EIIP Virtual Forum Presentation — April 13, 2011
Building Community Disaster Resilience
Through Private-Public Collaboration
William H. Hooke, Ph.D.
Chair, Committee on Private–Public Sector Collaboration to Enhance
Community Disaster Resilience
Senior Policy Fellow and Director, American Meteorological Society
Sammantha L. Magsino
Program Officer/Study Director
Board on Earth Sciences and Resources
National Research Council
Amy Sebring
EIIP Moderator
The following has been prepared from a transcription of the recording. The complete slide set (Adobe PDF) may be downloaded from http://www.emforum.org/vforum/NAP/Private-PublicCollaboration.pdf for ease of printing.
[Welcome / Introduction]
Amy Sebring: Good morning/afternoon everyone and welcome once again to EMForum.org. I am Amy Sebring and will serve as your Moderator today. We are very glad you could join us. For our newcomers, we will be providing some instructions as we go along so you can relax and participate with us.
You may recall that during February, we featured the FEMA Listening Sessions on "Strengthening Community Engagement in Preparedness and Resilience Efforts." Today we will focus specifically on private sector engagement, so crucial to this effort.
The recent study report titled, "Building Community Disaster Resilience Through Private-Public Collaboration" was linked from our announcement and is also linked from our home page. Please note that the PDF version of the report is available from the National Academies Press at no cost.
In addition, there is a brief summary of the highlights that you can download right now by clicking on the icon of the 3 overlapping pages at the top right.
[http://www.emforum.org/vforum/NAP/summary.pdf]
There are also a number of other related links on today’s Background Page.
We are making a recording, which should be available later this afternoon. The text transcript will be posted later on. If you are not on our mailing list, you can Subscribe from our home page, and then you will get a notice when these are posted.
[Slide 1]
Now it is my pleasure to introduce today’s guests: Dr. William Hooke Chaired the study committee and also serves as Senior Policy Fellow and Director for the American Meteorological Society. Bill had a long tenure with NOAA and between 1993 and 2000, he held two national responsibilities: Director of the U.S. Weather Research Program Office, and Chair of the Interagency Subcommittee for Natural Disaster Reduction.
We are also pleased to introduce the study director Sammantha Magsino, Program Officer for the National Research Council's Board on Earth Sciences and Resources. Before coming to the National Research Council, she was a geologist with the Washington State geologic survey. Sammantha will help us out during the Q&A portion of our program.
Welcome to you both and thank you very much for taking the time to be with us today. I now turn the floor over to Bill to start us off please.
[Presentation]
Bill Hooke: Thank you very much, Amy and Avagene. I am very grateful to the EM Forum for providing this opportunity. It is wonderful to be able to talk about this report and especially so for the following two reasons which are not captured in this slide, but which I want to mention as we get started.
The first is that I think there is a tendency, and not on the part of the folks on this phone call, but most folks world wide, to think of disaster resistance as a small side light to human affairs. As we know through events like the Sendai earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, or the Haitian earthquake—these events are not just interruptions of the natural order of things, but they are really the way the earth’s system does its business.
This idea of disaster resilience is fundamental to the human prospect. The second point is the same idea with respect to private and public collaboration. I think there is a widespread view that somehow this is a public sector responsibility—the whole issues of mitigation and preparedness and response and the rest of it—but in fact, the public and private collaboration that this report addressed is fundamental to any hopes that communities might have to building disaster resilience.
On the one hand, if you think of this as just another report, it is easy for those of us involved to think that this was terrific—but if you think about it in those terms, though, the fundamental importance of disaster resilience to human fortunes and the role of the private and public sector collaboration as being vital, there is still so much to be done. We will go through some of that today.
This particular report, as is true of all academy reports, is sponsored by an outside group. In this case the funding came from the Department of Homeland Security and the Behavioral Sciences Division, Michael Dunaway. We are very grateful to DHS for having the vision and insight to provide this report.
[Slide 2]
We’re looking at the statement of task. This is something that is arrived at jointly between the academy and its national research council and the sponsoring groups, in this case, DHS. You see the task is to assess the current state-of-art in private-public collaboration to strengthen community resilience, to identify gaps in our knowledge of how that collaboration works, and in the practice of it, to recommend research areas for investment.
