Fire Recovery Consulting

Black Forest Together has created The Phoenix Program – A Disaster Recovery Tutorial

The Phoenix Program is intended to assist communities affected by, or preparing for, disaster in the planning and implementation of sustainable recovery activities. This Program is a plug and play application intended to accelerate recovery activities. Its concept is founded in six years of “Lessons Learned” and practical experiences of the Board of Directors and staff of Black Forest Together.

Black Forest Together is experienced in planning and executing sustainable, long-term recovery operations for a community which is either planning for or has experienced a natural disaster.

Communities are generally ill-prepared and inexperienced to initiate recovery activities. They will struggle to

• coalesce a leadership team,
• develop a functional organization to plan recovery operations,
• identify community needs,
• understand the scope and complexity of recovery operations,
• plan, coordinate and resource a comprehensive and sustainable recovery plan.

Black Forest Together has developed a “turn key” consultative model that provides

• recovery plans,
• organizational structure and By-Laws
• filing with the IRS as a 501(c) charitable non-profit organization
• communication methodologies and
• a myriad of job descriptions, policies and procedures that can be exported to, and implemented by, any community in a natural disaster recovery mode.

The purpose of this model is to give community leaders the tools to minimize the time for the implementation of recovery operations. It mitigates the “what the heck are we to do” anxiety allowing leadership to act with a sense of purpose and confidence in communicating with and serving their community.  The seminal lesson learned is that recovering communities will have to fend for themselves once the responder organizations move on to the next catastrophe and the media consider your circumstance “old news”. Recovery operations, particularly from fire in a forested or wilderness area, may take twenty years or more. The Phoenix Program provides a means of planning for extended recovery operations.