 Wonderful. Let's begin. So again, thank you so much to everyone for taking the time to join us in this program today. Again, my name is Jessica Unger. I'm the Emergency Programs Coordinator of the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation, FAIC. And joining me today from FAIC is my colleague Tiffany Emig, who will also be available to provide assistance in the chat window should anyone have any questions or comments. So keep an eye out for Jessica and Tiffany for assistance. We're so pleased to be able to offer today's program as a part of a webinar series that will address the needs of the Alliance for Response communities and other cooperative disaster networks nationwide. These programs are made possible to the generous support of the National Endowment of Humanities. We hope that you'll be able to join us for the other programs in this webinar series. Go ahead and pull out your calendars for the new year and make sure you've marked the programs for January. You'll see that we'll be addressing many topics that are essential to cooperative disaster networks, from how to successfully work with volunteers, how to navigate the public assistance process, how to put together successful tabletop exercises, how to communicate effectively during an emergency, and how to successfully seek funding for your projects. Before we dive into today's presentation, a couple of brief technical notes. On your screen you'll see several boxes, including one labeled chat on the left side of the screen, and it seems that most of you have now found that to introduce yourself, so thank you. You'll also notice a box labeled web links and one labeled files on the bottom of your screen. If you post a question in the chat box, you'll receive a response either from me or my colleague Tiffany. Any questions for the presenters will be noted and collected. We'll plan to carve out some time for questions following each of today's presenters. So after Laura, Gary, and Steve and Kim speak, we'll also have time at the end of the full program for additional discussion. So be sure to add your questions in the chat box there. To use the web links box, click on the link that you want to see to highlight it in blue. Then click on the browse to button in the bottom of that box in order to visit that site. In the files box, you can click on the file that you want to download again to highlight it blue and then hit the download file button. And as a reminder, if you're unable to attend any of the upcoming sessions, don't fret. As I mentioned, we will be recording all of these programs and hosting the sessions on AIC's YouTube channel. That's accessible at youtube.com, backslash user, backslash, AIC, or I should say AI conservation. I'll share that URL as well. We'll aim to get all of these sessions up within the week of the webinar date. Before we begin with our presenters today, I wanted to share a little bit about the Alliance for Response Initiative for those who might not be familiar. Alliance for Response began almost 15 years ago with a key mission in mind to help communities more effectively protect their cultural and historic resources. The immediate objectives are to build relationships. So initiating an ongoing dialogue between cultural institutions and emergency managers and first responders. Also to educate cultural heritage and emergency management professionals. Working to raise awareness of the need to protect cultural and historic resources within communities, encouraging disaster planning and mitigation at archives, historic sites, libraries, and museums. And finally to develop strong ongoing networks to facilitate effective local response. This webinar series aims to support in particular this third and final goal. Today's program will hopefully inspire many of you to build even stronger networks through strategic planning and the development of robust mission and vision statements by laws and possibly even mutual aid agreements. Many of you might be familiar with Alliance for Response as an initiative of heritage preservation. In May of 2015, Heritage Preservation closed its doors. But fortunately many of its programs transferred to the foundation of the American Institute for Conservation at that time. Alliance for Response and several other emergency initiatives at Heritage Preservation joined forces with the emergency emergency initiatives currently underway at FAIC, including the National Heritage Responders, formerly known as AIC CERT. The team of trained collections care professionals who provide on the ground support for impacted cultural heritage institutions. Since Alliance for Response began in 2003, there's been an incredible expansion of the program. At the end of 2003, we had seen forums in three cities. By the end of 2006, we see additional meetings springing up across the nation. At the end of 2009, even more networks were taking hold. At the end of 2012, we see even further expansion. At the end of 2015, we get networks here. And at the end of this year, we've seen even more growth, especially in the Pennsylvania area, thanks to some of the efforts of Samantha Forsko and CCAHA to bring online additional new Alliance for Response groups in Pennsylvania. And I hope that many of those groups are joining us here today to get some ideas of how to build their networks. You can find out more information about the National Alliance for Response Initiative and the existing networks by visiting our website. The URL is listed here, but you'll also find the web link in the box below. Before I turn things over to our first speaker, we wanted to get a sense of who is on the webinar today. So to that end, we have three quick poll questions. First up, you will see the poll moving onto your screen. We're curious to know, are you currently involved with an Alliance for Response network? Please go ahead and share your votes. Okay, broadcasting the results. So I'm seeing that most of you are in fact involved with an Alliance for Response network currently, although a handful are not. So it's wonderful that many of you are familiar with the program. Okay, next poll question. If involved with Alliance for Response, do you know anyone from another AFR network outside of your region? For this question, we're mostly curious to see how much information is getting shared between networks. And not just those that are local to your own Alliance for Response groups. Okay, great. I'm seeing that the majority of you are in touch with others, which I think is really wonderful to see in the evidence of the fact that you all are learning from each other. So it's great. There are the results for everyone to see. Great. And final question. I'm curious about what regions are represented today. So if you are coming into the U.S., what region are you from? Okay, great. So I'm seeing many of you are here from the Northeast, a handful from the West, a couple from the Southeast as well. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. It's helpful for us to get a sense of who's on the program today. We will be asking more in-depth questions with the follow-up program evaluation. So please do share that information following the conclusion of today's session. It's wonderful to see so many people who are already involved with and familiar with Alliance for Response Initiative and to see geographic diversity as well. So today we're fortunate to be joined by representatives from three different Alliance for Response networks. A large effort is representing the Savannah Heritage Emergency Response Group, a.k.a. SHER. SHER began with an Alliance for Response kickoff forum in 2009 and it's an excellent work, not only organizing efforts in Savannah, but also with connecting with the AFR network in Atlanta, known as Heritage Emergency Response Alliance, or HERA. Gary Menges today will be representing the Seattle Heritage Emergency Response Network, or SHERN. SHERN began following a forum in 2006 and has developed into a robust group that organizes frequent programming, including tours of member institutions. Steve Dettweiler and Kim Bergen join us from the Alliance for Response Miami group. The Miami forum was held in 2013 and over the past three years the network has made major strides in organizing themselves. As an emergency manager with Miami-Dade County, Steve is well positioned to advocate for the work of their alliance within the community of emergency