Entering new waters

2023 in numbers

2023 was an exciting year for us.

Early in the year, we were invited to participate in a wildfire preparedness fair by the Napa Valley Grapegrowers Association. Recognizing that our highly effective live-action workshops can be time-consuming for both facilitators and participants, we challenged ourselves to develop a rapid learning experience with lower barriers to entry.

This approach proved transformative for us and for the people we serve!

Wildfire Board Game

We set ourselves the goal of designing a learning experience that met the following objectives:

In 5-15 minutes, invite curiosity, incite one Aha!, and convert interest into: * Motivation to take one action to improve household preparedness * Inspiration to engage in preparedness * Love of CCL’s conceptual approach to preparedness education * Trust in CCL’s ability to deliver on promises.

and aimed to serve these audiences:

Target participants are adults, or adults accompanied by children, who: *Are attending a community event in order to get information and enjoy a stimulating hour or two * Are concerned about home and/or workplace preparedness * View preparedness with dread and lack of enthusiasm * May have been evacuated, and may have experienced personal loss, because of wildfire

After consulting with our educational game design experts, we developed the Wildfire Board Game.

This board game is played by one or more members of a household, and takes players through an entire wildfire experience, starting with an evacuation warning or order, going through 2-6 weeks of being evacuated, and ending with the first 3 days after being allowed back. After playing the game, players have thought through a basic evacuation and return plan for *their* household, and have learned about the major risks and most important best practices for wildfire preparedness.

The game was an immediate success! Even in the first playthrough, it sparked much discussion and enthusiasm in players, and everyone walked away motivated to take care of one of their preparedness concerns when they got home.

Here are some our first players at that first Grapegrowers’ event:

Eddy Gomez and colleagues from the Town of Yountville enjoy a brisk conversation occasioned by playing the game.

The exposure and connections from that first event led to more invites to more events, which, in turn, led to more invites. In the end, we attended 10 events, and played 145 games with at least 296 members of the public. That adds up to 93 hours of individual thinking and learning!

The game design evolved between events, and we quickly started offering both English and Spanish versions:

The game board is bilingual, takeaways are language-specific.

Without exception, everyone who plays the game becomes engaged and is excited. Players not only wax enthusiastic about what they can do to prepare for wildfire but also praise the game. Here are some of their comments:

“This is great! I’m a retired firefighter, and it’s even making me think. I learned something!”

— Scott T. Parkhurst, retired firefighter

“We were talking about you all week! ‘Itʼs the coolest thing, you learn if youʼre really prepared.ʼ”

— Christine McMillan, Napa District Attorneyʼs Office

“The game works well with challenge tiles setting up both the likely actions a family might take, along with likely outcomes with a degree of chance built in making it a fun interactive experience for all ages.”

— Roberta MacIntyre, Fire Safe Sonoma, former Sonoma County Fire Marshal

“I think this kind of training is the way of the future. We’re past the point of pdfs and PowerPoints.”

— Jonathan Niksa, Napa Fire Safe Council

We designed the game for adults, incorporating sophisticated concepts and learning objectives. But we have happily discovered that children are captivated by it, and frequently impress us with their deep interest, curiosity and understanding.

The game, with its cute little game pieces, is sometimes taken to be a children’s activity. We have even had to ask to be relocated from a “kid’s fun zone.” Nonetheless, we often find that adults are quickly drawn in when their children start engaging. Especially, when a child turns to a parent for answers, such as, “Mom, do we have go-bags packed?”:

Children pull adults into the game.

Booth traffic attests to the game’s success in attracting attention and getting engagement. People spend 15-30 minutes at our booth, and we often have people waiting to play.

We are typically busy for the whole time of an event, and often longer. The numbers bear this out: Across the 10 events, all our game boards are in play approximately 75% of the time of the event. If we eliminate poorly-attended events (as assessed by vendors and confirmed by organizers), we play at capacity: Our boards are busy 98% of the time! Regardless of attendance numbers, we have yet to be able to pack up when the event is supposed to end, and are always the last to leave:

Still educating the public after others go home.

Here is a quick compilation video to give you a sense of an event:

Café Game

But we didn’t stop with a successful board game.

One of the invites we received was to provide edutainment at a Kiwanis Club breakfast meeting.

Obviously, the single-household board game wouldn’t work for a 1-hour group event. Instead, we sought to create a game that could engage a group of people at once.

Enter the Wildfire Café Game.

Like the Board Game, the Café Game takes players through a wildfire. But where the Board Game emphasizes thinking about household preparedness, the Café Game stresses social resilience and talking about how neighbors would work together. Players sit in groups of 4-8, imagining that they are part of a neighborhood. The challenges the game poses are designed to be solvable only through cooperation among neighbors, or even across neighborhoods.

Here’s what one “neighborhood” looked like:

Neighbors puzzle over what they need, and how they can help their neighbors

We played six simultaneous games at the Kiwanis club breakfast. The game was extremely well received, with all thirty participants expressing their enthusiasm and appreciation for the insights they gained:

“[I] learned a lot of stuff. This was awesome!”

“It was very well done and fun!”

“I am going home and prepare a go-bag for myself and my dog. Thank you for the great advice!!”

Disaster Preparedness Puzzles

Then, for our 2023 Holiday Calendar offering, we decided to experiment with very short learning experiences that would be interesting, engaging and fun.

We created a series of nine small puzzles, each intended to bring attention to one piece of disaster preparedness information. We posted these on our website, to our mailing list, and on LinkedIn.

People have responded very enthusiastically, and ask for more puzzles as well as for more challenging puzzles. This was the most visited puzzle of the series:

Word scramble: The 5 Pests of Dirseats Mangemeant.

Cultivating Volunteers & Partners

In addition to growing our learning program, we expanded our team.

We met Robin Parvin when she played the Board Game in Healdsburg. She was so inspired by it that she has joined us as a community trainer.

Lindsay Burr, one of our advisors, stepped up her involvement and is now the Chair of our founding board.

We also added three new advisors: Claus Raasted, an expert in innovation and audience engagement, Gary Milante, an expert in behavioral economics and games, and Luke Beckman, an expert in disaster community preparedness.

Here’s the Learning Team (aka Team Ducky) in action:

Making disaster preparedness fun!

Our success at getting people’s attention and keeping them engaged got the attention of other organizations. Over the course of the year, we developed a strong relationship with Napa Valley COAD, and connected with several other organizations in the North Bay disaster community.

Sharing Knowledge & Raising Funds

While most of our resources were occupied with getting people excited about disaster preparedness, we didn’t neglect other important areas.

Garett, our design lead, attended After the Fire’s 2023 Wildfire Leadership Summit, where he spoke with many in the wildfire community. During breaks, he and Robin offered attendees a chance to play the board game.

We continued our Research Roundtable series with another Roundtable conversation on Leadership Studies & Role-playing Games. This led to organizing a panel at the International Leadership Association‘s annual conference (a follow-up to our ILA roundtable in 2022).

Our Founder, Susanne, presented at the 2023 Hero Roundtable conference, drawing on her 2017 Hurricane Harvey research to highlight the vital role of daily actions in developing the mindset needed to rise to heroic action in a crisis. (She’s happy to report hearing ripples of her talk at the conference and in subsequent LinkedIn posts!)

Lastly, we raised $7806 in a fundraising campaign inspired by Susanne taking on the challenge of swimming across the Golden Gate:

With heartfelt gratitude