This past January, wildfires swept through large parts of Los Angeles, destroying thousands of homes and businesses in places like Altadena and the Pacific Palisades. Many organizations and individuals stepped up to help communities affected, including local service corps programs like the Conservation Corps of Long Beach (CCLB), Los Angeles Conservation Corps (LACC), and San Jose Conservation Corps (SJCC) that all deployed members to help respond to the fires.

A new Center for Environment, Community, and Equity (CECE) whitepaper, co-authored by CECE Director and SIS professor Dana Fisher, uses the service corps programs responding to the LA wildfires as a case study for exploring how these types of programs motivate young people to help communities recover from disaster.

To learn more, we asked Fisher a few questions about what types of young people serve in these service corps programs, the importance of workforce development in motivating young people to join, and how AU’s DataCorps Graduate Fellows Program is involved in the evaluation research.

What led you to study service corps programs and their disaster response efforts? Why did you focus this paper on the LA wildfires in particular?

I’ve been studying service corps programs and the ways that they are training young people and serving as workforce development for a number of years. I was initially doing work looking at how service corps groups were expanding the work they were doing around disaster response, recovery, resilience and emission reductions. One of the things that was really interesting to me in the work was looking at how young people were getting deployed after extreme events, particularly because many of the extreme events we’re seeing today are climate exacerbated, which means climate change is causing these extreme events to occur more frequently and with more severity—just like the recent floods north of DC in which a bunch of people had to be rescued very close to my house. So, the work originally was around these different ways that people were thinking about climate change and adaptation, which is really all about disaster preparedness and disaster response. But with the shift this past January after the Trump administration took office, we redirected the work so it’s not about all types of climate work but instead focuses specifically on disaster response, recovery, and resilience, which continues to be supported by the agencies that fund our work.

At the same time in January, a huge area in LA county burned down because of multiple wildfires that were driven by climate-exacerbated extreme events. We had already been out looking at service corps programs working in California, so I was curious because I know that a number of these programs redeploy people who are working on other projects to help communities respond to and recover from disasters. I started looking into whether there were folks who were doing this type of work and thought that this would be a great opportunity to look at young people who got deployed to do work on a climate-exacerbated disaster and support the communities affected.

What did your research tell you about who is working in these service corps programs and why they decided to serve?

When we started doing this work, I had the sense that different programs would be more focused on young people who had college degrees and who were using the program before they went to graduate school, but what we found in LA was that, overwhelmingly, people who participate in these youth-focused service corps programs tend to not be as educated as some other programs. Many don’t have high school degrees, and they can get their GED while serving. The folks are also predominantly Latino, which makes sense because the LA population is predominantly Latino and the program draws from local people, and they tend to be more male than female, likely because the work involves a lot of manual labor like clearing trails and brush to create spaces that would be too wide for fires to jump.

In terms of motivations, in this case, it was a lot of people who were interested in skills training, resume building, environmental interests—those were the top three. Which is interesting because that’s a lot of what this idea of workforce development is! It’s about giving people training so they have opportunities and entry points into work.

I also had thought that most of the young people in the programs would have some experience with disasters since they’re local to California, but it was only around half who reported having experience with either flooding or wildfires. I was really surprised by that because I thought everyone would feel like they were affected, but I learned that it was more localized: many people were affected by the smoke but not by the fire itself. So, I thought that might be a motivation, but in our focus groups we learned that people were very job motivated, especially given this very hard job market right now. A lot of them had been looking for jobs, and this was one of their only choices.

What insights does this paper provide about how to engage young people in supporting their communities after natural disasters?

We all talk about how we need to have more of a civic mindset and be more willing to serve and work for our communities, but one of the big findings here is that the best way to get people to work for their communities is to give them a living wage. These folks are given a living wage and healthcare so that they can do the work as their main job. When we count on people being civically engaged as an aside to what they’re doing for their work, it ends up being the most privileged folks doing that. A lot of people don’t have time to serve on the weekends because they have to work. Whereas here, we’re seeing people with lower levels of educational attainment and lower socioeconomic status who are doing this work, and they can do it because they’re paid to do it.

That’s one of the beauties of workforce development: it gives people a salary and living wage. And some of these programs help pay back loans for college or have incentives if you go to college after this. When we ask people in these programs what they’re planning to do after service, 40 percent of them say they plan on continuing education. A lot of them are using the corps as a springboard to more education or to go back and finish their education.

The other insight is that as we see disasters hit around the country—and unfortunately we have seen flooding hit all over the country in the past month—and as FEMA is less actively involved in supporting communities, these kind of programs where you have local people there who are trained to help and prepare the community for the disaster before it happens are going to become more and more important.

What is the DataCorps Fellowship program at AU and how were the fellows involved in this research?

The DataCorps Graduate Fellows Program, funded by AmeriCorps, trains graduate students to do the kind of evaluations that we did in this project. This summer was our inaugural summer where we had three DataCorps fellows who traveled with us to three sites to evaluate these programs. This white paper comes from evaluations that we had done in the spring, but this summer we went back and worked with one of the teams and did a focus group, surveys, and site visits to expand the research. We were in Jefferson Parish, outside of LA that had been hit by hurricanes, and in Utah in a rural area that faces extreme heat.

The data corps fellows help us with the evaluations we’re doing that get written up into white papers like this one and they also each come in with their own research question: one had a question about training, one about information diffusion and how info is shared in these service corps programs, and one about water governance. They are each writing their own reports, which will be published on the CECE clearinghouse. We are hoping they will get to do some briefings with the folks who were involved—they were originally going to present them to AmeriCorps but unfortunately that part of AmeriCorps was shut down with the cuts from the federal government. But we’re hopeful that they will still be able to share them. We are funded for another year, so we will have DataCorps 2026, and we have funding for six fellows so we are hoping the program will grow.

How are you hoping to continue and/or expand this work in the future?

AmeriCorps may or may not continue to be funded, but we are hoping that we can work with them another year and help them because they’re very excited to use these evaluative tools to help them better evaluate who is serving in these programs and how to make their experiences better.

We’re also talking with some private foundations, because these types of local service corps programs will continue, the question is, who will be funding and running them. And as a social scientist, for me the biggest question is how they are standardized—because standardization is key for making them effective. And we only know that if we can collect data and understand and evaluate it, which is the work we’re doing and the work the fellows are learning to do.

One of the things we’ll be doing this year is tracking all the people we’ve studied so far to see what happens to them next. That’s the important question: does this experience of going through a workforce development program like this lead them to have different types of jobs in disaster mitigation, environmental stewardship, and the like? We hope to continue doing that.

Another idea for this fall is to go to these areas that had disasters this summer like Texas, North Carolina, Vermont and New Mexico—and do the same type of evaluation there.