professionals in the area. We look forward to hearing their insights into the organizing process for each of their networks. Remember that we will be taking a short break between each presentation to ask questions of the speaker. And with that, I'm happy to turn things over to Lara. Okay. Can you hear me okay, Jessica? Sound great. Thanks, Lara. Good. All right. So let me advance my slide. So our Alliance for Response forum was at the end of 2009, so it really didn't get going until 2010. And, of course, it seems like most everyone here is from Alliance for Response, so I don't need to go too much into that. But ours was mainly focused not on a state level, but on a county level. So Savannah is in Chatham County. And so SEMA is our county emergency management agency. And we've worked very closely with them throughout this whole process. And they've been very much on board from the very beginning. And one of the initial things we did also was mapping about 80 of our cultural historical resources, museums, archives, libraries, you know, that sort of thing. And putting them into the GIS program that is then through the county and the city. So we sort of work with the county emergency management folks, which are a whole staff, as well as the one single city emergency manager. So that's just kind of when we got started in some of our initial things, where we got a logo and, you know, started to put some bylaws together. And when we started out, we started out with a very traditional structure. A chairperson, a vice chair, a secretary, and a bunch of committees. And so we do have the share chair. That's why I usually call it the chairperson, because otherwise you sound a little silly being the share chair. But it was a pretty traditional structure. You notice there's no treasure because, of course, we have no money. But some of the committees we then had were three standing committees. The executive committee, which was, of course, the chair, the vice chair, the secretary. We had a planning committee, which was supposed to do some long-term strategic planning. And I don't believe it ever did much, really. But then we had the training and education committee. And this is how I did attend the initial alliance for a month. And then I was on the training and education committee. And this was, started out being a fairly large group of folks. And we did the planning for quarterly meetings. So for a year of business meeting, as well as some sort of training. And we have done tons and tons of workshops throughout the years. Unfortunately, we saw over the years of sustainability. And I think this is a problem that everyone faces. How do you keep momentum going? So after the alliance for response meeting in 2009, we had a huge buy-in. We had tons of people involved. And it just sort of slowly, enthusiasm just kind of dribbled away from there. So that was a big challenge. And also keeping the first responder community involved was a big challenge, as well. FEMA, our county emergency managers, did remain involved. But we've had a lot of turnover in that city position. And just keeping police and fire involved has also been a real challenge. I came in, the first person to be the share chair was Beth Ryder, who was a, who is, excuse me, is a, recently at the time, recently retired historic preservation professional. And so she was the share chair from 2010 and 2011. And then I became the share chair in 2012 and basically have, have been ever since. And because of a lot of these challenges, particularly sustainability, we decided towards the, and we being myself and then the vice-chairman secretary, decided to, we need to change things up a bit. And so in 2015, we had a new plan. And this was to do two co-chairs because there wasn't, there wasn't really good using up of responsibilities in that traditional governance structure. You know, what exactly does a vice-chair do? You know, what does the secretary do other than take notes? You know, we had a lot of the burden of running share was put on the chair. And then there wasn't a lot for the other two people to do. So we thought, well, okay, let's look at what our goals are and let's, let's re-divide things up. And so I took on the role of the, the, basically a liaison to SEMA and working a lot with our partners in the community and then having a CNA chair. Yes, it is that confusing. Where CNA stands for Coastal Museum Association. And this is our local, more regional though, because it extends to several counties and a little bit up into South Carolina, the Coastal Museum, Museums Association is our professional group of museums and libraries and archives. You know, all of our cultural folks. And so we would coordinate with them and put together basically a mutual aid agreement, although we called it a memorandum of agreement, and put together an agreement with them that they have 10 programs a year. At least one of those programs would be share programming. Okay, so we've got this new plan. We've got myself in the SEMA chair. We recruited a new archivist in town to be the CNA chair. We get started in January. We are off and rolling. And then in February her husband gets a new opportunity and they move out of state. So all of that momentum we had going, and we just sort of went boom. And so we had to, again, rethink our plan. And so our new plan that we are putting in, and we spent most of 2016 sort of getting organized for this, figuring out what we're going to do. Our new plan is actually to have four coordinators. So we have moved really far away from the original chair, vice chair type of position. And again, this idea is to divide the workload, have really specific, this person is in charge of this. And one of the things that we've learned over the years is exactly what share is supposed to be doing. What are our challenges? What are our goals? And so this is going to divvy up the workload. Hopefully have a bigger volunteer base by doing that. And also our final goal here is to bring in a lot more folks from a much wider range of entities. So thinking about not just cultural and historical, potentially natural, bringing in our state parks, things like that. Bring, reincorporating the first responders into this as well. So four coordinators. And I'll go through each one of these and what we're doing. The first one is we're calling a chief coordinator who then becomes the coordinator emeritus, which is only slightly a joke. So I'll actually be taking on that role of coordinator emeritus as I move out of the chair person position. But this is a person who's sort of like the chair. They're going to be in charge of communication. We have an email list group that goes out and we use through MailChimp, which I highly recommend because it makes managing your list of people very easy. We have a website, which I started when I was on the Training Education Committee from the very beginning. We now have a Facebook page that I started while I was evacuated from Hurricane Matthew. We've also talked about getting a text messaging system called Remind app going. So the communication is going to be the chief coordinator's position. A resource list. This is something that our local emergency planning committee has done where they basically sent out a form to fill out. Anybody that has any kind of resources that could be used during a disaster, if you might potentially be willing to let people use them, then we would have sort of a master list of all the resources in the community that we could potentially call on if we had a disaster, particularly if we had a very localized disaster that we could all sort of pull together and fix this one small problem before it became a huge problem. It's been a chief coordinator's job also to be that liaison with all of our partners in the community. So acronyms. The LEPC, the Local Emergency Planning Commission, this is sort of like a business version of SHARE. EMP, TAC, this is something new that SEMA has started, but it's emergency. I don't know. I haven't even been to one of those meetings. It's very new. And then COAD is Chatham County Organizations Active in Disasters. So these are the folks that are going to be dealing with a lot of volunteers, especially volunteers that just show up that aren't part of a more organized group. Again, this is like a VOAD of volunteers, active in disasters, but our VOAD isn't strictly volunteer. They also work with SEMA and