In particular, there are three pieces of this. One is we were asked to look and see if there exists a kind of common framework or template for how such collaboration occurs. Second is to identify or develop guidelines that might govern how private and public sector groups might work together to implement such a framework in their community. Finally is to look at models of existing collaborations as we might find them.
I want to highlight that third piece because it is an area where we could do a lot more work. I think if you went into any community in America or worldwide, you would find some public and private collaboration going on. It would vary a great deal in how organized and visible it was, and how sustainable it was, but there is a lot going on out there. All of us feel like we could have done much more to look at that.
[Slide 3]
We had an outstanding committee. You can see a list of names on this slide. When I was approached by the academy to be involved in this, I looked at the group and I thought it was a terrific group to be a part of. I should highlight Sam’s role. You heard Amy mention Samm Magsino at the beginning.
For those of you who might not be familiar with academy reports, the staff directors play an absolutely crucial role in the success and effectiveness of these reports. They are essentially providing adult supervision to make sure a bunch of happy-go-lucky scientists and private sector contractors such as we had in our group that had a day job, keep to task, keep to schedule, keep focused on the problem at hand.
It is a job that requires a lot of intellectual capability and zero ego, because there is enough ego on the part of the committee members to go around.
[Slide 4]
The starting point was to think about what resilience is. We could have spent a couple of years debating this. There are a lot of definitions out there. We kept trying to simplify it and make it very general. We based it on a definition provided by Norris and others, and it was a little focused on public health, but you see it is quite general.
It is the continued ability of individuals, groups or systems to function during or after stress, such as a disaster.
[Slide 5]
Here is the diagram that shows the major elements of the collaboration as we saw it. This is our framework diagram that we promised. We are going to go through the components of it now. Bear with me a little bit. We are first going to discuss the community factors and then zero in on the other pieces.
[Slide 6]
These are the external factors that have to be taken into account. In most communities, disasters and disaster resilience are put aside in daily affairs. It is all about local economy, schools, healthcare, and the rest of that. There are a set of external factors that must be taken into account. What sort of jurisdictions does this community operate under? What is the political climate, levels of trust, economic levels, liability concerns and so on?
[Slide 7]
Here it is really important—we came back to this again and again—to engage the full fabric of the community. There is a tendency to think of this in terms of the local government actors and maybe a few of the major industrial employers in a given city, and maybe think in terms of a few NGOs, but we thought it was important to bring in all the community organizations and all segments of the population, including the disenfranchised.
As one of our committee members kept putting it, the disenfranchised are not surprised by disasters. They are living in a chaotic situation day in and day out. They have a lot of wisdom to offer, and they are the target of much of the work here.
[Slide 8]
Implementation principles and strategies—apart from this basic guideline of bringing in all of the full fabric of the community, it is important to understand from the outset what the goals and incentives are, to be able to have different actors intervene at multiple levels, so there is a neighborhood and community level.
Also, the communities are operating within a state framework and a national framework. We found it most successful when these efforts were devoted towards building capacity, changing community policies and practices and environment, as opposed to being more specific.
It is very important to realize the disaster resilience itself is a part of larger community resilience as a whole. Resilience is not something you can exercise every two or three years any more than you could decide to run a marathon today and think that in 18 months, you would run another one and not do any running in between.
Community resilience is a way of exercising this framework as you’re going alone and keeping it functioning well. It is very important to institutionalize these arrangementss. Leaders are important. Charismatic leaders who have fires in the belly for doing this are vital. In order to ensure that such collaborations endure beyond these folks, it is necessary to institutionalize the collaboration.
[Slide 9]
With regard to how things work, the emphasis is on that word ‘collaborative’ management structure. It is not top down command and control. It is not the city, county, or regional government acting as the principle and the private sector companies being agents or subcontractors carrying out the work. It is very important that this be a level playing field.
It is important to build networks to support this collaboration horizontally and vertically. It is vital to have some kind of facilitating body whose main goal is to see that this collaboration functions. We had a lot of discussion about this and people generally agreed that this facilitating body needs to be someplace outside the government structure. It needs to focus on the community and it needs to build on existing networks rather than try to go around.
