Santa Rosa school trustee featured in disaster preparedness series aimed at Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders

It’s a conversation Laurie Fong has had with her daughter several times in recent years: are you prepared for the next wildfire?

Last year’s Glass fire came about a quarter-mile from Fong’s east Santa Rosa home and related evacuation orders kept her from her house for almost a week.

The 2017 Tubbs fire forced her to leave her residence for a similar period as she and other school board members dealt with the aftermath of the deadly wildfire, which razed the Hidden Valley Satellite School in northeast Santa Rosa.

By now, Fong, a Santa Rosa City Schools board trustee and retired Montgomery High principal, is accustomed to having to evacuate at a moment’s notice, she said. She keeps a go bag ready in the office near her bedroom just in case.

“As all this was happening, she was checking in with me,” Fong said of her daughter, Kelly Fong Rivas, the chief of staff for Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg.

In preparation for this year’s wildfire season, the pair were featured in a “Talks with Mom” video series intended to serve as a model for Asian American and Pacific Islander Californians who are navigating conversations about natural disaster preparedness with their relatives.

The series was created by Listos California, a $50 million state natural disaster preparedness program for vulnerable and under-resourced communities that began in 2019 after being proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and approved by the state’s legislators, said Karen Baker, the architect and co-chair of Listos California.

The state’s budget, which has yet to be finalized, will determine if the program continues past this year, she added.

“It’s a recognition that we really have to look at these communities in a really focused way,” Baker said of the program. “You can’t just sit there and come up with a tag line and just hope that people will get prepared for disasters. You have to be really aware about how a culture, even a sub culture, is likely to respond.”

In the video with Fong and her daughter, the two speak about signing up for wireless emergency alerts, preparing go-bags and checking in with relatives who may need help getting ready for a natural disaster.

They also touched on components of their Chinese culture that may come into play while having those conversations.

“We need to check in with the relatives because they’re kind of scattered and you know, Chinese, they’re just kind of independent, they kind of just hunker down,” Fong said.

The series, which is posted onto YouTube and has been shared on the Listos California website and social media pages, includes similar conversations between relatives in English that are captioned in Hindi, Korean, and Tagalog.

One video in the series goes through natural disaster preparedness planning in Hmong and English as well.

“The intentions were good,” Fong said about why she participated in the series. “They were trying to uplift communities of color and reach communities that possibly may not be in the mainstream. Plus, I would never turn down an opportunity to do something with my daughter.”

Listos California’s focus was expanded to include public health emergency preparedness last year during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Baker said.

The group learned some farmworkers, who were disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus pandemic throughout the state, only spoke Indigenous languages from Mexico and could not understand COVID-19 safety information that was being given to them in Spanish.

The program then partnered with United Way of Fresno and Madera Counties to create audio clips with both COVID-19 and disaster preparedness information in those languages, some which traditionally are only taught orally and have no written component, Baker said. Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa also helped created a series of videos on both topics in various Indigenous languages.

“No government agency has something that is as vibrant as this,” Baker said. “The second we learned there was a group that couldn’t have access to information, we create it or have a community partner like Catholic Charities that says ‘We’ll create it.’”

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @nashellytweets.