In the fall of 2017, Lupe Duran sat overwhelmed with loss and uncertainty in an empty community college classroom in Santa Rosa. The Tubbs Fire had just killed 22 people and decimated thousands of homes in the city, including his own.
A stream of questions weighed on the 23-year-old: Could he afford to stay in Santa Rosa and continue school? Whose couch would he sleep on tonight?
As Duran pondered his future, one thing became clear: He didn’t want to feel completely powerless before a fire anymore. A welding student at the time, it occurred to him he should become a firefighter, like the professionals he’d seen save people’s homes.
“It was a feeling of wanting to do more, wanting to actually help and give back to the community,” said Duran, now 28.
This would prove easier said than done. California’s firefighting ranks remain disproportionately white, and male. In recent decades, agencies across the state have started to address common barriers for underrepresented communities, including the time and cost of training to qualify for many full-time job openings.
But for Duran, what got him on his way was a comprehensive workforce development program that seeks to diversify the profession.
The FIRE Foundry, a nonprofit collaboration of the Marin County Fire Department and local organizations and universities, offers free educational services and support aimed at propelling women and people of color into sustainable careers in the fire service.
Participants get a paid job in fire prevention with the county, so they can afford to fully engage in the one-year program, which covers the cost of fire academy prerequisite classes, counseling services, housing at fire stations, hands-on skills training, mentorship and more.
‘They’ll see that it’s like the perfect job’
On a recent morning, Duran and about a dozen other FIRE Foundry recruits participated in a mock rescue training in a forested area near Mount Tamalpais. Wearing firefighting uniforms, the team practiced how to use ropes and carabiners to help pull hikers who fall into ravines back to safety.
Recruits took turns rappelling off a vertical drop about 50 feet high, while connected to a rope system they had set up around a redwood tree. Once at the bottom, they helped a colleague playing the “victim” start the tough climb up the rocky wall, while the rest of the team pulled on the rope from the top.
“I’m hoping that, by showing them all the aspects of what we do in fire service, be it rope rescue or wildland fires, they’ll see that it’s like the perfect job,” said Marin County Fire Captain Rick Wonneberger, one of the instructors supervising the training. “The FIRE Foundry program gives people who may never have considered a career in public safety, who never had a direct in with it, a way to get their feet wet, see if they really like it.”
Most of the calls U.S. fire departments get are not about fires, but about medical emergencies. Medical aid comprised more than 70% of those emergency calls in 2021, while actual fires were just 4%, according to the National Fire Protection Association.
Today, many job openings in the field are for firefighter paramedics or emergency medical technicians (EMTs). The expense and years it can take to get certified are prohibitive for candidates with lower incomes and less time to spend training and studying, such as caretakers of young children — often women — or those already working full-time in other occupations.
Also, the profession has a strong family tradition — children and other relatives of firefighters apply with a leg up on cultural knowledge, plus valuable information on how to pass tests and requirements, according to experts on diversity in the fire service.
To those on the outside, the process can look intimidating and unfamiliar. This helps explain why a profession that historically has been mostly white and male has largely stayed that way: Nearly all the 307,000 firefighters in the country are men, and about 85% identify as white, according to the most recent estimates by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The agency does not publish demographic information about the occupation at the state level. While a number of statistics point to a more racially and ethnically diverse firefighting workforce in California, diversity experts said fire departments have more work to do to better reflect the communities they are sworn to serve.
“We’ve made some progress, but we have such a long way to go,” said Reginald Freeman, with the International Association of Fire Chiefs. He added that he became a champion for diversity, inclusion and belonging after experiencing intense mistreatment as an African American while at his first firefighter job in Mississippi.
Freeman stuck it out. And a challenge throughout his more than 22 years of service, he said, has been the erroneous notion among fire ranks that they must compromise quality in pursuit of candidates from different backgrounds.
“That’s malarkey. You can have a great diverse applicant pool and not ‘lower your standards,’ to join the profession,” said Freeman, the fire chief in Oakland, who is set to retire next month. “What we are trying to do is increase the standard of equity, social justice, and rightful access to these great jobs.”
Increasing diversity in California’s firefighting workforce
In California, where white and Latino workers comprise similar proportions of the labor force at about 40% each, white firefighters continue to be overrepresented while less than a third are Latino, according to U.S. Census estimates.
In 2021, nearly 64% of the state’s firefighters identified as white. Other groups, such as Asians and women, together totaled less than 7% of the firefighting workforce.