[Slide 10]
The final outcome, the proof of this pudding, is something you see when the disaster occurs and you realize you built up a little resilience. There are intermediate steps where we can see if we’re making progress. Do we see that the collaborative management structure is in place? Do we see that the trust level among all the participants is building?
Has there been a good identification of community needs and also resources that are going to be available? Does it look as if this collaboration is making it possible to leverage and coordinate the use of these resources more effectively? Do we see planning that is ‘all hazards’ and looking at the full disaster cycle?
[Slide 11]
This is not a "do it once and you’re done" kind of thing. The community is constantly evolving. The circumstances surrounding the community are constantly evolving.
[Slide 12]
It is very important to have in place a constant ability to reevaluate and see how things are progressing.
[Slide 13]
Let’s focus on some of the research challenges. Resilience as a theory needs to be testable, needs to have some predictive power—that shows you that your science and understanding are on the right track.
When we have to have some idea of what success looks like, it has to be definable, achievable, and repeatable—we ought to have metrics. It ought to be something that is measurable. That turns out to be easier to talk about than to do in practice.
[Slide 14]
One area of research that looks pretty important to us is the ability to identify and remove barriers that prevent changes in organizational culture. Most of what we have been talking about is not something that is business as usual for communities. There is a real need for research on evaluating as you go along. Think about this as embedded research, the way you have embedded reporters in a war zone.
How are you doing in terms of building trust among your collaborators? How are you doing in terms of rewarding individuals and organizations that span boundaries? Usually those rewards are few and far between. What can we see in the way of movement towards cultures of collaboration?
[Slide 15]
A key piece of this is data over extended periods of time. I am not a social scientist, so "longitudinal" is not a natural word for me, but this is the word they use for what I would describe as a long term data set. It documents the community change, validates methodologies, and provides comparable data sets for risk and resilience.
Data sets would be comparable over a period of years, but also hazard to hazard, or community to community, and shows some evidence for the long term investments, and evidence of the effectiveness of those investments. There is very little such data most places. The hazards research community sees this as a key barrier towards taking research on hazards to a new level in terms of what it can do and improving and building disaster resilience at ground level.
[Slide 16]
There is also research needed on how to motivate the players, particularly the business side. They have one major responsibility, which is to make a profit, and the all of rest of this subtracts from the profit margin in a sense. There is a constant dialog that is needed about how this contributes to profit margins in longer terms, how this will build the brand of a corporation within a community and nationally. The same thing applies to community and faith-based NGOs.
There is some research needed on what is there in the way of incentive and encouragement to take emergency managers and folks in Homeland Security who have a very full plate as it is, to add another set of requirements, issues, and meetings, and all the follow-up needed in a setting that provides much less control that sometimes seems is needed for this.
Finally, there needs to be research on the boot-strapping part of the process. How do we, as we go along with very constrained budgets at federal, state, and local levels these days, build capacity for collaboration?
[Slide 17]
We found ourselves favoring very much the idea of demonstration projects where researchers and on the ground practitioners would be able to work side by side and discuss on a frequent and ongoing basis how things were going. Practitioners would be able to explain why it is they were taking certain actions and moving certain ways and researchers would be able to ask questions directly of the practitioners rather than try to guess.
We also thought there should be a lot of effort devoted to how to improve nationwide sharing of such results and progress—comparison from community to community, giving us all a chance to see what is working in community A, so let’s see what they are doing that we might be able to apply in our community and so on.
We saw as one means toward this that there might be some reward for associated with establishing a national repository and clearing house for dealing with this.
[Slide 18]
Then there is the question of moving from some nice theoretical ideas to practice. We thought there were some things that could be done to create a climate that would foster this kind of community based collaboration. A large part of that is a national level indicating sending a strong signal in all sorts of ways that such collaborations are favored.
Providing a strategic framework at the national level, and then working on the social and political environments that recognize the need for exercising these networks. We have seen time and again in natural hazard work and work in willful acts of violence and so on that the breakdown of communication that occurs in some of the horizontal and vertical networks are a real challenge for everyone.
Finally what we need are techniques that are viral and catalytic and emergent that incubate the kind of mobilization that we are talking about.
