Editor’s Note: As of September 9, 2025, the Flat Fire near Sisters, Oregon, has been 100% contained. Magic Canoe centers stories of community mobilization, of replicable, scalable, on-the-ground actions and solutions in Salmon Nation. The development in the following story, as originally captured on Oregon Public Radio’s Think Out Loud, exemplifies this transformational work.
Since it broke out two weeks ago, the Flat Fire burning two miles northeast of Sisters has burned more than 23,000 acres. The wildfire destroyed five homes, threatened hundreds of others, and prompted evacuation orders that have since been lifted or reduced in Jefferson and Deschutes Counties.
Although the fire isn’t yet fully contained, the focus in the Sisters community has shifted to recovery. Those efforts are being led by Citizens4Community, a nonprofit that aims to build community in Sisters by convening opportunities for civic engagement, collaboration, and social connection among residents, including helping them become more fire-wise.
This past spring, the nonprofit organized community forums to educate residents about fire insurance and wildfire preparedness. The nonprofit has recently created a list of resources for how to help fire victims, emergency responders, local businesses, and other nonprofits impacted by the Flat Fire. It also helped another Central Oregon nonprofit, NeighborImpact, set up a Flat Fire relief fund and reached out to other nonprofits to learn from their experiences leading long-term recovery needs for communities devastated by wildfires.
Citizens4Community Executive Director Kellen Klein joins us to share more details about community building in Sisters and its recovery needs.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Since it broke out two weeks ago, the Flat Fire near Sisters has burned more than 23,000 acres. It’s destroyed more than five homes, threatened hundreds of others and prompted evacuations. With the fire 97% contained, the focus in Sisters has shifted to recovery. Those efforts are being coordinated partly by Citizens4Community, a nonprofit that aims to build community in Sisters. Kellen Klein is the executive director of the nonprofit. He joins us now. Welcome to the show.
Kellen Klein: Thanks for having me.
Miller: How are you and your family doing as containment for this Flat Fire gets close to 100%?
Klein: Thank you for asking. Yeah, we are doing well. I think our family is safe. Our home was never truly threatened. We live within city limits and I think, along with a lot of the rest of the community, we’re sort of feeling a combination of immense gratitude to our first responders. And a little bit maybe of trepidation about what comes next and what the recovery will look like.
Miller: Well, I want to talk about that, but I thought we could go back a little bit just to get some of your history. Why did your family move to Sisters, I think it was three years ago, from Portland?
Klein: Yeah, so we actually used to live in the prior guest’s, Senator Lieber’s district. And we started coming out to Central Oregon during the pandemic, just trying to find a place to get some fresh air with our kids without having to get on a plane. And started making some friends here and making more friends here, and before we knew it, we felt like we had a more tight knit community in Sisters than we had in Portland. We were really interested in a small, tight knit town where we could create our village, if you will, a great place to raise our family. So that, combined with 300 days of sunshine a year was really appealing and it’s totally proven true. We’ve just found a wonderful community here.
Miller: What do you mean by the word “community?”
Klein: Yes, great question. We define our community as anyone who calls Sisters home. When we think about Citizens4Communities’ service area, we look beyond city limits to those who live in more rural parts of Deschutes County as well. Anyone who comes to Sisters to buy their groceries, to go to events, that’s how we define community. But on a more personal basis, I define community as those that I can rely on to have a great quality of life and those who help me feel like I belong in the place where I live.
Miller: And you’re saying that in a short number of months or maybe just a handful of years, you felt more of a sense of that, of everything you’ve just been describing, in Sisters than you did in Southwest Portland.
Klein: Absolutely, and not to dig on or insult our friends on the other side of the mountains or anything like that, but I think there’s something inherent about living in a small town where you can serendipitously run into the same faces on the street every day. It makes it a lot easier to cultivate those deep and trusting relationships that are really critical to having a sense of place and a sense of community.
Miller: What’s the big idea behind the nonprofit Citizens4Community?
Klein: Yeah, so we work to foster a more connected community in Sister’s country, as we like to call it, Sisters and surrounding areas, by encouraging civility, collaboration, civic engagement, and social connection. We got our start at a time when there was quite a bit of toxic discourse in town. And our founders came together and felt that we needed to remind our citizenry how to disagree without being disagreeable.
