Resilience, led from the front.
We help governments at every level, and the fire services that serve them, build wildfire mitigation programs that fit their communities, with the FireSmart program as the foundation. We also work with the people who lead those organizations on the hardest part of the job: leading when things go wrong. Based in the Edmonton region of Alberta, working across Canada and the United Kingdom.
Published fixed fees. The first conversation is free.
Led by Sean Cunningham. Former Deputy Chief of Operations and Acting Fire Chief, provincial structure protection specialist, and King Charles III Coronation Medal recipient. More about Sean
FireSmart gives every community in Canada the same starting point. The work is shaping it to your mandate, your budget, your geography, and your council, and then making sure it is funded and staffed to last. Our founder has done that at the municipal and provincial levels.
Readiness Checks, grant applications, FireSmart program design, coordinator onboarding, and independent help writing the RFP and choosing the vendor when a full wildfire strategy is needed. For villages, towns, cities, and counties, including the hamlets and acreages where forest and development meet.
Grant program design, province-wide curricula, and instructor networks that reach every department. The FRIAA coordinator grant and the Advanced FireSmart Home Assessor overhaul are the track record.
Most of our work starts with wildfire. Some of it starts with a department that needs to prove its water supply to the underwriters, and some with a chief who has a hard conversation ahead. All of it is built to be used the day it lands, by the people who asked for it.
Build or adapt a wildfire program that fits your community and your mandate, with the FireSmart program as the foundation and funding behind it.
Prove to Fire Underwriters Survey that your department can deliver fire flows equivalent to hydrant protection without hydrants, so homes and businesses within 8 km by road of your stations are graded accordingly.
Vulnerability as a command skill, taught by someone who has had to use it on the fireground, at the council table, and on an industrial site.
Sean instructs three provincial wildfire courses and delivers them at your hall or in your region, so your people train together on the ground they protect.
Book a courseThe fixed fee services are the work we do most, not all of it. If what you need sits between them or outside them, a regional training plan, a wildfire program review for a utility or an industrial site, an interagency agreement, a council workshop, a provincial program design, we scope it together. You get a written scope and a fixed fee proposal within five working days of the first conversation, built on a day rate of $1,500 plus travel at cost, on the same terms as everything else here: completion billing on shorter engagements, milestone invoicing on larger projects, and net 30.
An independent, rapid review of how ready your municipality is for wildfire: where your program stands, how your fire department is trained and equipped to deal with one, and what to do next. It is not a hazard or risk assessment. It measures your program against the FireSmart framework and current provincial expectations, looks at the training, equipment, and plans your department would rely on, maps the funding you can realistically win, and gives council a plain, prioritized set of recommendations for the next 12 to 24 months.
Built for towns, villages, cities, and counties. Priced as a fixed fee that sits below the competitive bid threshold in most municipal purchasing policies.
All of it comes back to vulnerability as a command skill: saying "I don't know" on the fireground, "I was wrong" in the station, and "this will hurt" at the council table, and keeping the room. Sean has had to say all three.
The hardest things Sean has had to say as a leader, and what happened next, told for fire service, municipal, and industry audiences and shaped to your theme.
Includes a planning call, content tailored to your audience and theme, slides and a handout, and a recording release for your members. Travel at cost.
Six modules for company officers, chief officers, and the people about to become them: command under pressure, candour in the chain of command, acting in role, after action reviews people tell the truth in, delivering hard news, and leading when you were wrong.
Up to 24 participants. Includes participant workbooks, a planning call with the chief, and a 30 day follow up call. Travel at cost. Larger groups and multi-department cohorts quoted.
A programme for fire and rescue services, local authorities, and operational organisations working to change culture from the command level down: psychological safety that survives the incident ground, honest debriefs, and leaders who can own a mistake in front of the watch. Delivered by a Canadian chief officer who has led stations and run incidents, and who has no stake in your internal politics.
All UK prices include return airfare from Canada, accommodation, car hire, and meals, so every working day on the ground is yours. No separate travel invoices: the price you see is the price you pay. Prices in GBP, exclusive of VAT where applicable.
Cohort programs, fractional chief retainers, and executive advisory are scoped to the organization and quoted after a first conversation.
Book a keynote or workshop
As the sole consultant to Alberta Forestry and Parks, Sean rebuilt the program end to end: workshop decks, handbooks, facilitator guides, and instructor updates for new assessors, existing assessors, and instructors. He then delivered train-the-trainer workshops to fire departments across Alberta, building provincial capacity and closing out a key deliverable in the provincial wildfire mitigation strategy.
Everything we publish lives here first. Read it, argue with it, or send it to your council.
I am writing this from Malta, on my own, two months after the chapter I spent nearly thirteen years building was closed by someone else. In the last twelve months I was passed over
Read the article: The Chapter I Didn't ChooseThree habits carried from the fireground into every engagement.
You will hear what will not work before you spend money on it. That includes being told when we are not the right fit.
Numbers and field cases before theory. Every recommendation traces back to something that actually happened in a department, a community, or a program.
Every deliverable is ready to use the day it lands: the application, the plan, the council report, the curriculum.
CAOs and municipal leaders who need a defensible plan and a funding route. Fire chiefs who need capacity and a credible outside voice. Provincial program managers who need production-ready material.
Across Canada, from a home base in the Edmonton region of Alberta. Across the United Kingdom, where wildfire has become a resilience priority for fire and rescue services, local authorities, and land managers. Remote first, with site visits where the work needs boots on the ground.
Fixed fees for defined work and published entry offers. Grant applications are a fixed fee, never a percentage of the award, which most public funders will not allow and which rewards the wrong thing in any case. Work in Canada is billed in Canadian dollars plus applicable taxes; work in the UK is billed in pounds sterling plus VAT where applicable. Shorter engagements are invoiced on completion and larger projects against agreed milestones, so nothing is paid for before it is delivered. Terms are net 30.
