STORIES OF IMPACT
2024 - 2025
Download 2024-2025 Impact Report here
This past year, LegacyWorks Central Coast deepened its decade-long commitment to the region and magnified its impact across several arenas: building community resilience, wildlife and biodiversity, disaster resilience and land conservation.
150+ regional partner organizations engaged
13 active projects
These numbers include all active projects and partners for LegacyWorks Central Coast region as of November 10, 2025.
Our Role: Catalyzing Collective Action
LegacyWorks Central Coast exists to meet this moment. We bring people and organizations together to co-create bold, place-based partnerships that build a more just, resilient, and thriving region.
Active Projects 2024-2025
Wildfire Resilience
Impact areas: Community resilience, Disaster resilience, Food & Agriculture, Land Conservation, Water, Wildlife & Biodiversity
Co-stewarded by LegacyWorks, the Cachuma Resource Conservation District and the Community Environmental Council, the Wildfire Resilience Collaborative brings together agencies, Indigenous leaders, landowners, community organizations, and funders to align goals, strengthen relationships, and build wildfire resilience across the region.
LegacyWorks has facilitated partners in prioritizing high-risk sites and implementing a coordinated, landscape-level wildfire mitigation strategy, playing a catalytic role in advancing 11 priority projects that otherwise would not have moved forward.
“LegacyWorks created an inclusive space for rich dialogue and meaningful input to occur. When all voices and perspectives are equally considered and respected, you really begin to build trust and that’s what’s needed to create just and equitable climate resilience.” - Sharyn Main, Wildfire Resilience Collaborative
Project Spotlight: Wildfire Resilience Collaborative (WRC)
1) Wildfire Risk Reduction & Restoration Planning for Creeks in Goleta and Westmont
LegacyWorks and its partners in the WRC have been collaborating with County Fire, the City of Goleta and UC Santa Barbara Cheadle Center to develop wildfire risk reduction and habitat restoration plans for 10 priority sites along river corridors in the Goleta area. These sites are choked with flammable plants, like eucalyptus and arundo, that serve as conduits for fire from wildlands into neighborhoods. Our team has been working with partners to develop a much needed plan to replace flammable plants with fire resistant and resilient native plants like coastal live oak. Funding for the efforts came from the California Coastal Conservancy’s Wildfire Resilience Grant program.
UC Santa Barbara Cheadle Center, County Fire, City of Goleta and WRC team identifying fire risk reduction and habitat restoration needs. Photo credit Em Johnson.
2) Lompoc Climate Resilience Planning (Wildfire and Extreme Weather)
With support from Santa Barbara County’s Guadalupe Lompoc Initiative, LegacyWorks and its WRC partners are facilitating a resilience planning process focused on the impacts of extreme weather and wildfire. The planning process is engaging community members and leaders to identify resilience needs and opportunities and co-develop actionable projects. Our goal is to help build alignment, foster engagement, and lay the groundwork for a stronger, more resilient Lompoc.
Emerging community priorities include increasing wildfire and disaster resilience workforce capacity, establishing a community resilience hub to support vulnerable populations during disasters, and coordinated fire resilience planning and implementation across surrounding large landscapes, a mosaic of federal, private, state and private lands.
What's next? Once community priorities are clear, LegacyWorks and our WRC partners will help local partners advance priority projects, building resilience and the collective capacity to achieve even more together in the years ahead.
“LegacyWorks’ collaboration, dedication, and shared vision have been key to our collective success, and I’m genuinely grateful for the trust and commitment you’ve shown. Thank you for being such an exceptional partner.”
-Yasmin Dawson, C4-Lompoc
Self Healing Communities: Lompoc
Impact areas: Community resilience
Through the Self Healing Communities Project (SHC), LegacyWorks and its partners C4 Lompoc and Resilient Santa Barbara County are creating a powerful shift in how Lompoc addresses trauma, healing, and leadership development. Guided by the science of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), SHC equips community members to build awareness of ACEs and foster healing across generations in their own neighborhoods by supporting and investing directly in those most impacted. Through SHC’s mini grant and Community Leader programs, participants are learning leadership skills and leading their own projects to help one another: from support meetings for grandparents raising grandchildren, to bringing healthy meals directly to the homeless, to a establishing a multi-cultural arts center and more.