all the other folks. But making sure that we're attending their meetings, they're attending our meetings, making sure that we're keeping all this networking going. And then any special projects as well, that's going to be the chief coordinator's job, and then they're going to then roll off and become the coordinator emeritus so that we have a lot more continuity and we have much more smoother transition. And again, I'll be taking on that role starting in 2017. Next, membership coordinator. This is mostly getting people's contact information in case of a disaster. So how do we maintain a membership base? How do we maintain ways to contact them on an everyday basis, office phone numbers? But also, how would we get in touch with you if and when you are evacuated? Is email, phones, lots of different ways of getting in contact with people. Having just recently gone through Hurricane Matthew, we're trying to implement a lot of lessons learned, which isn't really part of this webinar, but that's one thing, that getting as many ways to contact people as possible. Bringing out the old-fashioned phone chain is another thing that this person is probably going to be in charge of. GIS mapping. So this is coordinating with both city and county employees to map all of our sites onto GIS so that when we have a disaster and disaster assessment teams go out, they are aware of where our sites are and they don't bulldoze something that we want to keep. And then also the membership coordinator will be in charge of an ad hoc nominating committee. We're going to do two-year terms for the next two years and they'll be in charge of finding leadership, or if people want to continue serving, of course. Then training coordinator. So this person is going to work with that Coastal Museum Association to provide a once-a-year, or larger program, who are thinking May for May Day. But then also provide a little snippet every CMA meaning. Just a little quick handout, some tips, a small project that could be tackled, so that we don't get this, I'm just so overwhelmed, I have so many other things to do, I can't take on a disaster plan as well. Well, what's one small tiny thing you could do? And then also just be that liaison as well to say, hey, this workshop is going on, this opportunity is out there as well. So that's the training coordinator. And then finally, we have the CMA coordinator. So SHARE has a position in the Emergency Operations Center. If we have a disaster or if we're evacuated, they can activate RESF-11C and we have a position in there. We of course have the staff that we have to make sure the people are trained. They have recently upgraded their web software and so we need to get everybody retrained. And it's a big commitment to do this. It means that you are going to do a 12-hour shift in the Emergency Operations Center when you have a hurricane going on and you potentially have family issues that you're dealing with, or how do you evacuate your dog and take care of this at the same time? It's a big responsibility. And so we're going to have somebody whose job is mostly to work with that ESD, make sure that we are keeping that staff, making sure people are fully trained. You have to take a bunch of the online FEMA courses as well, which is a somewhat significant time commitment as well. But then also be that liaison with FEMA. We would love to eventually get either damage assessment people more trained on cultural sites or get our share people onto disaster assessment teams, something that we're working with them to get the damage assessment teams a little bit more cognizant of our needs and then also our economic value as they go through an assess to then declare that disaster or not. So that's mostly what I'm going to talk about. I did want to touch quickly on our Mutual Aid Agreement as well. So we have a Mutual Aid Agreement with HERA, which is the AFR group in Atlanta. And this was really deadly simple to do. I emailed Christine Weissman, who I always referred to as my opposite member in Atlanta. She's been involved with HERA from the very beginning, and said, hey, you guys want to do this. And we were really prompted to do it through our work with FEMA because we were helping them write some of their plans, and this was one of the things that we put into the plan. So I contacted them and said, hey, you want to do this? She said, sure, why not? So I Googled and found a couple examples. We looked at Richmond, Virginia. We looked at San Diego, California. And we actually looked at SHERN, who you're going to hear from next. If I'm not mistaken, I think we are indeed SHERN, meaning we ripped off and duplicated their Mutual Aid Agreement and just adjusted it to how we needed it. You sent it back and forth between the two of us, worked out some really minor details, and then just had both of our membership vote on it and voted into action. We've never had to use it, knock on wood. But some of the challenges behind it were, how committed can we make our members? So we have, SHERN has a membership that's based on institutions. The institutions join. HERA has a membership that's based on individuals. Individuals join HERA. And how much could somebody realistically commit themselves to, say, go into Atlanta, taking time off work? Would they be able to use vacation time? What if their employer says, no, you can't go? There's arguments as to why this is important, such as, if I go help out somebody else, I'm getting free training for when we have disaster at our site. But it's definitely a challenge. And there are some, you know, we left it sort of vague in that if we had a problem, we could call on them and we would kind of have this network and those communication lines open is mostly how our mutual aid wasn't worked. Because if we were too committed, you know, people simply wouldn't be allowed to get away from work. Getting that buy-in from the higher level administration can be challenging. And not everybody has a job where they can simply do that. You know, I teach college. And so when class is in, I, you know, really, really need to be there. I don't really have a whole lot of flexibility in when I'm in class. Then I have flexibility when I'm not in class. So everyone's schedules are different. But I really encourage everybody to go to our website and R&D off of us. You know, use any documents you see, plagiarize away. Please, please do. And then finally, just shout out to the Pennsylvania people. I'm a Pennsylvania native, so it's cool to see all those little red dots up in the Pennsylvania region. So that's all I had. If anyone has questions, I'd love to answer them. Great. Thank you so much, Laura. Again, if anyone does have questions specific to Laura, feel free to drop those in the chat box now. See a couple people typing, so we'll just give them one moment. And thank you, Laura, for mentioning one of the most effective strategies for this work, R&D technique of rip-off and duplicate. Definitely really helpful to know that there's so many great examples out there that people can turn to when they're looking to develop their own resources. Yeah, yeah. Don't do this the hard way. Exactly. Yeah, no need to reinvent the wheel. Exactly. Samantha Forskoe is asking, have you filled all of the coordinator positions yet? Yeah, I'm happy to say we have. Well, we have in that we have people that have agreed. And I even got a no email reminder this morning from somebody. I need to put that out. We're going to do like a formal have everyone vote these people in. But, you know, if somebody volunteers for these types of positions, you know, they get voted in unanimously. Oh, that person's volunteering? Yes, yes, definitely. I vote for them. So I don't see this being a problem. But we do have all four positions placed essentially. We were hoping to get some more first responders into these positions. And we were unsuccessful in that. But, well, that's how it goes. We have filled them all. So I've seen a couple other questions come in. I see that the membership coordinator. Shoot, I think, I think Katie Sharon agreed to be the membership coordinator. And then, yes, and she's with the Skidwa-Allens State Park. And then Jeff Freeman is going to be our training coordinator, although I may have those two switched. But I'm pretty sure Katie Sharon is going to be our membership coordinator. And, you know, she won't be working with the GIS. She'll be