Danielle Antonellis, Founder and Executive Director of Kindling, discusses the organization’s aim to make a real change to the global fire risk problem.
Kindling is a global nonprofit born from Danielle Antonellis’ desire to make fire safety accessible to all. It was created by Antonellis to make tangible change by weaving together research, learning, advocacy and practice. Kindling started out in Antonellis’ parents’ basement in the US during the pandemic in 2020, but the nonprofit is now also registered in South Africa, which is a significant hub for Kindling’s work.
According to Antonellis, she first learned about fire safety inequality when working in the private sector as a fire engineering consultant. “In 2015, I started researching fires in informal settlements with Arup, my previous firm,” she explains. “It was an internal research project they initiated that led me down quite a rabbit hole of learning not only about informal settlement fires, but also how fire affects people in society differently.”
Founder and Executive Director, Antonellis, sat down with Fire and Safety Journal Americas (FSJA) to talk all about her professional purpose and why a career in fire safety engineering led her to understanding the severity of fire inequality.
When Antonellis began researching and learning about fires in informal settlements, this was a big aha moment. She explains that for years, she was interested in how communities that are affected by disasters can be better supported. But she thought there was nothing she could do as a fire engineer: “I felt as though the humanitarian sector was set up for structural engineers to contribute, but there was no clear pathway for fire engineers to do the same.” But when she learned about fires in informal settlements, everything changed.
Informal settlement fires often affect thousands of people. For example, in 2017, a fire in Imizamo Yethu informal settlement in South Africa displaced almost 10,000 people and, in 2021, a fire in a refugee camp in Bangladesh displaced 45,000 people. These numbers speak for themselves and so as Antonellis puts it, she became “really obsessed with trying to understand the issue and what we can do about it.”
In 2017, Antonellis served as an Assistant to expert witness Dr Barbara Lane on Phase 1 of the Grenfell Tower Public Inquiry and led Arup’s global program on fire safety in informal settlements. This was another formative experience for her and she became incredibly immersed as she went to see the devastation within the Tower firsthand. Having a chance to learn about the people affected, and to understand what they went through shaped her outlook significantly. She no longer saw fire safety inequality as an issue just in informal settlements – it was an issue across the world, especially if you are not afforded the same level of protection compared to other people, just based on who you are and where you live.
Grenfell was a chance for Antonellis to understand that the level of risk we are exposed to and what type of support is given in the aftermath is not a one-size-fits-all, in fact, there were a lot of disparities. She continued to learn about fire safety inequalities – in India, Bangladesh, South Africa, Costa Rica, Hong Kong and beyond. She knew that very few engineers were choosing to focus on these issues, they were neglected areas that needed more attention. Hence, Kindling was born.
Fire inequality can be defined as the unequal distribution of fire risk. There are a lot of reasons behind this. When you look at different housing conditions and socioeconomic factors, you begin to understand that certain groups are particularly exposed and vulnerable to fire.
There is a strong relationship between income level and fire risk, different types of housing and access to housing in the first place. Additionally, human vulnerabilities need to be considered too, like if you have a hearing impairment or mobility issue, this can affect how quickly you can respond.
Antonellis explains how these factors all intersect, to create very dangerous situations. This is the thinking behind Kindling’s work in the US, notably Kindling’s “The invisible US fire problem” report, which looks at this concept through a regulatory lens, focusing on the intersections between housing conditions and human vulnerabilities. When deep diving into this report, Antonellis discusses how the US fire problem has remained invisible because it is not easy to see through the way we currently track fire incident data, housing conditions and vulnerability factors together.
There is not a cohesive system where you can just click a few buttons and understand the full picture. Whilst she admits there has been some research done on specific countries or on smaller case studies, we still have a long way to go in revealing who suffers from fire and why – both in the US and globally.
Kindling is focused on investigating how fire risk emerges – how the problem comes to exist in the first place. People need housing, water, food, transport and they create waste.
Each city is a physical response to those needs and they are often created incrementally over a prolonged period.
Antonellis explained how, in formal environments, development goes through planning and building control, but informal settlements need more incremental and responsive mechanisms in order to meet needs.
She added how “no one decides they want a fire problem. It’s not like we build infrastructure and then say let’s add a fire problem’. Fire risk emerges as a consequence of other decisions.”
Antonellis discussed how her engineering background shapes her approach, but it is not enough on its own for this societal problem. She works closely with social scientists, residents of informal settlements, and others to better understand fire risk.
When examining issues like informal settlement fires, a fire engineer might focus on factors such as whether houses are too close together, whether materials are too combustible or why people are using candles and not electricity.
However, Antonellis believes these factors alone do not explain why people face higher risk of fire. It’s not simply a matter of awareness of the absence of engineering solutions, but the result from complex social, political and economic conditions.
Without this necessary understanding, you end up proposing solutions that aren’t grounded in reality. So, it’s necessary to have a team that can look at the challenge from diverse perspectives and bring in that complexity.
This is why the Kindling team is made up of people from diverse disciplines.
As Antonellis shares, in order to make a change “we need to think about how to incrementally improve conditions” and “often, the possible interventions are not physical engineering solutionsthey’re social interventions involving education, advocacy and relationship building.” Working as a part of a broader ecosystem is essential to reducing the fire risk problem.
