much of the field’s recent history. In fact, it was viewed specifically as one of the best-paid and most promising careers you could pursue without a college degree. In some ways, this last part is still true — but the overall situation is This attitude has been a common one within fire service culture for many years. It’s understandable in many ways, and maybe that’s why it’s so ingrained in many firehouses across the United States and beyond. After all, the notion of firefighters needing or even wanting a degree is fairly new — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth considering. A NEW EDUCATION LANDSCAPE To understand the value of higher education in the fire service, we must consider the how and the why of relevant degree programs. Like everything else within our fast- paced internal culture, education has to be practical, functional, and efficient to be worthwhile in the eyes of firefighters. It also must produce a clear, beneficial result equal to the time and money invested in it. P icture yourself at the firehouse dinner table with the crew attempting to enjoy a meal before the next alarm comes in. The young 20-something year old says that he or she is planning to take some time to get a degree in fire science. How do you think those other firefighters would react? Most of us can picture it easily. This younger firefighter hasn’t got half the experience they do and has only been around for a short time compared to the other crew members. They haven’t earned their dues yet, but here they are, throwing time into a college degree! Most of the other firefighters at the station don’t have a degree, and they’ve done just fine. Who does this young guy or gal think they are? COVER STORY \\ By Keith Padgett, Columbia Southern University, and Emily Sinclair Montague, IAFC Not So Old School: The Changing Role of Higher Education in the Fire Serviceon muscle memory and a working knowledge of the technical aspects of the job. As a lieutenant, however, your job goes much further than that. Your education will be the foundation of your ability to manage your company as a cohesive unit, “read” the scene accurately, communicate effectively, and gain insight from the call after it has concluded. It will inform your approach to the technical elements of a working scene and give you a mental framework that helps keep your thoughts, decision-making process, and problem-solving approaches objective. A strong education can also help leaders develop more subtle skills, such as effective methods for handling their own stress response and that of their personnel when faced with a high-stakes problem. These soft skills are extremely important for any leader or potential Leadership forms at the intersection of training and education. Training gives you confidence, competence, and context; education grants insight, critical thinking skills, and the ability to frame your job effectively. This latter skill refers to one’s ability to view their work beyond a given moment, incident, or challenge. “Framing” could also be described as mindset-building. Another way we could explain the difference between training and education is by translating the terms into what to do versus how to think. It’s helpful to view this through the lens of a specific incident. Let’s say you’re a lieutenant responding to a structure fire with your company. Your training will have taught you what specific steps you and your firefighters will need to take to effectively use your equipment, navigate the scene, and follow procedure. Most of this will rely quite different now. Most fire-service- related degrees can now be pursued mostly or completely online, though discretion is necessary to make sure your program is properly accredited. With the rise of online education, competition between programs has increased, and prices have decreased in response. The requirements of many of these programs have also become more flexible; it isn’t always necessary to complete the courses all at once or consecutively. Most importantly, however, is the fact that having a degree is now a practical requirement for many leadership positions within the fire service. Whether or not this is fair, necessary, or liked by the majority of firefighters is beyond the scope of this article. It’s simply the reality potential leaders have to navigate right now. TRAINING VERSUS EDUCATION One of the barriers that’s kept firefighters from considering degree programs is the notion that firefighting is a job you train for, not learn about at a desk. There’s this pervasive idea that the skills firefighters need for the job can’t be learned in any way other than through hands-on training or on-the-job experience. There’s some truth to this. Certain skills, techniques, and practices are learned best via training exercises. You can’t learn how to efficiently advance a line or ladder a building without actually seeing those things done in person — or without doing them yourself countless times. There are many parts of the job that experienced firefighters will say “can’t be taught,” as they require tactile sense, muscle memory, or lived experience to truly master. At the same time, firefighting as a whole isn’t restricted to these kinds of scenarios. There are many so-called “soft skills” that play a central role in effective firefighting, and while these can certainly be improved during hands-on training, the best way to develop them initially is through proper, structured education. This is especially true for those who intend to occupy a leadership position within their department. The notion of firefighters needing or even wanting a degree is fairly new — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth considering. necessary to do their job is almost all hands-on and technical. This isn’t the case for officers. Once you hit this point in your career, you might be asked to be an administrator, human relations expert, program developer, advocate, spokesperson, crisis manager, outreach director, budgeter, scheduler, and more at any given moment. The role you play within your department expands to encompass a huge range of additional skills that aren’t nearly as predictable as those you learned back in F1 Certification. Handling these roles effectively requires a working knowledge of how personnel relate to each other, how departments relate to their communities, how the local and state government relates to its fire service, and so on. Training can’t help you in these areas. There’s no training exercise that will teach you how to negotiate better health benefits on the basis of your department’s HazMat response capabilities, for example — but there are courses and degree programs that will. You can’t train for a high turnover rate caused by ineffective communication between stations and higher administration, but the right education program can give you precisely the skills needed to develop a better system and promote its adoption by the relevant decision- makers. Chief Keith Padgett is currently the Fire and Emergency Medical Services Academic Program Director with Columbia Southern University (CSU). Prior to that, he served as the Chief-Fire Marshal for the Fulton County Fire-Rescue Department, a metropolitan sized department in Atlanta. Emily Sinclair Montague is a communications and outreach specialist with the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC). She is an experienced writer with strong family ties to the fire service and an interest in public safety, professional development, and nonprofit advocacy. BEYOND THE CALL When you reach the rank of lieutenant and higher, education goes from “helpful” to “necessary.” Before this point, you can probably get by on training alone, but it’s never a bad idea to get a head start. In our increasingly competitive field, that head start could be the difference between a promotion and a pass-over a few years down the road. Still, for probationary firefighters, firefighters, driver engineers, and fire equipment operators, the knowledge strictly leader to learn. Even if you have no interest in attaining a specific rank, what happens if you become the incident commander on scene due to simple seniority or circumstance? Will you have the soft skills necessary to effectively handle that role in the moment? Every firefighter should at least have the ability to “switch over” to a leadership mindset when necessary. Education is what builds that mindset and allows us to use it both on- and off-scene.Next >