coordinating with GIS employees that work for the city. Okay, great. And then Terri Schindl asks if you have paid staff. No, no, no, no, no. No, we have, it's entirely volunteer. And it's entirely money-free, as I would describe it as. We have gotten a couple of small donations in, like, in-kind food and drinks to, from some of the, like, Polygon and Belfour and places like that have donated some food and drink to sort of lure people into our meetings and they've been supportive. I pay for the website. It's like, I don't know, 25 bucks a year to have our special little share online.info instead of having the word pressed behind it. So, yeah. And I see the question about the drop-off of membership. Yes, I was just going to ask that. I don't have any numbers on what it was originally, but we were into the 30s and the upper 20s as far as membership numbers go. And how do we address these? Well, one thing we did was we tried having meetings at different times. Okay, so people can't make it during the work day. Understandable? Let's have it at 5 or 5.30. They can pop in after work. That didn't work. We tried having food and drink. As I said, you know, we've had people on different companies donate some snacks and some wine and some beer, and we still couldn't get very many people to come to these things. We've had some really amazing programs and just, we saw a real, of course, like everybody, you know, the further the recession went on, the worse the situation was, because people were just so overwhelmed with everything that they were doing. Great. Well, thank you for addressing all of those. I don't see anyone else typing, but, oh, I think, perhaps Carl has another. And remember, folks, keep in mind, too, that if other things come up, we'll have a little bit of time at the end of the program to ask questions of the whole group as well. All right. Let's go ahead and hold those questions for the end. Oh, okay. No, sorry. It's coming in. So Carl is asking, what level of management are your members? I'm not sure what he's asking. We have, our members are institutions, so it's not like, it's not chariots that are members. It's not exactly directors that are members. It's, you know, the whole interpretation is a member. Armstrong University is a member, things like that. If that answers the question. Right. I think that might have been what the intent was. Okay, great. Well, again, thank you, Lara. That was really wonderful. And I'm going to go ahead then and turn things over to Gary Menges, who's going to be speaking with us about the Seattle group. Sure. And wonderful things that they've been able to do in the last 10 or so years. So Gary, I'm going to go ahead and unmute your mic. Take it away. Okay. Thanks, Jess. So when we were organizing the Seattle Network, one of our first decisions was to what to call the network. And we wanted to name that had a pronounceable acronym and we came up with a Seattle Heritage Emergency Response Network. So one of our, I'll be referring to Schern to the network today is Schern. Schern is a network of 18 Seattle collecting institutions and they're listed on this slide and I won't read them, but I'll point out that some networks or cultural institutions have only one kind of institution, for example, libraries or museums. But Schern has archives, record management, libraries, museums represented in its membership. And Schern includes most of the major collecting institutions in Seattle. So Schern was organized in 2010, but just to give you a little history, the organization of Schern built on the work that was done in several earlier initiatives. And the first one I've listed here is the Seattle Alliance for Response Forum, which was in June 2006. And it brought together 90 representatives of cultural institutions and first responders. And one of the things that came out of the forum was that most of the cultural institutions represented did not have a disaster plan or they didn't have a current disaster plan. And unfortunately, this was not an uncommon situation at the time. And as some of you know, in 2005, the Heritage Health Index showed that 80% of collecting institutions nationally did not have an emergency disaster plan that includes collections with staff trained to carry out the plan. So the Western States and Territories Preservation Assistance Service, or WestPASS, was organized in part to address this situation in the West by offering workshops to help institutions create disaster plans. And there are between 80 to 100 institutions in Washington alone that have participated in Washington workshops and developed at least a basic disaster plan. And WestPASS is sort of a virtual preservation center organized by six preservation librarians and funded by NEH, and we're in our 10th year. The third thing listed here, the IMLS of Washington Connecting to Collections Work Group on Collaborative Disaster Planning. That was in 2009, and that group developed a model mutual aid agreement, model mission statement for collaborative disaster response networks, and a sample list of shared supplies. So Cherna adapted these documents for its use. Finally, in July of 2010, several participants in the Seattle WestPASS Are You Ready workshop came together to discuss organizing a Seattle network. And Are You Ready is a WestPASS workshop that focuses on testing your disaster plan and developing collaborative partnerships. So the network organization, as I mentioned, the Washington C2C work group developed some model statements. So the first thing our group did was to use those statements to develop the Cherna Mutual Aid Agreement and Mission Statement. And the mutual aid agreement was signed by the, I have here signed by members, but it was actually signed by the directors or chief executives of the organizations that participated in the organizational meeting. So it's an institutional commitment, not an individual commitment. And Cherna officially came in existence on November 1, 2010, with 13 members, and since then five more institutions have joined us, so we now have 18. And as we began our work, we decided we needed a little more detailed organizational structure, so we developed bylaws. And Laura mentioned using our mutual aid agreement, well, we used their bylaws. We looked at a number of bylaws, but the one that Savannah had developed were the most useful. The mutual aid agreement did specify representation of all members on a steering committee, but the bylaws spell out things like officers' committees' meetings. And we have three directors, sort of what we call the board of directors or an executive committee, and they are the chairperson, the vice chairperson, treasurer and the secretary. And we do have dues, so we do have some money. We also decided to incorporate as a nonprofit in Washington. And we did that in 2014 and incorporating as a nonprofit, at least in Washington state, it's a fairly easy thing to do. And I've noted our website here and all of these founding documents are listed on our website. Some parts of the website are password protected, but these documents are not. Now, acquiring the expertise here, one of the things that we noted in the CERN mission statement is helping both members acquire the expertise needed to cope with emergencies and disasters, unquote. And the salvage workshops and the earthquake tabletop exercise that are listed here were led by CERN members. And we all have different expertise and experience and sharing experience is part of the network experience. So it's the learning from each other. And then helping each other, all CERN members have institutional disaster plans for their collection. But they agree to help each other, as it says in the slide, to respond to emergencies and disasters affecting cultural resources and collections by providing advice, support, and our actual recovery assistance. And that too is from the mission statement. I'm sure many of you are familiar with the PREP or the Pocket Response Plan for collections. And we use PREPs in our West Pass workshops and PREPs are done on legal size sheets of paper and they're folded to, I think it's two and a quarter inches by three inches and you place it in a sleeve so you can keep it readily available so you can carry it in your purse or your billfold or have it in your car. So you readily have, in the case of CERN, its members' contact information and contact information for local disaster recovery resources Now, partnerships, well, partnerships, I think I'm going to give this slide here to see here. