Workforce Development Efforts Track Wildfire Responses

In the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office (CCCCO), the drive for innovation is alive and well today, as it has been since the inception of the higher education system in 1907. The CCCCO’s response to the Los Angeles wildfires of 2025 is just another example of its dedication to providing its students with the best job- and career-focused opportunities available.

Even as the fires were spreading across northern LA County, the CCC Chancellor, Dr. Sonya Christian, was in Los Angeles, meeting with leadership at the schools most affected by the conflagration: Glendale Community College, Santa Monica College, and Pasadena City College. She was seeking information about how the colleges might respond to the crisis, both in the instant moment (as the fires burned) and subsequent to their containment. Her conclusion? California’s community colleges are the exact right entity to provide the workforce that will help the city and region recover. And her strategy to accomplish that goal is equally innovative: find the schools that are already training for occupations related to the rebuilding project and invest in extending their activities. The result: meet the CCC’s LA Fire Recovery Community Colleges Programs, aka Rebuild LA.

Step One: Identify Available Resources

The initial push for the CCCs (and for all entities seeking to help) was to identify who needed help and what kinds of help were available. Almost immediately, Pasadena City College (PCC) offered the Rose Bowl facility as an Emergency Command Center and a fire support hub. That decision gave the first 4,000 responders a place to suit up and stay informed about day-to-day firefighting activities.

Firefighter supports, however, were just one aspect of community college support efforts. There are 19 CCCs in LA County, and Chancellor Christian realized that all of them offered a panoply of relief and response opportunities, regardless of their proximity to the flames. Coordinating their contributions became the initial focus of the Rebuild LA project.

• Of the 19, the three colleges closest to the fires – Glendale, Santa Monica, and Pasadena – had the highest number of affected people. Hundreds of students, staff, and faculty all lived or worked within the fire perimeters, and many lost their homes and jobs. Other schools also had personnel who were affected by the disaster for the same reasons. Finding food, shelter, transportation, and medical resources for all who were directly impacted was the first order of business.
• Beyond those immediate needs, the schools also had a rudimentary infrastructure in place upon which to build out the industrial supports the communities would need to repair and rebuild. Specifically, the construction industry was clearly going to boom once the fires were contained. Whole neighborhoods would require reconstruction, from relaying underground water and electrical systems to replacing the homes and commercial spaces that had been destroyed. Very early on, Chancellor Christian began conversations with individual schools to determine which had programs already in place to provide the relevant workforce needed to accomplish the rebuild projects. Schools that had other resources and which could provide a foundation for future occupational training capacities were also explored for the short-, mid-, and long-term opportunities they might offer.
• Not least, the Chancellor needed reliable funding to underwrite the rebuild initiative that was emerging. The ‘Rebuild LA’ strategy would develop in tandem with the CCC’s “Vision 2030,” which provides a roadmap for the development of the Community College system as a whole. (Updated in July 2025, the revised Vision 2030 incorporated lessons learned prior to the fires, as well as those that arose from the challenges that the fires ultimately posed.) At the center of both projects – Vision 2030 and Rebuild LA – is the concept of ‘access,’ and, as of Summer 2025, the CCC system doubled down on its goal to ensure that as many people and entities as possible would have access to all the resources that are embodied within this higher education endeavor.

Step Two: Catalyze Existing Effort

Remarkably, the fire recovery situation in LA facilitated the actuation of a long-term goal of the CCCs. For several years, that system has been working to streamline community college programming to maximize its value at each school while reducing unnecessary duplication across the CCC network. Consequently, many individual colleges have been developing high-quality programming that meets very specific industrial workforce demands. Chancellor Christian approached these schools and asked if they could ramp up these specific focused activities to meet the newly emerging demands, too. She also inquired about sharing training practices with other schools, so that the overall training capacity would be multiplied to meet the soon-to-be-explosive demand for workers in these jobs. The Chancellor’s actions as the crisis unfolded jump-started the recovery effort before the flames were fully contained.

At the same time, the State of California came through with critical funding for this specific rebuilding project. In its 2025-2026 budget for the community colleges, the State allocated a total of $5,000,000 to be distributed in accordance with the Los Angeles Rebuild criteria. Over these next two years, the CCCs will build standard and CTE (Career and Technical Education) programs to respond to urgent, LA-based workforce needs, including retraining and upskilling capacities for current workers. The construction, emergency response, and infrastructure sectors are the most notable beneficiaries, as jobs in those occupations will be in very high demand.

In addition to covering costs for subject matter training, the funding also offers stipends of up to $1,400 per student for support services aimed at un- and underemployed learners. The three schools that are most affected by the fire will receive dedicated funding to move them quickly into ‘production’ mode:

• Pasadena City College will receive $1,000,000 for the LA Rebuild project and another $500,00 for the LA Rebuild Regional initiative.
• Glendale College receives $340,000 for its LA Rebuild efforts, and
• Santa Monica College is receiving $900,000 for the LA Rebuild and another $500,000 for the Regional Rebuild effort.

The CCCs will be using data collected and developed by its research arm, the Centers of Excellence, to guide the selection and implementation of training programs.

As this new year begins, these schools are already at work building out the resources they’ll need to pursue the LA Rebuild initiative. And the focus on the construction industry can’t come at a better time; even with all this contribution to building out those training and education resources, the gaps in trained labor for construction work will still prevent a fully employed sector any time soon.