About the Association
An independent, non-governmental network that convenes the people and organizations confronting extreme heat — aligning their work into one coordinated movement.
Vision
A nation resilient to the impacts of extreme heat.
Mission
Uniting the heat community to ensure aligned, effective, and evidence-based actions, policies, and initiatives.
Extreme heat is now the deadliest weather hazard in the United States, and its toll is rising. The expertise to meet it already exists — across clinicians, researchers, planners, workers' advocates, technologists, and policymakers. What the field lacks is connection.
Today that expertise largely sits in silos. Where the field does convene, gatherings tend to focus on a single slice of the problem — policy, governance, or worker safety — with few bridges to the related areas of heat work that bear directly on them. Opportunities to connect are routinely missed.
The field is also carried, to a remarkable degree, by a small number of dedicated individuals. Their commitment is a genuine strength, but it leaves the network fragile: when someone retires, changes roles, or turns to another issue, the relationships they held together can quietly dissolve — because those connections were personal rather than institutional.
The Association exists to change that. We provide the durable, institutional structure that holds the field together — convening across the whole of the heat response rather than any one corner of it, so that collaboration endures beyond any single person, organization, or moment.
As a convener rather than a service provider, our work concentrates where a network adds the most value.
Bringing the field together so effort is coordinated rather than duplicated.
Identifying critical research gaps and connecting institutions with the communities they serve to close them.
Surfacing what demonstrably works and helping it spread quickly across the field.
Helping funding and support reach the interventions and communities where they do the most good.
Building a clear, consistent public voice so the field speaks on heat with one message.
The Association is designed around a balanced, traditional non-profit structure: leadership is shared between an Executive Director and an Executive Advisory Committee, with subject-matter committees doing the collaborative work beneath them.
The Executive Director and the Executive Advisory Committee share leadership of the Association as peers. Its standing committees — where members, practitioners, researchers, and partners collaborate — develop the national reports and recommendations the Association publishes under its own name.
The following committees are anticipated as the Association launches. Each is a working space where practitioners, researchers, and partners in that area collaborate and help shape the Association's national reports. Committee areas are planned and may evolve.
Because members can take part in more than one committee, expertise flows between areas that rarely share a room. A few illustrations:
In practice
A physician recognized for treating heat illness in outdoor workers can help shape the Healthcare committee's work on clinical preparedness while informing the Occupational Heat committee's work on protecting workers — carrying hard-won insight directly between two fields that seldom meet.
In practice
A foundation exploring where to make a difference on heat can coordinate with its peers in the Financing committee while sitting in on the research, policy, and implementation committees — seeing for itself where the real funding gaps lie, and turning a single investment into a field-wide strategy.
The Association operates under the fiscal sponsorship of an established 501(c)(3) public charity. Contributions made in support of the Association are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law and are administered by the fiscal sponsor consistent with the Association's charitable purpose.