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't finish this. Tours for members here, initially all of our meetings were at NARA, the Alaska Pacific Facility in Seattle, but we decided we would be better prepared to help each other if we had some familiarity with members' facilities and collections. So we've been meeting at different members' facilities and then we tour that facility after the meeting. Now the supply cache, we have a supply cache at the Fry Art Museum, which is in central Seattle and we're establishing a second one at the Museum of Flight in Seattle and they, in fact, have offered us a surplus shipping container that was being used to store V-17 and V-29 airplane parts, which they're going to house elsewhere. And instantly one of the conditions of doing this was that we paint the container. So we're going to have a painting party at our next meeting. What supplies to acquire has been a topic of continuing discussion and we're in the process of acquiring supplies and trying to bounce the needs of smaller and larger institutions and different kinds of institutions. And all the supplies are intended to supplement and not replace supplies that members already have. We've received a small grant to buy the containers and we're using dues money to acquire supplies. So partnerships here to facilitate partnerships between members and local first responders and emergency managers before disasters in order to enhance cooperation and their understanding. So that's in our mission statement. So one of the things we've done is to meet with some of our partners and I'm sure all of you are familiar with Belfort. It's a major commercial disaster recovery company in our area and some members of Sharon also have red alert agreements with Belfort and we've met with them at least three times. And then the FEMA Region 10 headquarters is in Bafa which is a Seattle suburb and we've met with FEMA staff twice. The Seattle Office of Emergency Planning, we've met with staff in that office I think three times and we've met once with the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation which is the Washington Shepo. And then I've listed here as partnership visits we've had meetings and tours of the emergency operations centers that are listed on this slide at the University of Washington and the City of Seattle and that's helped to give us a better understanding of how the EOCs would operate in an emergency. Another aspect of this is partnership inclusion and the FEMA Region 10 National Disaster Recovery Framework stakeholder form in 2012, we were invited to participate in that and did. And then I was on the City of Seattle Disaster Recovery Planning Committee in 2014 and representing Sharon on that committee and then currently we're working on a Sharon cultural resource layer for the Seattle Emergency Management Division, their GIS system. So identifying storage areas for cultural resources are located and then some information about these storage areas, information that would be useful to the emergency managers during a disaster recovery. So all of these things I've listed under partnerships have helped to make first responders more aware of our concerns and we've had very positive feedback from them and vice versa, what first responders' concerns are so that we're both better prepared. Now this slide on ongoing, I've talked about the first four bullets in this slide and all of these are ongoing. The response protocol, the last bullet is something we've discussed but we've not yet finalized. But how do we help each other? What would be the protocol? And in the mutual aid agreement one of the clauses is that no party will be liable for any action taken by personnel in good faith or the direction of the party for whose institution assistance is rendered in the course of performing disaster recovery services pursuant to the agreement. So we have some things that are in the mutual aid agreement that I kind of sorted out a little more. So in conclusion with churn, we feel we're better prepared to respond to emergencies and disasters affecting cultural resources and collections and the first responders will be better prepared to assist us and we are better prepared to work with them. And this last slide is just my contact information. So thank you. Thank you so much, Gary. It was really informative and I've seen a few questions come in. So if anyone has other things to ask, feel free to go ahead and drop the chat window now. But the first question we had was from Jen Tobias who was wondering if materials for the table top exercise you mentioned earlier are available somewhere. I did that and it was actually based on one that I had done before at a couple of institutions. And it in turn was based on one that was developed at University of California, San Diego. And I don't think I have it posted anywhere, but I certainly could share it with you. Great. Well, Jen's provided her email address as well for the follow-up after that. Thanks for that question, Jen. And then Carl had a question. How far developed is the cultural resource layer for the Seattle EMD GIS system? And who's wondering about whose coordinating that project? We're just beginning this, although one of our meetings with the local Seattle Merge Management Division, this came up and they said they had this GIS system and that would be useful for them to know where our cultural collections were stored. So it's just in the beginning stage. And one of our members has volunteered to service a person to gather the information. So we've asked members to send it to her and then she in turn will work with the Seattle EMD. Great. And a follow-up from Carl on that. Do you have participation from Seattle EMD in developing GIS? They contributed input on how useful it will be to the emergency management community and to our first responders. We're just beginning, actually, on that. So I don't have much additional information other than what I said. Great. Well, I will say I know Carl's involved with a GIS mapping project in New Jersey. Oh, okay. Good. We can learn from each other. Yes. I think that there's definitely a lot of potential in doing that work with groups across the nation. So I'm glad to see the topic being discussed here. So let's see. We've had a few other things coming in. I think other folks are interested in hearing more about those exercises as possible. And Gregor is asking, have you included the NWS in your activities? So NWS is? I'm not sure. Gregor, if you want to elaborate, I was wondering if that would make sense to you. I think he's typing now. Oh, national literature. No, no, we haven't. That would be interesting to include them. But we haven't done that yet. It's a good thought. Thanks for sharing that, Gregor. Wonderful. Well, again, thank you so much, Gary. It's a really in-depth presentation, and it's always fantastic to learn about some of the great efforts happening out there in Seattle. You're welcome. Great. And just, I see a quick follow-up from Gregor. They're just saying that they've used Gregor's involvement with the groups in Massachusetts. It's interesting that it looks like they've used the National Weather Service for training and teaching. So a good thought for everyone for future activities to include them. Wonderful. Great. Well, we're going to go ahead, then, and turn things over to a team based in Miami, Steve Detweiler of Miami-Dade County Emergency Management, and Kim Bergen, who is at the Wolfsonian. They are co-chairs of the Alliance for Response Miami Network. So, you guys ready? You want to go ahead and take it away? Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Kim Bergen from the Wolfsonian, Florida International University Museum in South Beach. I am here again with my esteemed colleague, Steve Detweiler of the Miami-Dade Department of Emergency Management. We're somewhat unique, I think, in the sense that the co-chairs both come from different sectors of the emergency management, as well as the cultural institution. And I think Steve's just been a tremendous help, a resource, and brings a total different point of view to the whole thing, which I think that's part of what AFR is about. So, we've been very fortunate to have him as a part of our team, if you will. Our mission is... AFR Miami is dedicated to building a partnership between the art and cultural community and the first responder and emergency management communities in Miami-Dade and to our South Monroe County, which is the Key West area. Some of our goals are to, again, continue this partnership between the Alliance members and the first responders. The partnership is meant to enhance cooperation and understanding before the next emergency or disaster. We also are here to provide preparedness and outreach opportunities for both the art and cultural community, as well as the first responders, and to develop a robust incident command structure for the Alliance to respond to large-scale emergencies and disasters. We also assist member organizations in the development of their disaster and collection and salvage plans. We are here to act as a clearinghouse for resources and information about disaster preparedness, response and recovery via websites, resource tabletop conferences, webinars. We maintain and promote Miami's AFR website and social media pages. Steve does a wonderful job at that. And we are here to acquire on a cooperative basis supplies and equipment to support the emergency response disaster preparedness and collection and salvage programs of our member organizations. In terms of our membership, we're fairly young. We started out in 2013. And I think that we were able to solidify our goals and missions really with the help again of Steve. So our membership is institutions, mainly predominantly. We do have a couple of local conservators in our membership as well to provide assistance and information. Many university museums, as well as zoo's cultural institutions. We have Berry University, which also houses a special collection library as does FIU, Florida International Museum, for which I work. And we also have Miami-Dade County Cultural Affairs Department, which is fairly unique as well. They're a great resource and the Sky Museum and Gardens. So we have tried to reach out to the broader cultural sectors beyond the museum. It's still a challenge to try and get everybody to join and actually to the webinars, believe it or not, being in Miami-Dade, South Florida, where we've been very lucky, no hurricanes as of yet, but clearly we're right there, obviously very vulnerable to these types of disasters. Anyway, at this point, I will turn it over to Steve. Thank you, Kim. The one thing that we've been working on over the last couple of years that we've been founded is to have our successful outreach program. So thanks to Jessica and FIIC, we have our homepage that they maintain for us, and then we occasionally send them information, and they're very helpful getting that information up. So I think it was interested all of our past after-action reports from our exercises, our strategic plans, anything we've been doing for the alliances up on our website. And then, of course, we've been having our social media pages. We're right now in competition with New York City's Alliance for Response because we're trying to beat them in terms of the number of people we have on our social media accounts. So our Facebook and Twitter, we use Hootsuite, which is a very effective tool in terms of scheduling posts. It allows us to, you know, we minimum we have at least three posts per day, and it can range a lot of different things. So we include news articles on cultural affairs, you know, history, archeology, conservation, local art, and cultural activity. So if we have something going on at one of the museums, a lot of times that'll be reposted on our pages so we can get some more people going to our museums and kind of increase their following. Upcoming webinars, so this webinar is, of course, posted up on our social media pages and we've been pushing it out through there. Any kind of training course that are coming up here locally or across the country that it might be of interest to our members. General preparedness information came alluded to this earlier for the Alliance for Response Miami. It's a unique relationship with the Miami-Dade County Office of Emergency Management. Miami-Dade County Emergency Management kind of takes a lead in terms of South Florida. We're trying to get more of our other county partners to be more involved in the Alliance, but right now we kind of fold the Alliance for Response into our public-private partnership. So that's also more or less a co-ed what they mentioned before, a community organization active in disaster. It's mainly made up of our business sector, but it also includes our cultural art institutions. And during disaster, we have one point of contact in the ELC that acts as our ESF-18 liaison, and then they push information out to our private sector partners to include also the Alliance for Response members as well. So we push that information out through there. In terms of, like I said, we also have membership announcements, different things that are going on here in South Florida. We'll put that information out. During disaster, what we do is we have one of our AIC, one of our Alliance for Response members takes over maintaining a website. I maintain it on a day-to-day basis, but during disaster, of course, I'm activated. I'm working in the Emergency Operations Center. I don't have the time to be able to maintain our site. So what we do is we set it up where we designate the different sites that this person will pull information from, and they're just basically essentially reposting and re-sharing this information. What we did is for the Facebook, we tell them, okay, go to these particular websites, and it usually includes Miami-Dade County Government's website, National Weather Service Miami, Miami-Dade County Emergency Management, and a couple other select Facebook pages, and then Twitter. I don't know how much. Some of you guys are really aware of Twitter. Twitter allows you to create individual lists. So what we did is we did an incident list, and that has shows the Twitter feeds and the members of particular agencies. So I can designate which agencies I want them to pull from, and all they have to do is retweet and share that information on a regular basis. That way we can push that information out on a regular basis, and they don't have to go searching for the information. They know exactly the information they need to share on a regular basis. It makes it a lot easier for us. In terms of strategic planning, this has been an ongoing process for us. In 2015, we launched our strategic plan, what Kim alluded to earlier about the goals. What we started off as basic goals in terms of what the Alliance will be doing, and that was the five that she mentioned that facilitate the partnership, assist member organizations in development of disaster and collection and salvage plans, act as a clearing house. And then based on that, we moved forward and we developed our own strategic plan. And the strategic plan, which we'll be updating this year because it was a more or less a three-year plan from 2015 to 2017, the overall goals for that plan was to facilitate a partnership between the Alliance members, first responders and emergency managers, and Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, and we're working right now on expanding that because South Florida also includes Broward County and Palm Beach County, which are to the north of us. So we'll be working to get them on board and have them kind of play more of an active role and then provide preparedness and outreach opportunities for both the art and cultural community. And a lot of that is done through our existing program for emergency management. So a lot of times when I push information out to the private sector, it's also going to our Alliance members as well. So they were very actively engaged when we did, you know, we were getting prepped for Hurricane Matthew. Thankfully, we got missed by Hurricane Matthew, but we had regular communication with our museum community so they knew what was going on and what we were doing. And then develop a robust instant command structure. That's still an ongoing thing. Like I said, we have a person that takes over social media, but having that one designated person to take over for the museums is their central coordination point. We're still kind of working on that part. And then under the overall goals, we have a series of objectives. So like for goal number one, which is in terms of serving as a partnership, we have create