[Slide 19]
We talked earlier about the importance of local leadership, recognizing what the existing networks are there for, and instead of putting in competing networks that are distractions and marginally supported, it is good to look at what is already there and think about ways to make it more robust and build this in.
Again, the idea is that there would be somebody or some group of people who are in each community helping facilitate this whole discussion and coordination from a neutral position.
[Slide 20, 21]
It is important to institutionalize this collaboration and we talked about the importance of identifying community resources and capabilities that will show the immediate value of such collaboration and build community awareness of capabilities and gaps. What tools do they have available and what tools do they need?
This trust thing, particularly in the private sector companies looking at each other, and private sector looking at the public sector and vice versa, we have a lot of "we/they" and we need more of "us".
[Slide 22]
This is easier to say than to do, but it is important to develop measurable objectives. These means things that are not easy to measure, such as in last year we had so many private sector partners at this table, and this year we have so many. It is much more in looking for measures and signs that the community is really more resilient or coordinated than it used to be.
Public education is a key piece of this. K-12 education and public education for adults, and here is where communities—public and private sectors should reach out to local academic institutions for engagement in some of these areas.
[Slide 23]
It is imperative that communities have a good understanding of what such efforts are costing them and how they are going to sustain these costs over a period of time, so that they have an exercise they can keep up.
[Slide 24]
The last slide reminds you of what Amy said at the beginning, it is possible to view this report online at the National Academies Press. We had an information gathering workshop that was very important to our two-year study early on. There is a web address there for reaching that.
Amy Sebring: Thank you very much Bill. Now, to proceed to our Q&A.
[Audience Questions & Answers]
Question:
Susan Sanderson: Our tax dollars are already funding volunteer organizations in disasters: Citizen Corps. However, some of our CC organizations include more first responders and government people because this functions reports to EM. Some govt. employees just don't get it. They won't even give a council seat (voting) to businesses/non-profits/NGO. They talk collaboration and have a few token large corporations but what about the medium to small businesses. As an Emergency Mgr I can tell you for our area it's more a problem for EM/HS. They can't get out of the box, especially when it comes to grant dollars. The only way some EM's will do anything is if grant dollars depend on it.
Bill Hooke: I think that is a great point because you look at any community and you probably have some kind of 80/20 rule—80% of the income in that community is coming from 20% of the businesses.
You have a small group of businesses at the top that it is easy to coordinate with, and you have a much larger number that maybe don’t add up to so many dollars, but that are hugely important in terms of determining the nature and culture of a community—what makes it special and what may make it a community to begin with.
I think that is a terrific problem. We all struggle—we see our national government struggle with this. They have several large industrial states, and they have states with smaller populations. I think that kind of provides the answer for the keys to something like this.
You can imagine trying to have several groupings that try to capture—there might be one grouping that is larger corporations, one for medium businesses, and one for small businesses, and then aggregations or representatives from those who are talking about how it is working across those different sectors. Do you see what I mean?
It is now much different than what we do with a family if you have a large family. If you have a whole bunch of kids and they are a different range of ages, there are things where you are dealing with issues of family as a whole, and other things where you specialize to what is important to the younger or older ones.
That is not much of an answer, Susan, but you have identified a difficult problem. I think the key thing is that you have to show some interest in dealing with this. I talked to a friend of mine who is actually an in-law. She was in a very large family, and she said that when her dad died, one of her brothers said, "At least he ignored us all equally". That is a terrible kind of answer, but it is something we have to fight all the time.
Question:
Amy Sebring: Samm, did you have that small-to-medium size business perspective represented in the workshops that you did?
Sammantha Magsino: We did have some discussion in committee meetings. Some of our committee members were very involved in helping communities develop these kinds of private/public collaborations. What Lynn Kidder would probably have said was to try and identify those key people that are in touch with their own communities, whatever it might be—small businesses, non-native English speakers, or whoever—and tap into the leaders to those particular networks and engage through that.
Obviously, the table is not big enough for everyone to have a seat at it, but everybody can get engaged. How to do that specifically—I don’t think the report went into that kind of detail. It is going to depend on the dynamics of the individual communities.
