Extreme Weather Survivors
A nationwide community bringing together fire, flood, hurricane, tornado and heat survivors from all 50 states.
Leader
Chris Kocher, Co-Founder & Co-Executive Director
Sierra Lindsey Kos, Co-Founder & Co-Executive Director
Based in
San Francisco, CA
Website
Who they are.
In 2024, 108 major disaster and emergency declarations touched 137 million people across the United States, roughly 41% of Americans. Quietly, survivors of extreme weather are one of the fastest growing groups in the country. Extreme Weather Survivors (EWS) is a nationwide community built around helping this group where they bring together fire, flood, hurricane, tornado and heat survivors from all 50 states.
EWS offers survivors free resources in English and Spanish, including a network of mental health professionals and peer support from people who have lived through the same thing. About half of members also take part in EWS trainings in media literacy, storytelling and legislative advocacy, giving survivors tools to share their experiences and advocate for change. Their work recently caught the attention of The New York Times Magazine, which profiled EWS and a group of survivors in September 2026.
Why we believe in the leader.
Alta Futures supports leaders with lived experiences and knowledge. EWS co-founders Chris Kocher and Sierra Kos each came to this work through their own experiences with extreme weather. Chris was living in New York City when Hurricane Ida flooded the city in 2021, killing 14 people. Sierra’s experience came during Oregon’s 2020 Labor Day fires, when, after a week in a Portland hospital with her sick newborn, she and her family drove out of the garage and into orange skies thick with wildfire smoke.
Chris previously directed the survivor network at Everytown for Gun Safety and founded COVID Survivors for Change. Sierra is a filmmaker and creative who led creative and digital communications at Lyft. Together they pair deep expertise in trauma informed organizing with an instinct for how to make it real for people to understand the ways in which climate fueled extreme weather events are impacting more people every year.
Why the work got us excited.
Alta Futures supports a communications project at EWS, where they are helping survivors grow into storytellers and creators who can reach audiences that climate communication has so often missed. For a growing number of Americans, climate change is impacting them directly as flooded basements or lost homes. As the cofounders put it, people find it far easier to grasp one person’s current story than a sweeping warning that climate change will upend the future.
