Dede Smullen: Building Partnerships and Turning Wildfire Challenges into Solutions
When it comes to wildfire preparedness and community resilience, few leaders have made as significant an impact as Dede Smullen, Co-Founder and Chairwoman of Earth Foundries, Inc. With a degree in Environmental Policy and Planning from UC Davis and decades of experience in public and private planning roles, Dede has dedicated her career to building safer, more sustainable communities.
As a professional planner, Dede understood early on that wildfire risk posed one of the greatest threats to California communities, including her own in Santa Clara County. Determined to make a difference, she joined the Santa Clara County FireSafe Council (SCCFSC), where her leadership and vision quickly elevated her to CEO.
Under her leadership, SCCFSC grew from a small nonprofit with one employee into a robust organization with a 19-person staff, strong financials, and a reputation for delivering large-scale wildfire resilience projects. Dede successfully led the organization through the challenges of COVID-19, secured critical funding, and hired key leadership positions, including CFO Chris Sommerfield and current CEO Seth Schalet—ensuring a strong foundation for the future.
“I would say my legacy is the tradition of collaborating with partners to get the big projects done,” says Dede. “Before that, we had been siloed and competing for grant dollars. Building partnerships changed everything.”
Through these collaborations, SCCFSC delivered landscape-scale fuels reduction projects, created defensible space programs, and launched community education initiatives that have made neighborhoods safer and more resilient. These efforts have protected lives, property, and critical infrastructure across Santa Clara County.
But these projects revealed a major challenge: what to do with the massive volumes of unmerchantable forest residues left behind. Traditional disposal methods—such as open burning or costly hauling—were neither environmentally sustainable nor economically viable. Recognizing this gap, Dede saw an opportunity to innovate.
That insight became the impetus for founding Earth Foundries, a company dedicated to transforming hazardous forest waste into biochar, a valuable soil amendment that improves soil health, sequesters carbon, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Under her leadership, Earth Foundries has achieved major milestones, including:
- Deploying Slash Attack® mobile pyrolysis systems across California to process unmerchantable wood on-site and at scale
- Partnering with CAL FIRE, the U.S. Forest Service, and local Resource Conservation Districts on biochar market development projects to demonstrate the value of biochar in large-volume applications and create a sustainable market
- Supporting post-fire recovery and fuels reduction projects that reduce wildfire risk while delivering climate and soil health benefits
“When I saw how much material was left behind after fuels reduction projects, I knew we needed a better solution,” Dede explains. “We can’t just cut and pile—we have to create value from this material. That’s what Earth Foundries is all about: turning a wildfire liability into an environmental asset.”
Dede’s journey—from planner to FireSafe Council CEO to biochar industry pioneer—underscores a simple truth: when we turn challenges into opportunities, we create solutions that protect both people and the planet.
The FireSafe Council Advantage
The Santa Clara County FireSafe Council continues to be a leader in wildfire preparedness, delivering programs that reduce fuel loads, create defensible space, and educate residents about fire safety. The Council’s success is built on the strength of its leadership and the quality of its board members—visionaries like Dede Smullen who bring expertise, passion, and a commitment to community resilience.
Interested in making a difference? The FireSafe Council is always looking for talented, mission-driven individuals to join its Board of Directors. If you want to help shape the future of wildfire safety in Santa Clara County, visit firesafesantaclara.org or contact Seth Schalet at sschalet@sccfiresafe.org to learn more.
Harold Schapelhouman – BOD Director; Retired Menlo Park Fire District Chief
Since retiring from the Menlo Park Fire Protection District in June 2021 I have remained active in the emergency services community serving as an advisor, mentor, advocate, speaker, volunteer and subject matter expert on a variety of issues that are both important to first responders and of interest to me.
At the request of the Deputy Administrator of NASA, Pam Melroy, I assisted NASA Ames in Mountain View with their Joint NASA/FAA Next- Gen Project and Air Space Management Program in support of first responders and focused on Wildland Fire Response, specific to the use and coordination of manned aviation and coming unmanned aerial systems (drone platforms) for aerial observation and firefighting.
In addition, I was involved with Nor-Cal Firefighters in support of Ukrainian Firefighters. A foundation that was created to collect used but serviceable fire equipment from Northern California Fire Agencies that was sent to the Ukraine.
I currently serve as an unpaid technical advisor to Komodo Fire Systems, an eco friendly plant based fire retardant company, Ladris Inc, an evacuation and fire modeling software company and most recently, Fire Dome, an Israeli based start up.
I also currently serve as the Menlo Park Fire Districts Historian and as a board member involved with California Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 3 (CA-TF3), a non-profit foundation that was created to support our search, rescue and recovery dog teams and other important equipment acquisition initiatives, not on the Federal equipment cache list, like Star-link. To help, click here.
In addition, I have assisted in the support of proposed statewide policies and potential legislation related changes to medical discrimination for emergency workers and advocacy for National legislation related to improving the integration, support, funding, adoption and acceleration of Unmanned Aerial Systems for the Fire Service.
Prior to retirement, I spent 40 years with the Menlo Park Fire Protection District starting as a firefighter and finishing as the Fire Chief. The Fire District serves 100,000 residents and businesses located in the communities of Atherton, East Palo Alto, Menlo Park and unincorporated San Mateo County. The Fire District is located along the San Francisco Bay and in what is known as Silicon Valley.
As the Fire Chief, I reported to five elected Board Members who governed the District and together we were responsible for managing a 30 square mile area served by seven fire stations, twelve first response units staffed daily by 33 front line personnel with a full staff of 155 employees that included safety, code enforcement, support, public education and administrative personnel.
I managed an annual budget of $60 million dollars with a reserve of $65 million broken into various categories with no debt or outstanding obligations. We achieved an AA+ Bond rating, the highest available and clean audits each of the 14 years I was the Fire Chief.
One of my greatest accomplishments was the the purchase of nine strategically located properties, two used for an updated administrative headquarters, a warehouse for special operations and six properties located next to existing fire stations allowing us to rebuild three larger, modern, drive through fire stations and have additional space to rebuild, expand and construct three more fire stations in the future.
I worked closely with each of our jurisdictions Town, City’s and County Manager as well as our Police Chiefs, Sheriff and CHP Commander. We also closely coordinated with Public Safety Communications (Dispatch), the Office of Emergency Management and Office of Emergency Medical Services regarding our field paramedics and emergency first response medical units as well as the other County Fire Chiefs on automatic aid, the greater alarm plan, communications infrastructure, out of county (Statewide) mutual aid for Wildland strike teams and individual resource staffing requests coordination.
We also provided special contract services to our largest employer, Facebook Headquarters and their multiple campuses as well as the SLAC National Laboratory, one of the ten Department of Energy (DOE) facilities in the Country.
We also managed first response service contracts and agreements with the California Governors Office of Emergency Services (Cal-OES) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Emergency Support Function 9 (ESF-9), Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) as California Task Force 3 (CA-TF3) an “all risk” Task Force specializing in catastrophic collapse, flood, wild land fire and other environmental and man made incidents needing immediate search, rescue and recovery operations.
The FEMA annual performance agreement was supported by a staff of four personnel and an annual budget of $1.1 million dollars. The Fire District provided a 28,000 square foot warehouse for office, equipment and vehicle storage as well as a multi-acre training site for the 220 Team members from 16 local Fire Agencies and 60 civilian professionals that supported Task Force 3.
Over the years, I have served as an instructor and subject matter expert in emergency response related to terrorism, structural collapse, technical rescue and recovery operations, drone operations and use, water rescue, Wildland firefighting, community preparedness, incident command and control as well as firefighter safety.