Bill Hooke: I think Samm made a great point there and said it better than I could. I should mention that in our workshop we had some very big companies, like Home Depot, and some very small companies as well. The input we were getting from the community consisted of this fuller spectrum.
Sammantha Magsino: The role of the press that is one that is often overlooked, especially during emergency response activities—you look at the press sometimes as sort of a nuisance and getting in the way or passing on information that might not be the most helpful at that given moment.
On the other hand, what some folks at the workshop were saying is that members of the press are also members of the community and they can be engaged beforehand as part of the collaboration. That type of means of communicating can be quite powerful.
Question:
William R. Cumming: Dr. Hooke, did you find any good models of resilience currently operating at STATE or their Local Government level?
Bill Hooke: We did find good models. I struggle a little bit to pick one and zero in on one. Perhaps Samm has some examples.
Sammantha Magsino: The committee did highlight Safeguard Iowa [http://www.safeguardiowa.org/] as an example of private/public collaboration. I think the committee members liked the idea of having a neutral body facilitating activities throughout the state. That would be a state level effort. It was successful from what I understand to extent in response to floods that occurred.
Amy Sebring: You also cite Tulsa Partners. [http://www.tulsapartners.org/] We have links to both of those efforts on the background page.
Bill Hooke: In addition to individual communities that have been special—and Tulsa is a terrific example, because it is an example of where charismatic leadership really made a difference—there are groups that sort of work on a larger scale to provide resources at the community level. We looked at several of those. One we didn’t discuss the way we should have in the report was part of the Chamber Commerce—the Business Civic Leadership Council. There are a number of organizations that are trying to provide resources to communities as well.
Question:
Chris Saeger: Maybe I missed this, was there a mention of the role of social media in building collaborations?
Bill Hooke: Yes, I am going to turn that over to Samm because Samm also was involved in another Academy study that zeroed particularly on that.
Sammantha Magsino: Just a brief background on that other study. Under the same contract under DHS that allowed us to produce this report that we are talking about today, we also had a workshop and there was a summary along with that one the use of social network analysis for enhancing community disaster resilience. [See http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12706.]
It wasn’t so much about how do we use Twitter and Facebook, but how we analyze the data from such networks and how do we look at social networks more broadly so that we can filter information coming across those networks. We can decide what is good, bad, or actionable—what we need to do something about.
In the study we discuss today those networks came up and they were valued as tools for communication. The study didn’t so much focus on how to use those, but there was discussion on relying too much on electronic media because if you have a full-scale disaster you might lose power, which limits your ability to completely depend on those. But they are important in terms of tapping into existing networks.
Bill Hooke: Every time you saw in the Power Point presentation where we talked about building on existing networks—that included this kind of discussion. You have all sorts of dialogs going on in communities across the country about how to deal with healthcare in that community , the environment, the landscape, or how to grow the economy of that community.
The idea was as much to get people talking about disaster resilience as part of those discussions.
Sammantha Magsino: Social media was seen more as a tool than the means.
Question:
John Cutler: We've been pretty good at community collaboration on all disaster-response levels. We have some industries who feel they might be exposing too much private information if they share. Any suggestions how to deal with this?
Bill Hooke: That is a good point and we see that all over. In my own arena for example, the meteorological arena, the private sector is critical. Just to take one example—putting satellites up in space to observe the atmosphere and oceans—the companies that do that have common interest and they are also competing with each other.
It is a constant balancing act to protect their privacy and agree on things that represent a certain common good and focus on that. It is the kind of sensitivity that we are all required in any kind of discussion about respecting people’s privacy while building trust and looking at common objectives.
Question:
Marilyn Hilliard: Regarding "focused on the community" statements, should we instead think in terms of community based or community initiated? We ask because focused on the community seems to imply someone other than the community is in charge...
Sammantha Magsino: I think the language in the report, Marilyn, would completely support your point of view. I think community focused collaboration needs to be initiated at the community level. That is really the only way you can get buy-in from the community if it arises from the community.
Bill Hooke: I think this has been implicit in hazards work for a long time. If you look at a flooding event or something that affects a particular county, the President can feel that county’s pain, but the President has 3,000 other counties where that one came from and things are happening on an ongoing basis, too.
