Community Partnership Development Meeting Notes, May 2, 2025
“A Cultural Mapping of the FireSmart Program: Community and Social Drivers Affecting Both Neighborhood and Personal Awareness and Engagement in Kamloops, BC, with Implications for Smaller Communities Generally.”
Three members of our Community and Cultural Mapping Research Group met with representatives from the city, including the FireSmart program and the museum. Representatives from the city included the Indigenous and External Relations Manager, Sarah Candido; FireSmart Liaison and Coordinator, Kathleen Cahoon; Community Development Coordinator, Ben Chobater; Museum Supervisor, Julia Cyr; Museum Archivist, Mitchell Fidman; Community and Emergency Supports Supervisor, Natasha Hartson; Museum Curator, Matt Macintosh; and Museum Educator, Meghan Stewart.
Hosted by the Museum and Archives, we met in the recently renovated space identified for the FireSmart cultural mapping lab and exhibition, now set for July and August, 2025. We reviewed the research proposal and grant, the ethics review process, and timelines for onboarding the research team, student and community workshops, extending the literature review, setting up community participation, publicizing the project and the mapping sessions taking place in the museum and in neighborhood venues, analyzing and sharing the data, and noting the culminating exhibition/symposium with additional partnership support from the Kamloops Art Gallery and the university.
The latter half of the meeting focused on refining and signing the Community Research Agreement to ensure ongoing collaboration and co-creation, remaining true to the research proposed but also open to improvisation or new directions when mutually beneficial opportunities arise.
A master’s student, Lana Fine (Bachelor of Social Work, MA in Human Rights & Social Justice), has been hired as a research fellow, and two undergraduate RAs are being recruited.
The research co-PIs, Cheryl Gladu and Will Garrett-Petts, are in the process of completing an ethics review submission to TRU’s Ethics Review Board and will be calling together the TRU-based research group for their second meeting in the near future. In the meantime, all those directly involved in the community-engaged research are completing their ethics certification, TCPS 2: CORE, in accord with Canada’s Tri-Agency policy. The CORE course consists of nine modules and a knowledge consolidation exercise: tcps2core.ca
For information on the Kamloops FireSmart Program: https://www.kamloops.ca/public-safety/emergency-management/wildfire-interface-fires/firesmart
The research team gratefully acknowledges funding for this project through the Wawanesa Insurance Wildfire Community Resilience Research grant. Wawanesa Insurance is leading the charge as the first insurance company to invest in wildfire-related research at Thompson Rivers University (TRU), strategically located in one of the world’s most active hotspots for wildfire response.