a permanent, sustainable administrative structure. And that includes writing our bylaws, which we're in the process of finishing. That'll be this year. Maintaining our strategic plan. Recruit and retain members. That's something that's an ongoing process. I'm always sending out emails to new prospective members and Kim's always trying to twist people's arms and saying, you need to join us. And we also have another opportunity that's going to be coming up this year that is going to be a good impetus to get more people involved in the Alliance. And then also in terms of providing preparedness and outreach events, we've also reached out to our membership to say, you know, if you want to advertise, you can do it for the Alliance response page. And then also if they have anything coming up, that they want emergency management to come out, we had an agreement in place for several years with Frost Science Museum. So they would do, every year we would do hurricane preparedness day. That was in their old facility. They're right now in the process of building a new facility. And we're still waiting to hear whether or not we'll be able to continue doing that. But they have like numerous presentations they do during that day. And then we come out and we share information in terms of the general community. We have the past National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield would come out. He's one of our Hurricane Special, our local TV channel now. And then we also have National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service also come out as well as numerous other agencies that come out. So that's an ongoing thing. We're always looking at expanding that. And then also developing our response plans. Thankfully a lot of our institutions have started stepping up and developing their own response plans ahead of time. We were talking about before we got on the call that FIUs really kind of taking this to heart and they're really developing even more advanced plans than some of their institutions do. But we're always kind of stressing that to them. They have to have their own plans and ready to go at that moment as far as disaster. And then they talked a little bit about mutual aid plans. That's still something we're struggling with in terms of reaching out to our organizations and kind of stressing that and finding that niche. Like I said, when Jessica started this webinar, we're the only alliance response in Florida. There is no unfair alliance. Pennsylvania has, apparently they have all the alliances up there. Maybe they want to send that down to us. But we're the only one alliance on board. So this year we're kind of stressing out to the state to get them more involved and maybe develop a couple more alliances or have them rely more on us in terms of down here in South Florida and kind of taking what we've learned and kind of replicating it across the state. Most of our, for Florida, it's a little bit different because the population centers are really in South Florida, Central Florida, and that's it. And a little bit of North Florida in terms of Jacksonville. But really like Kampa, Orlando, and Miami, and South Florida, those are our major population centers. The rest of the county or most of the state, like 90% of the state is rural. So they don't have a lot of institutions like we have down in South Florida and Central Florida. So it's a little bit of an odd makeup in terms of our state. But we're working through that and we're going to kind of re-institute ourselves to work more with the state in terms of that. The present structure of the alliance, we have our steering committee. So everyone who's a member of the alliance has a seat on the steering committee. We have 21 members in all. The alliance has two co-chairs. We have, of course, me and Kim, and we're in charge of coordinating AFR responsibilities. The new proposed structure, what we're going to be doing in 2017 is this is a by-law. So we'll have, right now, we're envisioning a chair, a vice-chair, a secretary, and an accounting EM liaison. So I would be one of the EM liaisons, and then the alliance would appoint a coordinator. They would be responsible for mainly handling the response and preparedness activities for the alliance. And then we would have two standing committees, one for education and one for community outreach committees. With that, I mean, that's still going on, the ongoing process in terms of that structure. It might turn out like that. It might not. We're still, like I said, we're still going through our by-laws and seeing what works. The fact that we're so new and we're kind of an unknown in terms of Florida, it's never been a priority for emergency management to kind of focus exclusively on the museum and art and cultural community. So we're kind of laying a lot of groundwork down here in Florida and kind of serving as a template for the rest of the state. So it's kind of an ongoing process. It's also a very exciting process as well. But with that, is there any questions you guys have for us? Great. Thank you, Steve, and thank you, Kim. Thank you. It looks like we had a question come in from Carl. Just wondering if the Miami Alliance for Response already has ICS in place and was it or is it being developed as an input from Miami-Dade and Monroe County OEMs? Yeah, we can probably talk about it because the press release is out now. So we could probably talk about this a little bit. If you want to correct me, Jessica, if you can correct me. One of the things we're going to be doing, this is what I was alluding to before, is FAAIC got a grant from National Downwinds for the Humanities and part of that is for them to build additional Alliance networks but also to develop response teams to certain select Alliance networks and one of those is being South Florida. So that's one thing we're going to be pushing towards. I can't tell you in terms of the way we do things for how the Alliance for Response interacts with ESF-18 or the public partnership is we, of course, use ICS all the time but part of that training will also incorporate that more into the institutional level to make sure they're using as well some version of ICS that they can better work with not only the emergency management community but also the first responders as well. To a certain degree, yes, we do. To a certain degree, that's going to be this year's project in terms of that and building up that team and using ICS even more than we have before. Great. Yes. So it's definitely going to be a priority, making sure that more people are attuned to that system for sure. So Carl had another question about any possible plans for GIS mapping in the Miami network if you know of any other projects in the area that are addressing that. Yeah, we've talked about that. We were just actually talking about that when we were on the call because we were hearing from the other alliances like, oh, yeah, we should probably do that too. We actually have for Miami-Dade emergency management our GIS capabilities are probably one of the more advanced in the state. We actually have our own GIS database that we call Flipper. It's Florida interoperable picture processing for emergency response. Try saying that 10 times fast. We basically called it Flipper because we were going against the Gators. So that's where that came from. So we had to figure out something to say Flipper. But it's actually probably one of the more advanced systems in the state. It's actually more advanced than what the state does in terms of their GIS capabilities. Don't tell the state I said that. But that's something that we're going to be talking about probably this year as well as developing a cache and developing that, but having like a map of our institutions because as you can imagine we have a lot of institutions in South Florida. Some of them are big or relatively big like FIE with Sonia and with Perez Art Museum in Miami. And then some of them are mom and pop. Like Monroe County, especially we see that in Monroe County. Monroe County is the keys. And if you've never been in the keys before they have a whole different kind of style of doing things down there. And a lot of their businesses and their museums are very much mom and pop. They have maybe one or two staffers. And that's it. So trying to reach them is always a challenge for us and knowing who they are and where they are is always a challenge for us. But