Tackling the World’s Most Urgent Fire Safety Challenges, Together
Kindling × UL Research Institute’s Fire Safety Research Institute
Kindling FLAMES (Fire Risk Reduction through Learning, Amplification, Mobilization, and Education) is our partnership with UL Research Insititutes’ Fire Safety Research Institute (ULRI), a multi-year collaboration advancing fire safety where the need is greatest. Together, we generate evidence, strengthen community-led approaches, and develop tools that help reduce fire risk in informal and humanitarian settings. Fire in these environments remains one of the world’s most urgent and least understood risks.
Addressing it requires trust, long-term partnership, and a commitment to working in challenging places where the stakes are extraordinarily high. ULRI’s sponsorship powers foundational research, learning, advocacy, and practice that make this work possible. It is the engine behind much of the progress we’ve made, and the foundation for what will come next as we invite additional partners into the work ULRI helped ignite.
“UL Research Institutes’ Fire Safety Research Institute is dedicated to addressing fire safety on a global scale. It is estimated that over 1 billion people in the world live in informal settlements, and that number is increasing. While the ultimate goal is to ensure access to affordable, fire-safe housing for all, immediate progress depends on rigorous research into the challenges and barriers that contribute to fire vulnerability.”
-Steve Kerber
Vice President & Executive Director
Why did ULRI invest?
ULRI recognized early that addressing fire inequity requires more than high-quality research. It requires deep trust, community partnership, and years of institutional knowledge built through working in environments where fire risk is concentrated and the path to safer systems is far from straightforward.
ULRI chose to sponsor Kindling because our work combines rigorous science with the lived reality on the ground, generating insights that cannot be produced in a lab or through models alone. This partnership allows ULRI to extend its mission globally in a way that is safe, ethical, and rooted in real-world conditions, while resourcing Kindling to do the hard work that others cannot.
From the outset, ULRI made clear that they wanted this partnership to take on system-level problems that do not have easy answers — the kind of work that requires experimentation, space to fail forward, and the humility to learn quickly. The aim is not perfection, but progress: pushing boundaries, testing new ideas, and helping shape what the future of fire safety should be.
-Steve Kerber
Vice President & Executive Director
Our work together
The ULRI × Kindling partnership makes it possible to take on work that very few organizations can attempt. Together, we combine rigorous fire science with deep, community-rooted practice — running full-scale fire experiments, carrying out community-based fire risk assessments, and building forums and tools that help practitioners, governments, and residents act on emerging evidence. This shared effort has generated insights into how fires ignite, spread, and unfold in dense settlements, creating knowledge the field has never had before.
Alongside financial support, ULRI offers technical and amplification expertise that strengthens how specific elements of our work are designed, interpreted, and communicated. This collaboration creates a continuous loop between research, community insight, and system engagement, allowing us to test new approaches where risk is highest and learn quickly to shape practice beyond a single project.
Putting people at the heart of this work
These portraits highlight a few of the residents from BM Section A, Khayelitsha, whose leadership and insight strengthen Kindling’s community-based fire risk assessment work and contribute to the wider fire-safety efforts this partnership supports.
See our work in action
Click one of the projects below to explore the work from this partnership
Join the movement for fire safety for all.
Every life protected from fire is proof that change is possible. Fire can be managed, but only if we act together.
