In the ranks of wildland firefighters, women are typically a minority.
A Bloomington native now working in Southern Illinois hopes her new position with The Nature Conservancy will help ongoing efforts to change that.
Meredith Brown, a Normal Community High School graduate, is the first Women in Fire Coordinator for the environmental and conservation-focused nonprofit.
“I think it’s a huge step in the right direction,” Brown said in an interview with WGLT. “Right now, across any agency, usually it sits at about 10%: 10% of the folks that are actually employed are women or [identify as] non-male. That’s not a lot of people.”
Her newly-created position is charged with administering Women in Fire fellowships — overseeing a handful of participants in a two-year program aimed at diversifying the ranks of wildland firefighters.
While women have been trained in forest firefighting since the early 20th century and had broken into the ranks of most forest service fire crews by the late 1970s, the profession has remained male-dominated.
“It can be very intimidating to get into fire, especially as there’s this culture of: You have to be very macho. You have to be very strong and physically fit and mentally fit. And while that’s partially true, we need people with diverse experiences, diverse ideas, to be able to address the issues within organizations in meaningful ways,” Brown said. “If you just have the same people doing the same stuff, there’s never going to be any change.”
Brown didn’t always plan to be pushing for this change — or to be in wildfire fighting in general.
After graduating high school early, Brown said she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with her future. She decided to join Americorps National Civilian Community Corps, a program that places young adults in communities throughout the country for work on service projects.
After stints across the country, she eventually ended up in AmeriCorps St. Louis, where she began working in wildland firefighting and found it suited her. For the past three years, she was a program coordinator.
“It really tickles my ADHD — it’s so chaotic, but there’s so much noise that I’m actually able to zone-in and focus on a fire. It’s stimulating in all the right ways, it’s engaging, there’s always something going on,” she said. “I think the continued learning and the sense of community that wildland firefighting builds are the two things that have drawn me to it.”
Brown, too, said she felt an initial sense of intimidation when she began firefighting — a dangerous, physically and mentally demanding line of work — but combatted it by doing the work to standard and asking questions.
“I’m very Midwest-chatty, so I think I found it a lot less intimidating because I’m willing to ask folks things,” she said. “But I’ve definitely seen other people be very intimidated and be very scared to talk to people and open up that conversation.”
Instilling that kind of confidence into the Women in Fire fellows is one of the goals Brown has set for herself in the coordinator role, in addition to providing them an array of training and leadership opportunities ranging from wildfire academies to chainsaw certifications to on-the-ground work across the southern part of the state.
“That’s what I’m hoping to push for: More folks [having] that diversity of experience, but also being able to take that and transition it into a leadership role of some kind,” Brown said. “It doesn’t have to be the top leadership role, but even seeing somebody who’s not a man leading you as a firing boss or instructing you over the radio is a neat experience.”
The hope is to grow the program to four fellows at a time, Brown said, staggering each fellow's starting year. Much of the work will support the Shawnee National Forest.
Women in Fire fellowships are funded by the U.S. Forest Service, part of an effort to diversify its employee base. That effort coincides with an ongoing need to hire more wildland firefighters as wildfires have become larger and more frequent across the U.S. since the early 2000s.