Self Healing Communities Meeting, Lompoc
The Impact of Healing: Community Voices
The Lompoc Resilience Garden
Impact areas: Community resilience, Disaster resilience, Food & Agriculture, Land Conservation, Water, Wildlife & Biodiversity
The Lompoc Resilience Garden is a partnership with C4-Lompoc and Lompoc’s First Christian Church to enhance food security and bolster community resilience. With the help of partners like Route 1 Farmer’s Market, we are co-creating a community vegetable garden that will serve as an education site and a gathering place while growing food for the community. In July 2024, the Santa Barbara Bucket Brigade team held a training where Lompoc youth developed leadership and disaster response skills, installed raised garden beds, and planted vegetables. Later in the year, the garden’s bounty was harvested and shared with local food pantries. In July 2025 we hosted a community garden launch party, inviting broader engagement in this community effort.
Lompoc Resilience Garden, July 2025
Santa Barbara County Community Wellbeing Dashboard
Impact areas: Community resilience, Disaster resilience, Food & Agriculture, Land Conservation, Water, Wildlife & Biodiversity, Regenerative Economies
LegacyWorks has convened more than 90 partners across the County to begin co-creating a comprehensive Community Wellbeing Dashboard. The dashboard will aggregate, analyze, and share data and perspectives from a wide array of partners, generating insights, increasing understanding, transparency, and coordination, and informing investment in critical community needs. In 2025, we began with the development of the Housing and Economic Security impact areas which will go live in the coming months. In the year ahead, we will work with funders, agencies, and nonprofit partners to put the first dashboard areas to work and co-create additional impact areas. We look forward to continuing to facilitate the development of the dashboard, building our collective capacity to tackle complex issues.
"The Dashboard gives our community a clear picture of what’s working, where needs are greatest, and where we can have the most impact. It will help guide smarter decisions, stronger partnerships, and strategic investments across the county." -Jackie Carrera, Santa Barbara Foundation
Resilient Santa Barbara County
Impact areas: Community resilience, Disaster resilience
Over the past two years, LegacyWorks has helped strengthen the foundation of the Resilient Santa Barbara County network, aligning partners around a shared vision of a connected, trauma-informed community where families can thrive. Together, partners are working to increase understanding of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and the protective power of Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs), improve child health outcomes, and embed resilience-building practices across organizations and sectors. This collective effort is creating the conditions for a healthier, more equitable Santa Barbara County—where individual, family, and community wellbeing is supported by strong, collaborative systems.
“LegacyWorks always explores the edges, pushes forward into new possibilities, works with what is, and ignites what can be. I'm so grateful to be in partnership with LWG, I couldn't do the work I do without their support.” - Barb Finch, Santa Barbara County Department of Social Services
Gaviota Landscape Partnership
Impact areas: Community resilience, Disaster resilience, Food & Agriculture, Land Conservation, Water, Wildlife & Biodiversity
In the Vandenberg-Gaviota region, 35+ partners are building trust and shared purpose on mutual priorities—thanks to coordination support from LegacyWorks. By creating space for honest dialogue and alignment on how to work together, LegacyWorks is helping partners with diverse interests come together to steward this iconic landscape in ways no single organization could achieve alone. Over the past two years, a series of facilitated conversations and workshops has elevated and advanced several collaborative projects, including a generational opportunity to restore the Santa Ynez River estuary.
“LegacyWorks has helped us develop real shared purpose around our landscape goals. Our partners are now energized to work together—and we know we can’t reach those goals without each other.” -Candice Meneghin, Coastal Ranches Conservancy
Ellwood Mesa
Impact areas: Community resilience, Disaster resilience, Food & Agriculture, Land Conservation, Water, Wildlife & Biodiversity
At Ellwood Mesa—one of California’s most important monarch butterfly overwintering sites—LegacyWorks is working alongside the City of Goleta, Ellwood Friends, SB Bucket Brigade and other community partners to engage the community to restore monarch habitat and reduce wildfire risk. Through volunteer days, outreach, and public engagement, we’re reconnecting people to the land and inspiring shared stewardship of this ecologically vital place for the sake of community, biodiversity and wildlife.
More than 500 volunteers from 30 local groups contributed over 1,700 hours to habitat restoration at Ellwood Mesa, through weekly work days co-organized by Ellwood Friends, UC Santa Barbara’s Cheadle Center, the City of Goleta, Your Children’s Trees, the SB Bucket Brigade, and other community partners. Volunteers have planted 4,500 native plants and 466 trees for Monarch Butterfly habitat.
Our Partners
Partner with us!
Let’s co-create a resilient Central Coast—together.
Contact: Ellen Kwiatkowski
ellen@legacyworksgroup.com
