 Good morning. My name is Stephanie Castro and I would like to welcome you to CSIS. Before we begin and before I begin my remarks, if I could remind everyone to turn off or to silence their personal devices, I'd appreciate it. Again, thank you all for being here this morning. I'd also like to thank the Department of Homeland Security for giving us this opportunity to collaborate with them on this event and on this topic. In the last year or so CSIS has taken a particular interest in the issue of disaster resilience. I know a number of you have attended our past discussions in our disaster resilience series that we've co-hosted with the Irene W. and C.B. Pennington Foundation of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For those of you who are interested in this series I would encourage you to visit our website CSIS.org to learn more about those events that we've had in the last 18 months including videos and interviews with disaster resilience experts. Natural disasters represent a significant challenge for the United States. On average we experience 10 severe weather events each year exceeding $1 billion in damage. In the 1980s the annual average was only two such events. In 2012 alone disasters cost the U.S. an estimated $110 billion making it the second most costly year in disasters in recent decades. Addressing disasters and their consequences will require us to improve both our immediate response efforts and our long-term efforts to build resilience so that communities, businesses, government agencies and individuals are better prepared for and can recover more quickly and more fully from natural disasters. To discuss how we can make building a resilient nation more effective and more of a priority we are joined today by a distinguished panel of experts. First I'd like to introduce David Heyman who will be delivering a few opening remarks. David is the Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security where he and his team provide thought leadership, policy development and decision analysis in a range of issues. He is responsible for developing and integrating DHS-wide policies, planning, programs and strategies across all missions including disaster resilience. I'd also like to note that David was the Founding Director of the Homeland Security Program here at CSIS where I am currently the Acting Director so thank you for joining us David and welcome back. Before David takes the stage I would like to introduce our three speakers today. First I'd like to welcome Jane Cage, the winner of the 2012 DHS Rick Raskorla, and I'm sorry if I'm butchering his last name, National Award for Resilience. As Chair of the Citizens Advisory Recovery Team in Joplin, Missouri or Missouri I guess I should say. Jane demonstrated extraordinary leadership in response and recovery efforts following the devastating tornado of May 2012 or rather 2011. I'm confusing my ears. After that tornado the Citizens Advisory Recovery Team was established to provide a forum between citizens and the city council as a community began to recover. Jane Cage created the quote listening to Joplin unquote plan which served as the foundation of the community recovery efforts. In recognition of the role that the community played in this massive effort Secretary Napolitano chose to present the 2012 National Award for Resilience to Ms. Cage and the citizens of Joplin. Following her remarks we will hear from David Kaufman, Associate Administrator for Policy at FEMA. David has been responsible for framing FEMA's strategic direction, developing the agency's whole community approach to emergency management and its supporting doctrine, launching the strategic foresight initiative and creating and co-leading a nine country multilateral working group on community resilience. And finally we have Deborah Ballin who is the General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Public Policy at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety where she has served since 2008. Prior to her work with the Institute Ms. Ballin was the Executive Vice President of Public Policy Management for the American Insurance Association where she developed and implemented policy for federal and state public policy issues. And without further ado I'd like to cede the podium to my predecessor's predecessor, David Heyman. Thank you Stephanie and my colleagues up here and all of you and for welcoming back to an old home Center for Strategic International Studies one of the greatest think tanks in America and possibly the world and I'm not biased. I see some familiar faces. You know one of the things that's great about CSIS compared to my new job at Homeland Security is how close it is to Starbucks. When Secretary Napolitano's team called me to offer the position and to be on her team I thought long and hard about it because you know Homeland Security is a tough mission, it's 24-7, you're playing defense, it's a great challenge, a lot of responsibility and a difficult organization, new organization and I had just moved up to the northern part of DC and my commute to CSIS became almost an hour with double buses and things like that. And when she offered the job I said this is really hard decision and then I thought about it, it's a 10 minute commute, that's good. And I said yes and then after saying yes I realized there was no Starbucks up there and so I'm glad to be back here and I'll be going to Starbucks after this discussion. Anyway, we're here to talk about resilience and a lot of folks use that term, we hear the term frequently, it's got a lot of familiarity but the question is what does it mean and how do we use it in a policy sense? What is resilience and how do each of us become more resilient? How do our communities become more resilient? This is a challenge that we face at the beginning of the Obama administration and from a policy perspective you want to have your vision, you want to have your strategy and policy and you want to have your organization to move that forward in your programs to follow And that's in fact what we did and