Over the eight to nine years since we were founded, we’ve really evolved into more of an umbrella community building organization. We know that we’re not going to feel incentivized to work together to roll up our sleeves and solve hard problems if we aren’t just in a relationship with one another already. So we focus a lot on different events and programs to bring people together. Just get to know your neighbor, so that when life gets hard, when things get tough, we already have those relationships established and we can work together to solve them.
Miller: Can you tell us about one of the workshops you held in the spring? This was about being fire-wise.
Klein: Yes, so twice a year we host community forums that draw 100 to 150 people and we also livestream them, and they’re always focused on hot topics facing the town. Wildfire in Sister’s country is one of those ever present challenges that is always back of mind, especially as we head into the summer months. We like to refer to August as “smoke season” out here.
So we felt it was prudent to get ahead of the game a bit this year, and bring together some of our local emergency managers and civic leaders to talk about wildfire in Sister’s country. It proved that there was so much to talk about that we split it into a two-part series. The first was called “Are We Ready?” and that was focused more on our community’s individual and collective preparedness for wildfire. And part two was called “Are We Covered?” and that was more focused on the insurance implications and challenges that we face in the WUI, or Wildland Urban Interface, as we call the place where we live.
Miller: Well, those are obviously huge questions and it goes house to house. It goes from defensible space to defensible space and individual households’ policies in terms of coverage. But just for that first one, “Are we ready?” – how would you answer that collectively?
Klein: Yeah, I think one of the takeaways for the group was that when it comes to our emergency management and first responders, and their coordination and preparation, we are kind of a shining light for the state of Oregon and beyond. I’ve heard that testimony from emergency responders in other areas and folks that came into our region to combat the Flat Fire. But when it comes to individual awareness and even neighborhood or community level awareness of our citizenry, maybe that level of understanding and preparedness for wildfire wasn’t there as much.
We’ve had a massive influx in population over the past five years. Many people have come from urban areas or other parts of the country that aren’t as prone to wildfire. So there’s a pretty steep learning curve to understand what is necessary to be prepared for wildfire here and also just a recognition that we’re only as strong as our weakest link. It doesn’t matter how much preparedness I do on my home. If my neighbor has done none, chances are there’s a lot greater threat to all of us. So there’s a level of working together that really needs to be coordinated amongst our community members.
Miller: What about insurance for the second half of that workshop? What most stood out to you from what you heard from residents?
Klein: I think one of the biggest takeaways was there’s a lot of fear. We have already seen various insurance providers leave our community entirely, and those that are remaining are terrified of even shopping around for a lower rate because chances are if they leave one, they might not ever get it back again. A lot of folks are stuck in their homes and unable to move because they know they won’t be able to get insurance on their new place. So even for those folks who might be looking to downsize or move somewhere more, even within town that’s more affordable, they can’t do it because of the insurance question.
Some of those challenges, unfortunately, are out of the control of a small community like ours. But one key takeaway that we heard from the insurance wholesalers, local brokers, and our emergency managers who were participating in that panel was that we need to work together to make our collective community as attractive as possible to insurers. That means home hardening, that means defensible space, that means more collaborative efforts within the community and within our neighborhoods. That means fire-wise certifications, or IBHS certifications is another one that has to do with fire preparedness for homes. The more that we can work together to do that, the more insurers are going to look at Sisters as an attractive place to insure despite the threats around us.
Miller: Do you think that those two workshops, and more broadly that the other kinds of community building and community fostering work you’ve been doing, do you think they had any tangible effects over the last month when the Flat Fire hit?
Klein: I like to think so, yes. And we’ve heard testimonials from our mayor, from our fire chief, who said things like that the efforts that Citizens4Community did to drive awareness really helped catalyze some additional defensible space efforts and home hardening efforts within the community that probably helped save some of these homes. I was chatting to the fire chief earlier this week who said that they’ve seen almost a doubling in the amount of home wildfire resilience assessments that they have been providing to the community. That’s correlation not causation, but I like to think that some of those can be attributed to our forums.
