Community Restoration Projects
Learn more about our Community Restoration Projects here!
Come and join us at the Humanitarian Farm and help us grow organic produce for local food-aid! #bbhumanitarianfarm #bucketbrigadeacademy
High Speed Fire Prevention?
This local climate action brought to you by Youth + Gravity + Bucket Brigade Fire Prevention Team.
Extreme fire risk calls for local climate action. In response to the Super El Niño, Bucket Brigade youth leaders trained for over 145 hours to help lead our inaugural Fire Prevention Team.
Please support our work this Fire Season!
#bucketbrigadeacademy #bbfireprevention #communityresilience
Bucket Brigade Fire Prevention Team #1
That`s a wrap people. Bucket Brigade Academy training 2026 is complete with our first ever FPC Team graduation. Each of these students has now completed 140 hours of community leadership and response training. You are looking at the top 99th percentile in youth community resilience training nationwide. First Aid, Wilderness First Aid, CPR/AED, Stop the Bleed, Wilderness First Responder, ICS-100 and Community Fire Prevention Team Certified. Total Badasses.
#bucketbrigadeacademy
Last Strawberry Harvest Tomorrow!
Sunday will be the last strawberry harvest of the summer. Don`t miss it!
Click the volunteer link in our bio.
#bbhumanitarianfarm #sbbucketbrigade #bucketbrigadeacademy
Happy Independence Day from the Bucket Brigade!
Join us this Saturday for the LAST RESTORATION PLANTING OF THE SPRING at Ellwood Mesa.
Help us bring the butterflies back and restore this beautiful community open space.
Sign up "volunteer" link in our bio!
BYBB This Saturday to the Bucket Brigade Golden Shovel Awards!
Put on your best jeans or your party dress and come celebrate a whole year of kick @ss climate action in Santa Barbara. Click the link in our bio for tickets and more information.
Climate change and natural disasters have taken a toll on our local ecosystem. Repeated wildfires, record-breaking droughts and short-duration, high-intensity rain events have caused all kinds of problems in the past 10 years. The Bucket Brigade has been working to restore ecological damage since our first deployment in 2018. Our restoration work began in the debris-flow damaged areas of the Ennisbrook Open Space and the Casa Dorinda Open space where we spent a whole year removing man-made debris, digging out native oak trees, rebuilding trails and replanting areas that were struggled with post-disaster invasive species pressure.
This work really resonated with volunteers, with the neighborhoods where we worked and with communities served by these restorations – so we stuck with it. To carry our our mission to train volunteers and volunteer leaders, we found a damaged area of a beloved local park and began a 7-acre Community Restoration Project: The Bucket Brigade Humanitarian Garden.
The garden sits in the heart of a vital watershed ecosystem that was badly damaged by failed agricultural ventures and a decade long drought. For this reason, it seemed like the perfect place to teach restoration leadership…by actually restoring the whole area together. The work began with weekly volunteer projects to remove flammable invasive plants to reduce fire risk and to clear areas for restoration. We then replanted the area with endangered native trees and an edible native cactus grove. We also created a 1-acre buffer area with 72 species of native nectar-producing plants to create a native pollinator demonstration garden.
In 2022, we launched the Bucket Brigade Academy at the Humanitarian Garden where we have trained 66 local students to lead volunteer deployments and restoration projects. Many of those students have gone on to lead flood-relief and sandbag assistance projects in the community. 8 elite students have become professional volunteer coordinators for the Bucket Brigade and lead local restoration projects at open spaces, schools and trails.
Our current restorations projects include The Humanitarian Garden (ongoing), Ellwood Mesa Butterfly Preserve (on behalf of the City of Goleta) and The Bucket Brigade Humanitarian Farm – a 1-acre urban farm restoration where we grow produce for local food-aid.