I'll tell you, we set out the national security strategy puts out the four key pillars of the national security strategy, it includes defense, diplomacy, development and security and resilience of the homeland. So resilience is in there, it's in the quadrennial review, it's one of the five missions that we promoted to accomplish homeland security. Homeland security we have to prevent terrorism, secure our borders, administer our immigration laws, safeguard cyberspace and the fifth one, ensuring resilience against all hazards. And so we've put the framework out there and the question is what are the policies and programs to do that, what are the organizations to do that? Well the president in his first directive created a resilience directorate on a national security staff, that was critically important and integrated that. President actually Bush created that as well. And then second at the Department of Homeland Security we created a resilience integration team so that all the different parts of Homeland Security that are dealing with resilience come together. But it turns out that even with the standards that we've developed, the grants that we put in place, the programs we put in place, it's still hard to do. It's, you know, resilience is a concept in fact everybody knows and they see it and they recognize it, but programmatically figuring out how to make a more resilient nation is a great challenge. So what we did, we said, ah, if you know what it looks like, how do we model it? How do we model resilience? And how do we inspire resilience? It's one thing to have the Ready.gov site which tells you the different things you need to do to be prepared and that's critically important. If you haven't done it, read the site, get your kit, have your plan, stay attuned. But it's another thing to be inspired by and understand resilience and that's what I really want to talk about today, modeling resilience and why we created the National Resilience Award. This is the first ever of its kind. I had the privilege of joining and standing with the people of Joplin this past May at the second anniversary, I guess, of the tornado, the devastating tornado that came through there. And the people of Joplin understand too well how difficult it is to be resilient, but they are a model of resilience. And as a testament of their strength and generosity and purpose, we, the Secretary, announced and honored the people of Joplin and Jane Cage with the first ever National Resilience Award, the Rescola Award. Let me tell you a little bit about the Rescola Award. Rick Rescola, British American, dual citizen, fought in Vietnam, decorated hero in both countries, and lived his life in America, American citizen, security expert, and worked for Morgan Stanley, was a bit of a character. Everybody who knows him, loved him, and he, back in the 90s, before the 93 bombings of the World Trade Center, was worried about that and petitioned a number of experts and officials to improve security in the World Trade Center. That bombing happened and ever since then he made a point of preparing his organization for future disasters. And he had them drill every month, he had different folks going into stairwells and running up and down them, and he would be out there with his bullhorn coaching them along. And everyone, everyone somewhat laughed at it, he was always a character in doing this, but he got them prepared. And on 9-11, every Morgan Stanley employee survived, evacuated, largely because of their drilling and his efforts, all but five survived the attacks. The five who did not survive was Rick Rescola and four of his security partners who were going up the second tower to help others when the second tower fell. And so the award was created in his memory. He is a person of great character and conviction and a model for preparedness and resilience. And so this national award, we want to use it as a way of helping build a more secure and resilient nation. And the award reads as follows. It is for superior leadership and innovation by a non-governmental individual organization who exemplifies the qualities and achievements of Rick Rescola, emphasizing leadership and effective preparation, response, and recovery in the face of disasters. And if you know what happened in Joplin, small town in Missouri, hundreds of people lost their lives, tremendous devastation, but the community pulled together in an almost ad hoc way. Jane Gage, who is here today, she was the chair of the Citizens Advisory Recovery Team, and they recognized on their own that they could pull together and build and rebuild a better and more secure and resilient community. And they did so in ways that are pretty remarkable. For those of you that know disaster recovery and response, some of the most challenging parts are housing and schools and all of those things existed in Joplin. And what was remarkable is that they chose and focused largely on getting those students back into school. Those happened in May of 2011. And 87 days after the tornado hit on August 17th, when the students had to return in the fall to their schools, the community had worked together and they found a way to get all those students back, and business was as usual on day one of school for all of the students of Joplin, a remarkable achievement. And it goes beyond that, the debris removal, the planning, the vision, and this was done in partnership with the federal family. FEMA was there, 820 employees were working there on the recovery effort. I talked to Jane yesterday. Every one of the citizens who were dislocated in their homes are back in their homes. If you know about how difficult that accomplishment is, it's an extraordinary accomplishment and the people of Joplin should be commended. So this is a model of recovery, a model of resilience. There are many models across the country and we want to just be able to tell the story so that others can learn. And in fact, that's what happens. Citizens of Joplin have been able to help citizens in more Oklahoma who, two years almost to the day of the Joplin disaster, had