Bemidji fire brigade helps youth with disabilities ladder up their skills
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On a recent afternoon, members of the Inclusive Fire Brigade assembled just outside the Bemidji Fire Department near Engine 7. The 10-member crew laughed and joked while eagerly awaiting their chance to go 50 feet in the air for a bird's eye view of the city, using the engine's extended aerial basket.
According to Bemidji Fire Chief Justin Sherwood, since the program began its monthly meetings in March, participants have worked hard learning fire service fundamentals, like how to carry ladders properly, hand-off fire axes safely and how to work as a team.
As a result, Sherwood felt it fitting to reward them with something they would never forget, a ride in the aerial basket, “to kind of give them a unique taste and a new experience that only firefighters and those close to them get to experience."
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"It's more rewarding for me if I'm being honest with you,” he said. “You can see the smiles on everyone's faces.”
Before his turn on the ladder, program participant Nicky Haubrich was a bit nervous. “I’ve got a little bit of butterflies in my stomach, but I got this,” he said.
Once he was tightly secured into the basket alongside firefighter Nathan Brasel, the ladder began its ascent after Haubrich gave the go ahead. “I’m ready, let’s do this!” he said.
A short time later, with both his feet planted safely back on the ground, he couldn’t hold back his jubilation.
“It was amazing!” he said.
Job training with a dose of fun
The Inclusive Fire Brigade is a partnership between the fire department and the nonprofit Lead for Inclusion, whose executive director is Shannon Murray.
She said the organization serves young people, including those with intellectual and physical disabilities.
"We're working to make our communities more accessible and welcoming for folks with disabilities,” she said. “We do advocacy and outreach, and we also have a lot of fun together."
Murray said the pilot program is multifaceted. Participants won’t come out of the program officially trained as firefighters, though soon, brigade members will begin training to become CPR certified. Nevertheless, they learn a lot of skills relevant to any profession, like leadership and teamwork.
"We're working on job skills and hoping to make the fire department more inclusive in its hiring and influence the whole city,” Murray said. “We have big visions of this growing beyond our area too."
Daniel Norton, a program participant, said one of the most alluring aspects of it is the chance at more job prospects, because inclusive employers are hard to find.
“Ultimately you get one of a select few jobs,” he said. “And either you don't like that job, and you try and find another job, and you can't, or you just feel like you're stuck with that job.”
But he has also enjoyed the chance to learn the specifics of fire department work.
During that recent meeting, he demonstrated how he was taught to roll up a firehose properly.
Starting with the hose laying fully stretched out on the ground, Norton grabbed the male coupling and started rolling it inward to the hose. With each revolution, the hose got bigger, until it looked like he was pushing a giant donut.
"The reason you roll the male coupling in is to protect the threads,” Norton said. “So, if it were dropped… the threads are less likely to get damaged than if they were on the outside."
After Norton completed his demonstration, Sherwood, who was standing in the wings, couldn’t hold back his emotion.
“I just heard that whole thing, and it made me so proud,” he told Norton.
The spark that started the program ‘I gotta do it!’
The idea for the program came about a year ago. That's when former Lead for Inclusion board member Asher Geller stopped into the fire department for a tour. And it's then that his friendship with Fire Chief Sherwood began.
"It was actually on YouTube when I first found out about firefighting, and I was all like, ‘That would be something I'd like to do,’ but I didn't know if I was willing to do it or not,” Geller recalled. “And then when I met Sherwood, I was all like, ‘I gotta do it!’”
The 22-year-old said a short time later he pitched the idea of a partnership between the fire department and Lead for Inclusion. Eventually it was approved by Lead for Inclusion’s board and the Bemidji City Council.
Because the Inclusive Fire Brigade is a pilot program, its future isn’t exactly known. After a year, organizers will evaluate and go from there.
“I definitely hope that it can continue, maybe even go as far as starting to bleed into other communities,” Geller said. “It's the first of its kind in probably the entire country, maybe even the world.”
Brigade participant Aiden Warner said she feels like the program's training has empowered her.
"It really helped me to get out more, be more vocal. I used to be quiet, and now I'm able to ask questions,” Warner said. “I'm able to just speak and not be afraid to ask questions or raise my hand to ask them."
Warner said the program has also led her down a path of self-discovery. As an adoptee, she said she now has more courage to connect with her culture: her biological father is from White Earth Nation and her mother, Leech Lake Nation.
‘There is a place for you in the fire service’
Fire Chief Sherwood said he hopes many participants will have the kind of positive experience Warner has.
"This group really focuses on those individuals who have been titled by or labeled with some form of disability,” he said. “My goal… is to simply show that there is a place for you in the fire service, no matter what your role, everything you do to contribute to public safety assists us in creating a safer community."
Sherwood said to create the program’s training regimen, he relied on his background in elementary education from Bemidji State University. He also looked at various programs and curriculum for beginner firefighters from around the nation.
Sherwood took what he liked from them, leaving the rest, then he began laying out priorities, goals and benchmarks.
"I was taught here at BSU that the best teachers are great thieves, and you don't reinvent the wheel,” Sherwood said. “Rather you, kind of adjust, adapt it to your crowd, to your organization, and that's what we did here, firefighter skills, educational skills, and brought it together."
The vice president of the Minnesota State Fire Chiefs Association said at some point, he and Murray would like to share the program they helped create with other fire stations across the state, and eventually the nation.
It's a vision that program member William Duncan said everyone can benefit from.
"It's part of a human existence. Inclusion is when you pass a ball to another person that you may not have known, and then they eventually will pass it to the other person,” he said. “And inclusion is just all about how you treat the other people."
