Josiah Nishita, Managing Director of the County of Maui, closes the 2026 Wildfire Leadership Summit with a keynote that is about Maui and about what everyone in the room learned together.
Three years after the August 8, 2023 fires in Kihei, Kula, and Lahaina, Josiah gathers the themes of the week into one message: recovery belongs to the people who call a community home. Along the way he shares what Maui has learned and what he heard from other speakers and panels:
Recovery requires partnerships. You are not on an island in this, and no community recovers alone.
Do not make the common enemy each other. The common enemy is the lack of stable housing, barriers to rebuilding, and too little mental health support, childcare, and community resources.
Keep the community at the center. When Maui's emergency management administrator, Amos Lonokalua Hewitt, draws a family on a whiteboard, hard decisions become easy.
Listen, learn, and adjust. Communities move at the speed of trust, so keep showing up and keep asking who you are recovering for.
It is about building lives, not buildings. Mayor Bissen's measure of success is to keep our people home, and rebuilding does not have to mean recreating exactly what existed before.
Plan for the next seven generations. As the Mayor puts it, we plant a tree now for the shade we will never experience.
He closes with a question from a woman at a community meeting: if I do not have a safe and secure place to lay my head at night, how do you expect me to dream? Stability matters to survivors, and recovery is about letting a community dream again.
Josiah also thanks the After the Fire USA team and every attendee for the work they do. Mahalo.
The Wildfire Leadership Summit is an invitation-only, three-day convening from After the Fire USA, an initiative of Rebuild NorthBay Foundation. 2026 Summit: September 15–17, 2026, The Hanna Center, Sonoma, California.
After the Fire: Recover. Rebuild. Reimagine.™
afterthefireusa.org
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