a devastating tornado come through more. And I don't know if Jane's going to talk about it today, but she's got a wonderful project that she's working on right now. Are you going to talk about that? I'll just mention it so maybe get her to talk about it. But the stories that the people of Joplin and the learning that took place there is one that we should all embrace and learn. And she's helping to pull that together. I won't say more than that and you can talk about that. But it was a great honor for the Secretary of Homeland Security, for myself, for the Department of Homeland Security, to give the first ever Rascola Award to Jane and to the citizens of Joplin, recognizing their contributions in the aftermath of the devastating tornadoes from 2011. And what I wanted to leave behind with you as a point of departure is the question of how we continue to build a more resilient nation. We're working. The Sandy Recovery Report just came out this week and you'll see tremendous recommendations about how we build in resilience, how we build in the ability to withstand better disruptions such as the floods of Sandy. And we can do that with fortified standards. You'll hear a little bit about that today. You'll possibly hear about a program that we're piloting called Resilient Star, which is this notion that you can have a choice about which house you buy. You can buy the house that's built to the fortified standards and know that it will be better in terms of facing disaster than others. And you just need to have the concept there like you do with Energy Star and we'll talk about that. But we can as a nation become more resilient, but we have to do it person by person, family by family, community by community. Jane's here to talk to you a little bit about the citizens of Joplin and that community, which is a model of resilience, why we were proud to give them the first ever National Resilience Award. The next one will be awarded this September. Thank you, Jane, for letting us honor you and your citizens and colleagues. And I'll turn it over to Jane Cage and thank you all for your time and attention today. Good morning. First of all, I'd like to say that everybody works hard in Joplin, not just me. So I'm certainly just the representative here and unlike the other people on the panel, I really don't have any credentials related to resilience. You know, in real life, I'm a small business woman who runs a networking technology company and then I kind of have a second life as a volunteer. So what I really have is just the practical experience of what happened in Joplin. So, you know, take that with, I only have one set of experience, but it seems like I have a lot of it. And in terms of Rickra Scorla, I mean, certainly what he did in comparison to what I did in Joplin, which is facilitate a lot of meetings and hurt a lot of cats, you know, there's nothing in comparison. But I will tell you that I think we've made some really great progress in Joplin as a result of the tornado, you know, to the five second statistical mark. 161 lives lost, 18,000 cars destroyed, 7,500 buildings damaged, 4,000 of those destroyed, 3 million cubic yards of debris removed, you know, larger than the World Trade Center disaster. We had a lot of damage in a really short time and it went through an older section of town and all the way across our town. When the winds were at their highest speed, over 200 miles an hour, it was moving at its slowest. So I can tell you that I could go and stand and not see anything taller than I was for a long way. And any picture that you see, these two that kind of slide through are nothing in comparison to what it's like to stand on the ground. But FEMA's Region 7 long-term community recovery arrived about a week after the tornado and that team led by Steve Kastner suggested to the public officials in Joplin it would be good if citizens had a role in recovery. And I can tell you everyone was busy, so long-term recovery was really not on the list of priorities for our city manager and our fire chief and our police force and everyone else. So they gave that role to citizens and they asked a bunch of us to come together and I would have done anything they asked of me that night because everyone who lived in Joplin wanted to help. So with Steve's help we formed the Citizens Advisory Recovery Team and what that was was a group of citizens that got together to imagine what Joplin could be like after a disaster. We had our first meeting on June 30th, which was my birthday. So I was willing to give up my birthday to come to the public input meeting or the citizens meeting and then 12 days later with their help we held our first public input meeting. We had about 350 people come that night and out of those 350 people I saw a nurse who had taken care of me at the hospital two months before who told me that she found her dog in a kitchen cabinet when her house was destroyed and I looked around and I saw a man I knew that was a caregiver of three disabled men who lived in a home where all of them died. So that night was a way to give citizens an opportunity to stop looking around and start looking ahead and so we asked for their input in the most basic of ways and it was with sticky notes that we put up on boards around the room and we ended up that night with 1,500 pieces of separate input and with the help of FEMA we turned that into a booklet that we distributed everywhere to raise awareness about recovery issues. We also asked for volunteers and we had about 150 people that began to work in those four sectors to help us take the input we had received and develop priorities and themes. A month after that we had another public input meeting and we said this is what we think we've heard are we right and help us choose priorities and we voted with dots on boards and we had another public input meeting and we started to work from there. When I first became the chairman I couldn't understand why the FEMA people wanted to take me to lunch every other day. I thought you know I have other work to do and what's my real