The FIR Fresh Start Initiative
Professional-grade infrastructure resilience “due-diligence” starting documents, delivered free of charge to communities, military installations, and organizations — in place of the traditional consulting engagement that typically runs $35,000 to $175,000 for small and mid-size entities, and $500,000 or more for large ones.
Here is exactly how it works. A FIR-certified assessor generates your package on FIR’s analytical platform, which ingests publicly available federal infrastructure data and open-source research to populate a preformatted document suite tailored to your location. This replaces the initial infrastructure inventory and gap-identification pass that a traditional engineering firm would perform manually, and it creates an inventory dataset specific to the entity of interest. It provides the basis for your community to step into the FIR Bronze readiness maturity level.
What this is not: a completed or validated assessment. The documents are produced from federal open-source data. They are not field-verified, and they are not assessor-validated — your assessor generates and delivers the package and briefs your leadership through it, but nothing in it has been examined on the ground. It will contain gaps that reflect the accuracy of the underlying federal sources. It contains no scored findings, no verified evidence, and no certification of any kind. Any scored statement about your community’s readiness can only come from a formal certification engagement, conducted under the framework’s full legal protections.
What this does provide: the basis for informed discussion and real plan refinement. A huge head start. An orientation to your community’s infrastructure, economic, and demographic profile, combined with parametric cost estimates for infrastructure hardening and continuity-of-government options, plus the initial pass at a roadmap. This is the foundation for investment prioritization and the planning that follows.
What you can expect: today’s infrastructure and supply chains are optimized for normal operations, not for abrupt, long-term disruption — COVID gave us a small glimpse — and they are largely unprotected against Black Sky risk. These documents will illustrate that gap, and the mitigation cost estimates can appear unaffordable if every vulnerability is addressed without prioritization. The good news: the Fresh Start is a free basis for exactly that prioritization. It delivers a workable path to continuity of operations, civil order, and population care in a Black Sky scenario — reached through follow-on analysis and local decision-making. The Fresh Start removes the two dilemmas that stop most communities before they start: “How do we start?” and “We don’t have a budget to start with.”
What You Receive
When your community is accepted into the Fresh Start Initiative, a FIR-certified assessor generates your package on FIR’s proprietary Resilience Framework platform and delivers the following — twelve analytical documents, fronted by a plain-language briefing for your leadership, all built from your actual federally listed infrastructure data.
Fresh Start Municipal One-Pager
The front page of the package: what the Fresh Start is, what it is not, and what a certification engagement involves — written for elected officials, in plain language.
Executive Summary
One-page synthesis for elected officials — CI inventory, keystones, hardening gaps, an indicative scenario risk picture drawn from open-source data (not a scored finding), and priority recommendations.
Briefing Deck
Presentation-ready deck covering the BSE definition, 4PE threat actors, your infrastructure and archetype fit, the indicative risk picture, and next steps.
Archetype Analysis
Which of the framework’s community patterns — industrial park, urban district, suburban network, planned community — best fits you, and what that pattern predicts about your strengths and binding constraints.
Threat Intel Report
Four-Party Ecosystem threat analysis correlated to your specific infrastructure by sector.
Readiness checklist
The specific gaps between your community and a 30-day continuity core, in priority order, drawn from open-source data. A scored readiness grade is produced only within a formal certification engagement, under the framework’s legal protections.
BSE Readiness Roadmap
Six-phase plan from Bronze through Diamond Blue with action tables and budget framework.
Funding Navigator
Every roadmap item mapped to federal grant programs — BRIC, SLCGP, EMPG, DCIP, DOE GRIP. (Note: Federal grants typically do not fund Back Sky Readiness)
Economic Assessment
Tax base at risk, jobs at risk, census data, equity analysis, and grant cost-share eligibility.
Training Plan
Every person who needs training, what they need, when, and at what cost.
Workforce Scoping
Every role assigned to a training tier with decision authority level and phase gate.
4 More Documents
PM Guide, Operational Planning Guide, Diamond Blue Checklist, and Infrastructure Inventory.
Most Fresh Start documents look at your whole community. This one zooms in on the part of local government that must never stop — and plans for it to keep running for a full 30 days during a Black Sky Event, even if everything outside its walls is down.
What it is
A focused continuity-of-operations (COOP) plan: the playbook that keeps essential government functions working through a long-duration grid-down event. It is built around your essential governance cadre — the small core of people and mission-essential functions a town or county cannot operate without — rather than the entire population.
That focus is deliberate. Protecting the whole community to a 30-day standard is a large undertaking; protecting the handful of functions that hold a government together is achievable now, on a real budget, and it is the foundation everything else is rebuilt from after Day 1.
A hardened core that sustains essential governance for 30 days on its own — not population-wide resilience.
What the plan includes
Built to recognized federal standards: the FEMA Continuity Guidance Circular (CGC-1) 30-day sustainment horizon for mission-essential functions, and FEMA P-361 / ICC 500 protective-design criteria for the hardened core.
Available with a Fresh Start assessment or on its own. On the request form, note that you’d like the 30-Day Continuous Operations Plan so an assessor can scope your governance cadre.
How It Works
Step 1: Apply
Complete the assessment request form. Tell us about your community, adjacent military installations, and what prompted your interest. There is no cost and no obligation.
Step 2: FIR Generates
A FIR-certified assessor loads your infrastructure from more than ten federal open-source databases, traces dependency chains, identifies keystones, and generates your complete document suite on FIR’s analytical platform. Generation takes minutes; the platform does the manual months of a traditional engagement.
Step 3: You Receive
Your document package is delivered electronically within days or a few weeks (depending on backlog), and your assessor walks your leadership through the One-Pager, Executive Summary, and Roadmap in a 60-minute briefing.
What This IS
A professional starting framework — the analytical structure, the questions that must be answered, the gaps that must be assessed, and the roadmap phases that must be planned — generated in minutes and in your hands within days, rather than months. It gives your leadership a clear path forward and a credible document set to present to councils, commanders, and grant reviewers.
What This Is NOT
A completed or validated assessment. The Fresh Start documents are generated from federal open-source data; they have not been field-verified and are not assessor-validated. They contain no scored findings and no certification. All entity-specific content — infrastructure details, threat assessments, population figures — must be independently verified. Scored findings exist only inside a formal certification engagement, which begins with a short Pre-Engagement Acknowledgment and a Certification Engagement Agreement establishing confidentiality, discovery protections, and the framework’s legal architecture — protections first, findings second. This is the beginning of a process, not the end of one.
What Comes Next
The Fresh Start documents are designed to create momentum. Once your leadership has reviewed the assessment, natural next steps include:
Training
Enroll your working group in BSE 099 (free, 10 hours online). Your team gains shared threat language and a personal readiness foundation. This is the prerequisite for everything else.
Certification
Your lead assessor progresses through CRC, CIRP, and ultimately CBRA certification — building permanent internal capability instead of perpetual consultant dependency.
FIR Engagement
For communities ready to accelerate, FIR provides contracted assessment services, exercise design, grant application support, and ongoing advisory through the certification journey.
Apply for a Free Assessment
No cost. No obligation. A certified FIR assessor will generate your community’s complete Fresh Start document package and personally brief your leadership on it.