Law enforcement is perhaps the highest risk profession in our country. With the goal to make it home safe each day, officers face danger and risk from the unpredictability they encounter with every call. As a mother of a former police officer, I know the worry doesn’t end with the officer. It extends to family and friends.

Placer County Deputy Paul Solbos founded Warriors Always Ready, a nonprofit that provides high-quality physical and mental training for first responders and veterans through his Code3 Brazilian jiu-jitsu program.

Solbos’ inspiration was a call for service that put him in serious doubt he would make it home safe. His story begins like so many tragic law enforcement stories.

They needed to say something with six bodies scattered around the sidewalk at 10th and K streets. So Darrell Steinberg and Katie Valenzuela took shelter in the safest place they knew. They blamed guns.

With an actor’s studied passion, Steinberg spoke of broken hearts and school shootings. Valenzuela, newer at this sort of performance, tearfully described a phone call at 2:30 a.m. and waded into the weeds of the nation’s fascination with armaments.

Lynn and Virgil Nelson have had 17 different people live in their home over the past several years. They don’t run a boarding house. They are home sharers, people who offer unused space to those who need a place to stay.

“It’s not a weird idea, it’s a proven model,” Lynn says, citing 47 home-share organizations across the U.S. “We’ve had the personal experience of how enriching it can be.”

The Nelsons have always been ready to help others. Virgil is a retired American Baptist pastor and the couple traveled the world as missionaries. When they settled in Roseville seven years ago to be closer to grandchildren, they saw the need for affordable housing and realized they could make a difference.

Over the last seven years, the city has spent millions of dollars and embarked upon many projects to address homelessness.

After housing hundreds of people, it looked as though we were meeting needs and lowering the homeless census. Then the pandemic hit.

Under county health orders, we were forced to let people “shelter in place.” Jails were emptied for the same reason. Bail schedules were reduced to zero. The homeless population grew and addiction rates skyrocketed.

Over the last year and a half, I have become intimately involved with how farmers and ranchers work to rejuvenate land burned by fire.

My partner, Jarrod McBride, bought a 10-acre ranch bounded by Mountain Ranch, Railroad Flat and Mokelumne Hill in Calaveras County that had been devastated by the Butte Fire in 2015. He calls the land Pasture Works.

While many are scared off by these charred areas, we were attracted to Pasture Works because we saw enormous potential in the less expensive mountainous terrain and felt that once land burns, it will not catch fire for quite some time.