job here but I started to understand and they gave me a book to recall the FEMA oddly enough the FEMA long term self help recovery guide and I should have read it the first day but I probably didn't read it until three weeks later out on the back porch and I understood the process that we should work our way through and with that we were able to make real progress. So we developed a set of priorities I went back to the public again for confirmation that we were on the right track. We presented it to our city council and they accepted it but we didn't stop there. We formed an implementation task force and for all of you government types you know it gave me another set of initials. I became the chairman of the CARTITF so that was a good thing for me. It made me more impressive in all of your eyes and what we did was we brought another government word I know now stakeholders to the table and we brought the school board we brought the city council we brought the card and we brought the chamber and we assigned all of the priorities out to each of those groups and tried to set a timeline. After we worked on the strategies for those next steps we got all of those words together in one meeting which for us was pretty historic that everybody would be at the same place at the same time for a regularly scheduled meeting. I presented those implementation task force suggestions and ideas and every group adopted those and by de facto we've become the long term recovery plan for Joplin. So it's amazing that it came I think in my opinion not from the top down but from the bottom up that it came from a set of sticky notes and from that we developed a plan that's become really the bellwether for everything that happens in Joplin related to recovery. You know have we come a long way yes we won't have our high school our 11th and 12th graders meet in the shopping mall in a abandoned big box store. Our middle schoolers meet in an industrial park in a shell building. We have kind of a Lego built hospital for one of our hospitals and it won't be completed until 2015. The school's not until 2014. We have a lot of projects on the table but we have a long way to go. But I think what's made us unique is that in the days before the tornado if you ask how to be resilient ready it's that we knew each other you know and I stepped into the meeting that night of 30 people or so there wasn't a person around the room I couldn't name. You know so as community leaders we had worked together many times we trusted each other. It wasn't our first introduction and that that led us a long way down the path and as you know my role is that it's good for me because I don't have a dog in the fight I don't get paid by anybody. I don't have any allegiance to any group of citizens and that's a great position to be in from my perspective. But it lets me communicate with all of the other groups. You know everyone tells me their issues sometimes I'm Switzerland in Joplin and that I'm able to provide the objective input in the background for them so we're going a long way later on I'm happy to answer any questions that you have but I do think we're modeling I hope you'll come and visit us someday in Joplin. You know I think we're a great place to visit you know maybe some of you will even want to move there someday but if you come come to the house for dinner and we'll talk all of it over and you'll see what we've been doing. So with that I'll turn it over to someone who knows a lot more about resilience than I do. So I'd actually challenged that last statement pretty strongly. I don't think so. I like very much as much as part of me doesn't like following your remarks I like very much the placement of my comments in this conversation space because what you've done so nicely is paint a picture a very rich picture both of the deep challenges facing a devastated community and the sources of strength by which that community came together to deal with those challenges and it's incredibly impressive and it's incredibly instructive and I think you'll hear as I start to try to sketch some of the connective tissue between that very tangible set of images that you just conveyed to all of us and the broad picture of national policy that David let off with. I mean that's the space that I'd like to try to work in for a couple minutes is talk about how are we taking the policy concepts that David referenced in the national security strategy and the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review and the Presidential Policy Directive Aid on National Preparedness and apply those concepts in ways that help more communities that face unfortunate circumstances deal with them in ways akin to how you have in job plan. So for me I think the most poignant piece of your remarks is the very clear reminder that in the business of disaster management it's very easy to get lost in the language that we talk about emergency support functions, we talk about mission assignments, we talk about debris removal and stuff that has to happen and funding mechanisms and all project worksheets and all this other language and it masks us from what's really at the center of all of this which is people. That disaster management is fundamentally about people. It's inherently a social process and if we are not careful we can lose sight of that and get in our own way very easily in terms of how we foster building capability to withstand, to recover from and to adapt from crises. So at FEMA we've tried to take the concept of resilience as an opportunity, an opportunity to look in the mirror at ourselves and at our field of practice and not to do that on our own but to make that a collective conversation and a collective re-evaluation. I was raised by two psychologists which explains most of what's wrong with me and that is a long list that none of you would like to hear about but I did get at least one valuable lesson out of that which is take any moment of change as an opportunity to step back and reflect and question underlying assumptions. So the very first set of things we began to do