This project built on past programs delivering climate-risk management education for diversified, socially-disadvantaged, beginning and under-resourced growers. The project provided salient disaster risk-management education to growers traditionally underserved by insurance and risk management tools. The threat of wide-sweeping catastrophic disasters including wildfires, drought, extreme temperature swings, floods and pandemics has compounded in the last decade. Producers shared that insurance is an important investment to survive catastrophes, although beginning and small-scale producers are some of the least likely to purchase insurance.
Our project reduced the human, production and financial risks of underserved producers to climate disasters with tested strategies based on decades of training farmers. The program created resilience networks sharing farmer-to-farmer knowledge of financial recovery. The activity-driven learning model directly impacted 146 participants (85 verified producers) and indirectly impacted 829 producers through views of videos, websites and recordings. We did this through hosting 6 live workshops, creating 7 new resources/tools, 4 videos, 3 case-studies, and 18 one-on-one coaching sessions and by producing a self-paced “Financial Preparedness for Disaster” online course with 6 lessons and 23 modules. This “mini-course” supplements existing wildfire and climate courses. Activities, online evaluations and polls verified participants’ increased understanding on financial preparedness can lower climate risk.