Sean Cunningham started Frontier Resilience Canada nearly three years ago, alongside his fire service career, to help close a capacity gap in Alberta's FireSmart program. For those first three years the practice had one client, the Government of Alberta, and one job: build the training and tools the province's programs needed. In 2026 it became his full time work, and the practice is now open to municipalities, fire services, and governments across Canada and the United Kingdom.
He spent 13 years in municipal fire services, starting as a paid-on-call firefighter and finishing as Deputy Chief of Operations and Acting Fire Chief of a combination career and paid-on-call department. Along the way he designed one of Alberta's first FRIAA FireSmart coordinator grants, now a proof of concept for a province-wide funding model, and led the overhaul of Alberta's advanced FireSmart home assessment training as the practice's first engagement.
He is a provincial structure protection specialist with operational experience on high profile wildland urban interface fires, and he instructs the Alberta Wildland Urban Interface Crew Member course, the Advanced FireSmart Home Assessor course, and the train-the-trainer course for assessor instructors.
Before fire services, he spent a decade leading and teaching adults in Alberta's oil and gas sector as a journeyman crane operator. He has served on the board of directors of the Alberta Fire Chiefs Association and remains on its committees, serves on NFPA technical committees, holds the King Charles III Coronation Medal for advancing municipal wildfire management beyond traditional forest protection areas, and is completing a Bachelor of Business Administration at NAIT. He holds citizenship in both Canada and the United Kingdom, and the practice works directly with clients in both countries.
Sean lives in the Edmonton region with his family, a father of four. Away from the work he plays acoustic guitar, reads more Norse mythology than is strictly reasonable, and writes. The story of how the practice became his full time work is in "The Chapter I Didn't Choose". He runs it the way he would want to be led: plainly, with the hard parts said out loud.
The questions CAOs, fire chiefs, and program managers ask in a first conversation. If yours is not here, send it through the form below and it will get a plain answer.
Wildfire mitigation is the work a community does before a fire to reduce the damage it causes: managing vegetation around homes and infrastructure, hardening buildings, planning development so it does not create new exposure, training firefighters for the wildland urban interface, and making sure plans, agreements, and funding are in place. In Canada the FireSmart program organizes this work into seven disciplines, and it is the foundation we build from.
We assess where your program stands, find the funding, design or adapt the program to your mandate, write the applications and plans, train the people who will run it, and brief council in language that supports a decision. For most municipalities the Wildfire Readiness Check is the starting point.
They are different things. A wildfire hazard or risk assessment maps where and how fire threatens a community, and a full mitigation strategy or community wildfire plan built on it typically starts in the low tens of thousands from a specialist firm. We do not do either ourselves; for $6,000 we will write your request for proposals, score the bids, and recommend a vendor, so you get work built for your community rather than a template. The Wildfire Readiness Check is a review of how ready you are: where your program stands, how your department is trained and equipped, and what to do next. It is a fixed fee set by the size of the municipality, $7,500 for communities under 5,000 residents, $9,500 up to 25,000, and $14,500 up to 100,000, plus applicable taxes, with travel at cost. Larger municipalities are scoped and quoted. Much of this work can be funded through FireSmart related grants in Alberta and across Canada, and the Check maps which programs apply to you.
Alberta municipalities can access FRIAA FireSmart program funding, including the coordinator grant model our founder designed, alongside federal programs such as Natural Resources Canada's Resilient Communities through FireSmart and insurer supported programs. Other provinces run their own community FireSmart funding. Programs and intakes change every year, so the Readiness Check delivers a current eligibility map rather than a static list.
Yes. Our founder holds citizenship in both Canada and the United Kingdom, and we contract directly with UK clients without a local partner. After record wildfire seasons, UK fire and rescue services, local authorities, and land managers are building community level wildfire resilience, and the Canadian FireSmart experience in program design, funding, and training transfers directly to that work. We also deliver the Candour and Culture in Command programme and conference keynotes in the UK, with airfare, accommodation, car hire, and meals built into every GBP price.
Keynotes and conference sessions on candour and vulnerability in command, and officer development workshops in six modules: command under pressure, candour in the chain of command, acting in role, after action reviews people tell the truth in, delivering hard news, and leading when you were wrong. Workshops run from a $3,500 half day to an $11,000 two day intensive for up to 24 participants. In the UK, the Candour and Culture in Command programme runs two or three days from £12,500 with travel included.
The wildland urban interface, or WUI, is where homes, businesses, and infrastructure meet or mix with forest, grassland, and other flammable vegetation. It is where most wildfire losses happen. Sean is a provincial structure protection specialist with operational experience on high profile wildland urban interface fires and instructs the Alberta Wildland Urban Interface Crew Member course.
Ask. The fixed fee services are the work we do most, not all of it. For anything else we scope it together, and you get a written scope and a fixed fee proposal within five working days, built on a day rate of $1,500 plus travel at cost, with the same terms as everything else on this page. If it is not something we should be doing, we will tell you that too, and point you to someone who should.
An accreditation from Fire Underwriters Survey certifying that a fire department can deliver the minimum fire flows the insurance industry expects for detached dwellings, using tankers in a timed shuttle rather than hydrants. Once accredited, properties within 8 km by road of a responding station are treated as having protection equivalent to the industry's minimum hydrant requirements, which can improve their insurance grading and in many cases lower premiums. Accreditation is valid for five years. We help departments prepare, train, rehearse the timed test, write the application, and work with the underwriters through to accreditation.
Tell us about the community, the department, or the team you lead. The first conversation costs nothing, and you will get a plain answer on whether we are the right fit.
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