is have that conversation with ourselves, have that conversation with our colleagues across the enterprise. This is a very distributed field of practice. No one really works for anyone. It encompasses virtually every agency at every level of government, all sorts of players across the private industry space, the non-governmental organization space, the civic organization, the public. It is a wide swath of partners, of players, of actors. And we began by stepping back and asking very foundational questions. What does this really mean? What does success really look like? What do communities that have coped with crisis? What are their stories and their lessons have to tell us? The multinational group that was referenced earlier is built around that kind of comparative analysis, looking at community experiences and crisis in different countries and trying to derive comparative themes that can be useful from a policymaking standpoint. To spare you the 18 months of process in the middle of that, what that all distilled down to is really a doctrinal reframing. In some people's view, a whole new approach. In other people's view, back to our roots, back to our basics. Regardless, a set of principles that we can use to keep us grounded in that first-order recognition that this is really all about people and about what will most effectively support people moving through very challenging times. So the principles are pretty simple. And I'll spend just a couple minutes talking about them and then talking about some of the things that we've been trying to do to shift our practice as an agency but also as a field to support those principles. The first is almost self-evident, except that it's not in all too many circumstances. And it's understand and meet the actual needs of the entire community. There are heavy biases that creep into planning rooms. We tend to plan for the sets of needs that we're familiar with, whoever we are at the table. So this is very much about stepping back and making sure that all the voices are, in fact, at the table. That full understanding of how the communities really work, how social activity is organized in communities on an everyday basis, who the underrepresented voices and groups are in those processes and what the specific challenges and needs are that they may have and how that can be brought into the process and into consideration in an important way. The best analogy that I've heard come out on that is communities are like DNA. It's that complex. And what's more, unlike DNA, they're not at all static. They are constantly shifting and changing. We each participate in many different communities in our lives. Communities of practice, communities of interest, communities of faith, family networks, geographic communities, occasionally communities of circumstance, and yet all of those represent important mechanisms, avenues, and opportunities. The second is acknowledging that complexity, the importance of engaging and empowering all parts of the community and thinking specifically about crossing sectors, about how this scratches across not just the governmental sector, but the public's, the private sector and the civic sector as well. And what do we do to set conditions in a way that enables and supports emergent action, catalytic leadership at a local level, a brilliant example of which is sitting to my left, supports that, sees that when it's happening because it is almost always happening. The real challenge ends up being will it happen in productive cooperation with government or in opposition to what government is doing? And we have plenty of examples of both with very different pathways on the back ends of disasters. Seek out opportunities to build trust through participation and most importantly let public participation lead in setting priorities. Again, such a wonderful illustration in Joplin. And the last is it's helpful to think about the social environment in ways akin to how we think about the built environment, the physical environment. We're very comfortable with conversations about how we strengthen the resilience in our infrastructure systems or think about risk reduction to physical infrastructure. We don't necessarily have that same set of dialogue in the same way with respect to social infrastructure. And yet what we would propose is that's exactly how we need to think about the social environment. We need to seek out, strengthen and support the pillars of strength in our communities on an everyday basis. The places people are turning to to solve problems around everyday issues. Because more often than not, those are the places they're going to turn in the moment of crisis as well. So the value proposition that underpins all of this is the idea that a community-centric approach to disaster management that focuses on strengthening and adapting those institutions, those points of strength on a daily basis will offer a more effective path to security and to resilience than one that focuses on what governmental action will deliver alone. And that's really the core premise behind all of this. That the disasters do not represent challenges to government, they represent challenges to society. And society is more than government, much, much, much more than government. Government comprises 10% of the workforce. The capability base is so much broader outside. What are we doing to find ways to productively engage that capability? Either through direct action, but more often through enabling the action of others and working to support it, working with it. Some of the things that we have underway, just to close this out so that you don't leave this conversation thinking that it's all theory and no practice and in no particular order. But for the past four years, we have aggressively been rebuilding our relationships with many players, engaging new players in new ways. We have private sector participation in our own operations center and engagement on a whole host of operational issues that we never would have contemplated years past. Working with broad range of organizations with