Local government and local business have an entirely different risk/reward structure from the national risk/reward structure in looking at this. I thought your comment, Marilyn, was terrific.
Question:
Emily Meyer: What are some examples of ways to reward boundary spanning individuals and organizations?
Bill Hooke: One goes back to the media example. One very inexpensive way to do this is to recognize it within in the community. So if the community is making its safety relative to the river that runs through it or the tornadoes it sees periodically, or something, if they are making that a priority and they are shining a very favorable spotlight on the people who are doing this and saying, "Jane or Fred or whoever has worked a lot of hours off the clock doing this, and we all owe them a debt of gratitude"—that helps as much as anything else.
Another thing that helps is listening to the folks and individuals in the corporations who are doing this—a lot of the motivation for this is in seeing things improve, not just the recognition. If you picture yourself butting your head against the brick wall, sometimes you tend to give up. I think doing, being responsive, to what the suggestions are is magical in terms of providing some incentive.
Sammantha Magsino: This is something that Kathleen Tierney on the committee would have had a lot of say about. It is an interesting question and it is actually one of the challenges to collaboration that is highlighted in the report. That is an area that needs more research on exactly how to do that. More effort is needed to promoting and facilitating multi-sector collaboration. More training is needed. It is not really there within organizational culture.
Bill Hooke: You mentioned Kathleen Tierney. Another committee member, Brent Woodworth, is listed as being with the Los Angeles Emergency Preparedness Foundation, but he worked a decade or so for IBM. They have a rapid response team that would go into earthquake areas or flooded areas worldwide and they would reestablish information and technology infrastructure for that location and swoop in and put it there.
It was a great way to brand what they could do. Another thing is that not all companies or NGOs will have equal incentives. Some will have special incentives like that, and you can look to them.
Question:
Avagene Moore: Bill, I love the idea of Public-Private Collaboration or Partnership. However, we won't have resilient communities and a resilient nation until we educate citizens, individuals and families that they must be resilient as well. In your esteemed opinion, how do we make believers of all the players, not just the big companies and businesses in the private sector?
Bill Hooke: I get nervous when anyone says "esteemed" in the same phrase as my opinion, but again, we all somehow made this transition with putting on seatbelts. We went from a few people doing it to everyone doing it and regulations to do it. We’ve done the same thing with smoking, in terms of now it happens out on the streets.
We should see this as likely to go the same direction and over the same kind of time scale. Going back to some of the points we were making in training the education community-thinking about K-12 education, thinking of it in terms of generational terms, this looks far more possible. It is possible to have these cultural shifts.
You have to have one that really matters. As we watch how the Japanese have responded to the earthquake and tsunami, we have seen much to admire and a few lessons to learn, as particularly as applies to our Pacific Northwest and the states along the cascadia subduction zone. I think that provides a kind of teachable moment.
We have that kind of culture in the aviation community. In the aviation community there is a real culture of learning from experience. When the airplane accident occurs, people swarm all over the accident site and say "We don’t ever want this to happen again". That is quite different from a culture that says, "We’re going to rebuild just like before". We can move from one to the other.
Sammantha Magsino: Ines Pearce, a committee member, once described the need to engender the expectation that such an organization in a community will exist—this collaborative organization. She likened it to a Chamber of Commerce. You can’t go to any sized community in the country without finding a local chapter of the Chamber of Commerce.
It is that group that is expected to be the support for the business community for issues that are important to them. The expectation needs to be engendered within the community that this collaboration exists to support the needs of building disaster resilience.
Question:
Dan Iradi: Is it "too honest" to suggest that collaborative relationships may be built based on needs? For example, EM performing a GAP Analysis may find solutions within their own community - through local businesses with whom they can develop a relationship to deploy resources during an incident response. From a private sector perspective, EM can provide to businesses areas of expertise that they may lack - disaster planning, training and exercises for their COOP [continuity of operations] and for the safety of their employees and families.
Bill Hooke: If I understand that right, I think that’s a great comment. That’s the essence of collaboration. It’s not just that you’re doing it for its own sake. You’re doing it because you can achieve some larger purpose only in that way.