But I think even more broadly than that, it got people talking at the neighborhood level, at the citywide level about what we can collectively do and what we can do within our individual households to be prepared for fire. And some of that is just creating opportunities for us to get to know our neighbors, for us to get to know our local organizations. And creating those more tight-knit networks ahead of time, at least for me, has proven extremely valuable as we’ve now been sort of shifting into relief and recovery mode, and figuring out how to deploy resources and where.
Miller: So let’s turn to that resilience and recovery. What is recovery going to look like coming out of the Flat Fire?
Klein: We are luckier than many other communities. Out of 827, I believe it was, homes that were either within the fire perimeter or immediately adjacent, only five burned. And that is a testament to our local fire districts, to all the personnel that came in from across our state and beyond. We are so grateful for their support. Also, we got lucky in a lot of ways. We were the only major fire in Oregon at the time, so we had 1,200 personnel here fighting it within a couple of days. We had air attack resources, etc.
But even if only five homes burned, what I’m learning is that there is a long tail of recovery. And God bless our emergency management systems, but they’re designed for emergencies. There comes a time when their services sort of pivot and need to shift to other emergencies, and the community is left a bit more to its own devices to figure out how to support community members impacted by that fire in the long term. So that’s kind of what we’re grappling with as an organization right now.
We’ve been coordinating efforts within the local nonprofit community, but also having conversations with our emergency responders, and those with various services and resources, time, treasure, talent within the community . . . to figure out, OK, what is recovery going to look like, what needs can we anticipate over time? And who is it that’s going to be responsible for supporting those community members who are really integral to the long-term future of our town?
Miller: One of the points that came out last week when we had conversations about the the aftermath of the Labor Day fires in Southern Oregon, the McKenzie River area and Detroit, is that a lot of the people who have had the money to come back or to rebuild had more money to begin with or it was their second home. It wasn’t even their first home, and they were talking about some of the growing tensions between year-rounders and vacationers or second home people. I wonder if that’s something that you see in Sisters and how you think about that in the context of a cohesive community?
Klein: Definitely. We certainly see that tension here. It existed before the fires came. I believe the latest data that I’ve seen is that our vacancy rate in Sisters is about 20%, which means that 20% of homes are not occupied more than halftime. So that basically means 20% of our homes are vacation rentals, second homes, or third or fourth homes. And yeah, that tension has been high in terms of the cost of living. And unfortunately, with many natural disasters, they kind of exacerbate the differences between the haves and the have nots. Those with the means are able to rebuild or chances are they were more insured, but those without the means have a much tougher time rebuilding. That might mean moving away, that might mean they may be forced to close their business.
There’s a lot of these challenges that we anticipate will probably be exacerbated, so we are, right now, trying to even just get a handle on what those needs are. There’s not really a pre-designed mechanism for getting an inventory of what the needs are of our community post-fire. We’re hoping to help coordinate that so that we can at least start getting an understanding of who needs their fences fixed, who needs help with clean up, who needs help with rebuilding, who needs to find a new place to stay. Then we can sort of be a mouthpiece for those people and advocate for greater support, whether it’s from our elected officials or the philanthropic community, or just rallying support within our community and all the volunteers that we have here.
So we’re trying to get ahead of those tensions, but we’re certainly mindful that they can impact the overall sense of community and sense of place, if suddenly it’s becoming more stratified and unequal.
Miller: We just have about a minute and a half left, but how do you think about community building at a time when politically there are unbelievably stark divisions?
Klein: My number one rule of civil discourse is don’t talk about civil discourse. So what we’ve found is that when you try to get people to be civil with one another and they feel like it’s being shoved down their throats, they’re not really interested in engaging. But when you can keep the conversation and the activities focused either on no-agenda-type things like outdoor movie nights, roller skating nights, community sing-alongs, and people get to know one another as neighbors first, then when things get hard, they see each other as neighbors and not as that crazy person down the street with that political sign in their front yard.
So we try to do a lot of that, building the relationships before we need them. And then at the same time, we try to keep the focus on local solutions. We’re a community where most people are living here by choice because they want to. And we try to keep that top of mind when having these really difficult conversations. Sure, we’re a politically diverse community, but when we keep the focus local, we tend to roll up our sleeves and solve hard problems together. I’m really grateful for that.
Miller: Kellen, thanks very much.
Klein: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Kellen Klein is the executive director of Citizens4Community, a nonprofit based in Sisters.
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