Community
Region 9 has revitalized how it serves its region. The Region 9 Board is speaking about the efforts of 2022, plans for 2023, and opening discussion to its members and partners for the future of the region.
This session leverages neuroscience research and application to the fields of emotional competence and intelligence, and offers effective tactics emergency managers can use to enhance their individual and organizational resilience and performance. Emergency managers, first responders, and others learn – often through the example of the leaders whose footsteps they follow, to be “tough”. To not feel. To not be tired, or burnt out, or exhausted – or at least never admit it. Or if you do, make sure you follow it up with a caveat that shows you didn’t really mean it. After all, we’ve been schooled for generations that emotion has no place in the workplace. Perhaps some new company may be promoting vulnerability or emotion, but emergency managers have no time. They are the ones that keep things running when the crisis happens. The pandemic and other events of 2020-2022 proved that. Or did it? Or did it just underscore the need to change the conversation and our behavior – as individuals and organizational and community leaders? The latest statistics are staggering, and the data isn’t even fully in yet. Suicides skyrocketed in related fields, and attempts aren’t even fully tracked. Record numbers of talented emergency professionals have left the field, and new incoming talent dips their toe in the water only to leave when they see the churn. The truth of the matter is that emotions play an integral role in how we respond to people and events. You simply cannot separate emotion form resilience, and in this case – our collective ability to better respond to crises and emergencies.
Given the vital importance of infrastructure to our social and economic well-being, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) developed the Infrastructure Resilience Planning Framework (IRPF) to enable the incorporation of security and resilience considerations in critical infrastructure planning and investment decisions. CISA encourages our partners and stakeholders to institutionalize the use of the IRPF as a long-term methodology, with its flexible set of guidance documents and resources, for integrating critical infrastructure security and resilience into local and regional planning across systems and jurisdictions. An update on the IRFP will be provided, along with examples of this process in work through the use of CISAs surveys/assessments, including the Regional Resiliency Assessment Plans (RRAPs) completed with state of Hawaii, and ongoing efforts with the Pacific Territories of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI), as well as components of the process used during special event and blue-sky days.
We will be talking about opportunities to augment EM work through participation in The Region 9 Collaborative.
Emergency response wasn’t designed with children in mind, and the unique needs of children are often an afterthought following a disaster. Project:Camp Executive Director Mikey Latner and Board Chair Lorraine Schneider will discuss how children process extreme events differently from adults, how we can better include children and families in planning, and share best practices from Project:Camp’s experience running emergency pop up day camps. We will explore why childcare is a critical element of community resilience and how organizations can rally around specific services to serve families and other groups more effectively with specific needs.
Documentary Film: Quake Heroes
Discussing storytelling’s role in shaping public opinion.
The pulse of emergency management has been changing - from a profession with a steady state of planning interrupted at times by a spike of response activity to now a steady state baseline of permacrisis with some ‘spikes’ being more like plateaus and others piling on top each other concurrently. Emergency management has evolved over the decades and the coming years will present new challenges for the field. Traditionally, emergency management has focused on shock events, but now for some their area of responsibility is broadening to include stressor events such as climate change, supply chain disruptions, homelessness, drug epidemics. Added to this are the challenges of cyber-physical convergence and hybrid threats. Even for those not expanding their focus beyond shock events, the threat horizon is expanding. The impacts of these changes go beyond our policies and procedures and affect us as practitioners. This presentation will highlight some of these changes and what they mean for us in terms of horizon scanning, situational awareness, response readiness, and human elements.
No one can truly be prepared to respond to a mass shooting. We write and test plans, we exercise with our partners, we even talk about mental health impacts. This presentation will focus on lessons learned in planning response and recovery from the Monterey Park shooting to recovery of a community including setting up a Family Assistance Center, how we often overlook our own trauma as emergency managers, what mental health support really means, and how to navigate the political landscape that descends after a mass shooting incident.
As emergency management matures and incident consequences increase in complexity, more interdisciplinary partnerships are required. Enterprise risk management is currently being utilized to identify and methodically prepare organizations for future risks to obtaining strategic objectives. A discussion on where emergency management and enterprise risk management intersect, differ and how each process builds more resilient organizations.