Shared Ground
Shared Ground is a podcast that explores resilience & grit, generosity & kindness. We start with true stories of kindness and support during and after the 2025 LA wildfires.
Shared Ground
Episode 17: Quick Hits - From Firestorms to Community Strength with Matt Gonser and Jonathan Parfrey
How do we turn overwhelming climate risk into actionable hope?
In this Quick Hits episode, Sean caught up with Matt Gonser, Climate Resilience Officer for LA County, and Jonathan Parfrey, Executive Director of Climate Resolve. Together, we break down what resilience actually means and how it’s being put into action across Los Angeles.
Matt shares what it looks like to build climate resilience at the systems level, from extreme heat mitigation to coastal protections, and why government must center community well-being in its plans.
Jonathan offers sharp insights from years of policy and project work, including surprising lessons from disaster recovery that reveal how communities can thrive through change—not just survive it.
From fires to floods, housing pressures to extreme heat, this conversation challenges assumptions about displacement, community capacity, and what’s possible when we lead with both planning and compassion.
✅ Listen in if you want a clearer, more hopeful way to think about resilience—grounded in real policy, real projects, and real people.
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Shared Ground is produced by Sean Knierim and Allan Marks. Thanks to Cory Grabow, Kara Poltor, Corey Walles (from The Recording Studio) for your support in launching this effort.
For more stories of resilience & rebuilding, kindness & generosity: visit shared-ground.com and subscribe to Sean's substack. We invite you to share your own stories of resilience at the Shared Ground website - whether in response to the January fires in LA or other situations.
Follow us at seanknierim.substack.com, Instagram, or wherever you listen to podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc).
Thanks for making time to talk here, so maybe we start over here to my right, your left listener, so can you tell me who you are, what you do for a living?
Speaker 2:Sure. Thanks, Sean. My name is Matt Gonzer and I serve as the Climate Resilience Officer within the County of Los Angeles Chief Sustainability Office. This is a relatively new position. I've been with the county just about nine months and I'm new to the region as well. I've been with the county just about nine months and I'm new to the region as well. But this builds from a legacy of sustainability leadership from the establishment of the office in 2016, the creation of the first regional sustainability plan in 2019, and lots and lots of specific department plans to address their climate hazards and risks, whether it's drought or coastal issues. And our opportunity now is, in the update of the Our County Plan, more intentionally and purposely weave in some of that work that has been done, fill the gaps that still haven't been addressed, but also to help communicate that story so that we can all see that opportunity for resilience as a regional community moving forward.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for being here sir, oh hi, my name is Jonathan Parfrey. I'm the executive director of Climate Resolve. We're a nonprofit organization headquartered in downtown Los Angeles. There's about 25 of us enthusiastic, entrepreneurial souls that are part of our organization, and what we do public policy in trying to move the state of California, the city of Los Angeles, the county of Los Angeles to enact climate resilience measures, and then we like to roll up our sleeves and actually do projects as well. We like to see things get built and we've been busy both on the policy side and on the project side, and, sean, we'd love to work more with you at Sideport.
Speaker 1:I hope we get a chance to do that. Jonathan, you said climate resilience, but just resilience in general. How do you define that or how do you think about that concept?
Speaker 3:Well, we're facing a lot of challenges right now. The recent fires the biggest example of them all, but there are other ones that are a little bit less dramatic. So, for example, extreme heat. Extreme heat actually puts more people in the hospital, actually kills more people than any other kind of climate impact that there is, and by a wide margin, and so our organization has been very active in trying to help people related to extreme heat, providing real options for them as a way of, you know, just staying healthy in the face of these climate challenges that we're facing.
Speaker 1:Thanks. And how about yourself, as you're thinking about resiliency, how do?
Speaker 2:you define that, yeah, and I do want to bring it back to climate resilience, just because that is the title with which I have the privilege to serve in this role, and for us, though we're not shying away from the other impacts of economic resilience, resilience itself comes from psychology and humans' ability to sort of move beyond trauma with support networks.
Speaker 2:It also then evolved into ecological resilience and these systems that provide us these great free benefits that we too often take for granted, but now more so into disaster resilience and climate resilience, where these changing conditions that John has then spoke about can either be a stress to the system we know it's getting hotter outside but it also can manifest in something like a heat wave, so that's a shock to the system.
Speaker 2:The other hazards of sea level rise can mean winter waves are that much higher. Increasing temperatures and prolonged drought are things that can feed into wildfire risk. So for us, it's really important to understand the amplification of these risks as a result of burning fossil fuels and excess heat in our system and to think about how we are directly addressing those risks for people in places inside and outside of homes, the environment of those communities, those things that I mentioned that provide us some of those direct benefits, but also a sense of place and a connection with place. But also, what is government doing to ensure that existing, a new infrastructure continues to provide conditions for thriving, healthy, connected communities? And that's the vision that we hope to put forth through the update of the Our County Sustainability Plan.
Speaker 1:So you're grappling with some really complex, dynamic challenges that are leading to tough things, like what we've been talking about with the fires in LA throughout the day-to-day. What's bringing you hope? I mean, I imagine I hope for me. My hope for you is that you're seeing as many beacons of hope as you are challenges to address.
Speaker 2:I will answer the hope, but I want to drill home the point that climate change is overwhelming and abstract and if we don't talk about it in direct, simple terms, we'll continue to make it overwhelming and abstract and make it too difficult for people to engage directly. Not that it's easy to do, but there really are only so many ways to address some of these climate hazards and unfortunately sometimes they can have cascading or compounding effects. But we know there's. You know, if you want to keep someone safe from heat, you provide cooling. You don't let it get hot, you stop polluting and causing climate change.
Speaker 1:There are no responses to the discrete challenges.
Speaker 2:There are no responses to the discrete challenges. So that actually does give me hope as people continue to share their thoughts on what are community improvements that they also want that also start to sync up with the kinds of things that address this climate risk. Because I come from planning, I think our ability to bring climate resilience to community is just basic community and environmental planning and long-range thinking with those hazards and risks that we know we're confronted with.
Speaker 1:Excellent, Jonathan. Hope Bring some hope, Jonathan.
Speaker 3:Our organization sprung into analyzing the Woolsey fire that affected so many people in Malibu. We started with a thesis, and the thesis was that the communities that were receiving people would be negatively impacted, that there wouldn't be enough housing, they would feel crowded, that the people who were the receiving communities would suffer economically. And you know what we found? The exact opposite. The people who took people in ended up benefiting financially. You can take a small town outside of Paradise, california. It's called Chico. The city of Chico has ended up with a financial surplus in their city because there was more economic activity happening within their city, and there's also federal dollars that flow in for education, and so the school districts were being funded because they had more pupils.
Speaker 3:The thing that is an amazing realization is that we have this idea that people who are displaced are going to be a burden, but guess what? It's the opposite. They end up contributing to the community. So here we are in Southern California. We're seeing federal action that is really bringing so much burden to immigrant communities. We've got to change our thinking around that the people who are coming here can provide great benefit to Southern California as they are economically. But we should, rather than thinking that we have to put up with people who are immigrating here that they're actually providing a benefit, and so that's what gives me hope is that if we pay attention, we will learn great lessons, and I think one of the best lessons is that we don't need to be afraid of the changes from climate change if we actually have an open heart and open arms and we can actually work with the people that need help.
Speaker 1:It'll become our benefit to work with them. Thank you both for talking with me. Thank you also for the service you're providing to this region now, but also for a long, long time into the past and, hopefully, the future. So thanks, guys, thank you, thanks, jonathan.