that's something that we're probably going to be tackling either this year or the following couple of years in terms of doing more GIS. Okay, wonderful. Again, thank you to Carl for raising this important issue because I do think it's something that I would encourage Indian All Alliance for Response groups and other cooperative disaster networks to consider as an activity because having that information is going to be incredibly valuable. I just wanted to share it to you. I think Gregor has noted that the group that he's involved with Coastat, Massachusetts, which is born out of a Boston-based Alliance for Response group, were just awarded a grant by NEH to develop and put on a series of five workshops in conjunction with Massachusetts Firefighting Academy. So congratulations to that group and we're looking forward to seeing the results of that effort and what that means in terms of helping us all be a little more prepared to deal with fires and communicate with our local fire departments as well. And then Samantha had a comment about reaching out to the small communities. Yeah, it can be challenging, Samantha. It's something we're still struggling with in terms of reaching out. I mean, some of our institutions here in Miami-Dade County are relatively small. We have like Coral Castle. I'm still trying to get in the front door with them. They had maybe five staffers that worked down there. So it's still, it's worth it. It's just figuring out that niche. The one thing we've kind of relied upon a lot for like our training program we do, we try to make it as virtual as we can. So a lot of times when I do training sessions for not only our public-private partnership but also Alliance members, I try to make that virtual. We do, for the ESF-18 and also for Alliance members, we do like a tabletop every year. And it's just basically a scenario I come up with. And sometimes it's a hurricane. Last year we did a terrorism scenario and then we just do it virtually. And they log into a webinar and I'll feed them an overall scenario and then they can talk amongst themselves and then report back to me and say, okay, what are you guys going to do? What's going to be your overall response? And I think last year we destroyed a couple of museums and Kim Museum was totally destroyed. I blew up the front entrance and they weren't very happy with me about that but it just gives them a little something to do and keeps them engaged in the process and that's one of the things that my leadership charged me with early on is try to make everything virtual or have that kind of virtual capability because it's even hard for us to kind of get some of our partners to come to training sessions because everybody's always pulled in 10 different directions. So the virtual certainly helps. Wonderful. Well, I want to just go ahead and remind people to go ahead and post any questions that they might have whether it's for Steve and Kim or if there's other questions that you fought us for Gary and Laura as well. Please feel free to go ahead and share those in the chat box or go ahead and open this up to any remaining questions for our presenters today. Okay, so Samantha Forskoe is asking, are those table tops provided through youth specifically for cultural institutions or are those table tops done with emergency management folks as well? It's both. Most of the last year's table top I did it for our public-private partnership so it included our public-private partnership it includes a lot of different members it's mainly all private sector so it's our chambers of commerce it's some of our banks it includes our larger box stores like Target and Publix and Walmart and then we also had a component of that as also our cultural institution so some of the scenarios I had for them was particularly targeting those like Air University was targeted Wilsonian was targeted and then the year prior to that I did a table top just for the cultural institutions which was kind of an overview so I could get a better idea of their preparedness level and what I needed to do to kind of reach them and address some of their strengths and deficiencies as well so we try to do the table tops most of our private sector is a little bit different because some of them are they either work on loss prevention or they are business continuity planners but the museum is a little bit different because some of those partners are safety and security folks some of them are like Kim who are their registrar some of them are conservationists that really depends on the institution so we kind of make it as generic as we possibly can so we can kind of engage them and make sure that they're interested and they find it useful. Wonderful, thank you thanks for that as well. And the other table top after Asher and Port Samantha are all on our Alliance Response website so if you want to look at that that's your actual report so you just go on our website and they're all down there. Yes, and just one more reminder too you can easily access any of the web links that we've discussed today via the box at the bottom of your screen just click on it to highlight it blue and then click the browse to button and it should take you there in your web browser. All right, well I don't see any other questions I do see one more person typing once again to Laura, Gary and Steve and Kim for taking the time out to prepare some wonderful remarks for today and it's really helpful to have your insights on this topic and see how you all have addressed some of these questions of group sustainability over the years and how to organize your network so really grateful for that. So I'm just seeing the comments from Terry saying that MPN trains in small rural and tribal in FEMA region 8 states focus on co-training with county's EM first responders and the GTA will talk together and actual burn from the fire centers I'm wondering if anyone else is working at that level it's a really interesting model certainly. So I do encourage you all to go ahead and continue to chat with each other in that window I'm just going to go ahead and close out with a few final slides and this is a repeat of one from before but just a reminder of some of the upcoming programs and I wanted to let you all know that if you refer to the file box at the bottom of your screen you'll see a file named Alliance for Response Free Webinar series. If you download that that's a flyer for the whole series so feel free to use that PDF to share information about the upcoming programs I think was especially instructive to those who are involved with the organizing level of Alliance for Response Networks but you'll find that the rest of the programs do have a really wide reach so I would think that any individuals that you know who are possibly interested in this topic but aren't involved with Alliance for Response Groups currently might be a good hook to get them interested in getting involved with their local networks as well so feel free to share the word far and wide so just one more note Samantha it looks like has responded to Terry saying they've done some table talks with emergency managers and cultural institutions for participants training for a statewide response team so great examples out there at one final slide I just wanted to share again the contact information for all of today's speakers so you'll see everyone's email address here please feel free to reach out with any questions about the content that we've shared and I'm also going to go ahead and pull over a link for you all to an evaluation for today's program please do take just a few moments to fill out this brief 10 questions survey this information is incredibly valuable in helping to shape future programming and that's the final question in regards to other kinds of future webinars you would like to see and I think we've had a few ideas talked around in the chat box today which is great so again I just want to thank you all for taking the time to join us today special thanks to our wonderful speakers Laura Surfer, Gary Menges, Steve Zetweiler and Kim Bergen and of course we are so grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for making this series possible have a wonderful Thursday everyone wishing you all a very happy and festive holiday season and I hope to see you all at our next session which will be on Tuesday, January 10th at 1pm Eastern thanks again Steve Zetweiler has left the conference