Sammantha Magsino: That is actually one of the first steps in the practical guidance the committee offers. You need to identify what the need is of the community and then figure out who are the primary stakeholders with respect to those needs who have the resources and capacity to address those needs.
In that way, if I understand the question correctly, it is quite reasonable to say, "We need to be able to get trucks from A to B, and we know that these roads will likely be closed under these circumstances. What kind of resources can you provide, or can we use your parking lot, or whatever." I don’t think it is bad thing necessarily to be that direct as I think you are implying Dan.
Amy Sebring: I think his point is that maybe some of the incentives for collaboration is the notion that "if you can do something for me, then I can do something for you."
Sammantha Magsino: The committee absolutely agreed. I think they state it fairly clearly in the report that collaboration is good for the bottom line and there is value for the participants in collaboration to collaborate long before you have a disaster. There is a much more immediate benefit. Be honest about it. Celebrate the benefits. That is one thing that was stressed in the development of the model in the report—if you do something right, you celebrate it because it gets more people involved.
Question:
Susan Sanderson: Is anything being done with the EM organizations (IAEM, NEMA?)
Amy Sebring: I believe both of those organizations do at least have public sector committees. I would like to take this a little broader in terms of outreach. What’s next with the study results? I assume you turned around and submitted back to the Department of Homeland Security.
Sammantha Magsino: I know that DHS had been very serious about getting the research recommendations that this committee and the committee that put together the workshop on social network analysis. They wanted those research recommendations so they could determine how best to spend their research dollars in this area. If I understand the question correctly, that was one of the reasons for doing this. Presumably, they would now go back and follow up on some of that research.
They have also asked for some derivative products. They didn’t call them derivative products, but there is a pamphlet you have a link for on your cover page, and that DHS asked us to produce specifically geared toward community leadership. What information do they need to know? They don’t really care what kind of research is needed—they want to know what they can do on the ground.
So there has already been some, this briefing for example, is one of outcomes from having done this report. We are trying to get the word out as much as possible and disseminate it as much as possible.
Bill Hooke: I think Samm made some excellent points. She and I were over last month briefing an interagency group—maybe a dozen or so federal agencies on this work. The committee members are plugged in to the community in a diverse set of ways and they have all been working on this topic before the committee assignment came up.
They weren’t obviously going to stop. Now they have a tool they can use. We are taking every invitation we can get and trying to respond favorably to it. We are also injecting it into all of our conversations in a variety of different directions as we move around. As I said at the beginning, this is a topic that goes beyond a single academy report.
There are a lot of people—practitioners, researchers, policy makers, journalists, and everybody in between who are fretting about this and good things are going to happen I believe.
[Closing]
Amy Sebring: Great. That’s a good note to wrap up on today. Thank you very much Bill and Samm. We appreciate your taking the time to be with us today and share these ideas. Incidentally, if you are going to the World Conference on Disaster Management in Toronto this summer, Bill will be there in person presenting this topic.
Bill Hooke: With Michael Dunaway, so come and hear what he has to say on this. He is very thoughtful on this subject.
Amy Sebring: Again, the recording should be available later this afternoon. If you are not on our mailing list and would like to get notices of future sessions and availability of transcripts, just go to our home page to Subscribe.
Before you go, PLEASE take a moment to do the rating/review! Note: We are asking you to rate the relevance of the information, and this will assist us in our future programming.
Now for a few announcements: We are pleased to welcome two new EIIP Partners today, FEMA Region 7 located in Kansas City, represented by Private Sector Liaison Scott Weinberg http://www.fema.gov/about/regions/regionvii/ , and Snohomish County Washington Medical Reserve Corps represented by Therese Quinn http://www.snohomishcountymrc.org/ . Please look them up on our Our Partners page, and if your organization is interested in partnership, please see the link on our home page.
Please note, our next program will take place at noon Eastern on THURSDAY, May 5th, in order to bring you a special program with Timothy Manning, FEMA Deputy Administrator for National Protection and Preparedness! Mr. Manning will share his perspectives from the Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand. Please make plans to join us at that time.
Until then, thanks to everyone for participating today. Thank you very much for the good questions and comments. Have a great afternoon. We are adjourned.