Napa Valley Community Foundation

Long before supporting the Valley Steward Initiative, Napa Valley Community Foundation (NVCF) had been helping Napa County recover from wildfires. Napa Valley Community Foundation staff and board have spent years working alongside families rebuilding after disaster, distributing millions of dollars in recovery assistance, and witnessing the lasting impacts that wildfires leave behind. They have seen how a single fire can affect not only the people who lose homes, but entire communities grappling with economic disruption, rising insurance costs and an uncertain future.

Those experiences have led NVCF President & CEO Terence Mulligan and Chief Impact Officer Julia DeNatale to a simple conclusion: recovery matters, but resilience matters even more.

“There have been many moments when wildfire risk became very real,” Terence said, recalling the devastating fires that began in October 2017 and continued through the Glass Fire and other major incidents that followed.

“I remember how quickly everything changed,” Julia said. “One day you’re going about your normal life, and the next you’re thinking about evacuation, about neighbors, about what might be lost.”

Since 2014, NVCF has invested more than $30 million in disaster recovery, about $12 million of which was expended in the wake of the 2017 and 2020 wildfires. Nearly 70 percent of all funds that NVCF distributed following these disasters has been in the form of direct financial aid to help residents rebuild their homes and lives. Terence and Julia shared that NVCF recovery efforts generally continue for at least three to six years after each wildfire.

As the Foundation helped people recover, Julia and Terence found themselves asking a different question: What more could be done before the next disaster arrives?

“We realized we couldn’t just keep reacting,” Julia said. “We had to start thinking about how to reduce the impact before the next fire happens.”

That led them to support Napa Firewise and the Valley Stewards Initiative.

Rather than relying on a single source of funding or responsibility, the Valley Stewards Initiative brings together landowners, public agencies, nonprofit organizations and private philanthropy to address wildfire risk at a meaningful scale. For a Foundation built on the idea of collective action, the model felt familiar.

“What stood out to me is that everyone has a role to play,” Julia said.

Napa Valley Community Foundation aggregates resources from thousands of donors who care deeply about Napa County. Combining those resources, the organization can tackle challenges that no individual donor could solve alone. The Valley Stewards Initiative operates on a similar principle.

While neither Julia nor Terence has personally lost a home to wildfire, their commitment to wildfire resilience comes from years of working alongside people who have. Through NVCF’s work, they have witnessed firsthand how fires affect entire communities. Julia noted that public perception often overlooks many low- and middle-income working families who live in fire-prone areas.

“There are a lot of folks living in areas that need help with mitigation and resilience,” she said. “Those stories don’t always get told, but they’re the ones that really define how a community recovers, or doesn’t recover.”

That broader perspective shapes how they think about wildfire resilience. While the immediate images of wildfire often focus on destroyed homes, the impacts extend far beyond property lines. Wildfires disrupt Napa’s visitor economy, strain public resources, drive up insurance costs, and threaten watersheds and infrastructure.

“The perception of private benefit is outweighed by the public good,” Terence said.

That belief is one reason the Foundation has become one of Napa Firewise’s longstanding supporters. Through its Napa Valley Community Disaster Relief Fund, as well as its Donor Advised Funds, Napa Valley Community Foundation has contributed nearly half a million dollars to Firewise programs over the years.

Looking ahead, both hope the Valley Stewards Initiative can help build a culture of shared responsibility that extends to future generations.

“We’ll always have fire,” Terence said. “That’s not a risky thing to say.”

The question is whether communities can make future fires more manageable through the work they do today.

For Julia and Terence, the answer lies in collaboration — the same spirit that has helped Napa recover from disasters may ultimately help the community become more resilient before the next one begins.