whom we did not previously have established relationships and working much more tightly with non-governmental organizations, voluntary organizations active in disaster, et cetera, in a number of ways as well. We have launched a community resilience innovation challenge in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Los Angeles Emergency Preparedness Foundation. Very little money to run a national challenge to seed cross-sector practice. Tremendous response. I think we put roughly $800,000 available through that program. We had well over 2,000 applications from across the country. Tremendous interest and we made about 30 awards. The projects under that program are underway now. Most recently, developing a real emphasis in our messaging to the public and our engagement of the public in preparedness and a shift in our focus and our language and our framing. Moving beyond the considerable progress we've made in building awareness to focusing on building action and motivating behavioral change, the frame for that is thinking about it as a preparathon. But how do we get people to take an action? Because taking one action increases the likelihood that they'll take one more action. So that includes a wide range of activities and you'll all see that new messaging and that new approach unveiled as we move into National Preparedness Month. But a real embodiment of some of the principles that we've been talking about before. So I'll maybe leave it with just a few simple truths and then turn to my colleague to my right and our opportunity for discussion. Almost always the public is the true first responder unseen. It's almost always first and foremost neighbors helping neighbors, bystanders helping each other. The disaster is just one variable in the equation. The disaster interacts with the social environment, the underlying social conditions, the same way it interacts with the physical environment. We need to think about how we work with those conditions and who is working on issues in that space socially on an everyday basis. Successful recovery is organic. And that's another word that I would use to describe the story that Jane just told. That is a story of organically driven recovery, priority setting, et cetera, but organic from within. And again, this is all a social process. If we do not embrace these truths and think about what it means to administer programs in the context of them and provide support in times of need and recognition of them, we will never make real progress in building resilience. So thank you and I'll turn it to Deborah. Thank you and congratulations to Jane in terms of winning this really important award. For those of you who hadn't previously heard of Rick Rascorla, I would encourage you to read Amanda Ripley's book, The Unthinkable, about how people survived disasters. It's a fascinating book overall and there's about a chapter that's devoted to him and the work he did certainly on that day when he lost his life, but also in terms of anticipation and preparation. And that is such a theme, I think, of what we're here about. And certainly your work really doesn't compare to his, but it's vitally important and it's certainly a model for us to go forward. So congratulations on that. I'm with the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. We are a 501c3 organization that's supported by the insurance and reinsurance organizations and we do engineering, physical testing, scientific testing and communications that's directed at making individuals and businesses better prepared for a variety of events that may come their way. When we say disaster, it could be a big national disaster. It can be a fire in their building. It's a disaster if it affects you is sort of the way we look at things. I was reading the Hurricane Sandy Recovery Report earlier this week and there was an interesting phrase that I thought described IBHS quite nicely, although it wasn't intended to do that. It said, promoting resilient buildings through innovative ideas and a thorough understanding of current and future risk. We like to think that's what we do. Actually, the Hurricane Sandy report said rebuilding, but insofar as we'd like to get to the point where we don't need to do rebuilding because we built right the first way, I'd like to focus a little bit more directly on that. I usually have some really razzle-dazzle videos that everyone says ooh ah and then they really sort of get into what we do. Unfortunately, the format here doesn't allow that. So you're stuck with me. But I'm going to talk a little bit about the razzle-dazzle that we do and what we're really trying to accomplish. We have a brand new research center. I guess it's actually celebrating its 30th anniversary in South Carolina where we actually blow down buildings and we burn buildings and we deluge buildings and we apply all sorts of other hail to buildings. The idea is to better understand vulnerability and to identify ways to do better in the future. And when we built that facility we realized that if we had this scientific center in the middle of nowhere and believe me it isn't the middle of nowhere and no one knew about it, we'd be educating ourselves but we wouldn't be making a difference. So we developed what we said at the time was a three-year strategic plan. I think we quickly realized it's a three-stage strategic plan of how do we take that research and change society, make it more resilient. The first step was getting people to pay attention to what we're doing and thank you all today for paying attention but on a broader scheme we do a lot of communications, a lot of video that really captures, gets on TV a lot and people say, oh wow, that's really something. Then getting them to change their minds, to want to make changes that make them more resilient, to want to have a stronger roof instead of stronger granite countertops and ultimately to use all of those individuals to transform society so that we as a society accomplish the things that you're trying to do. So that's sort of the plan and we can certainly talk about it a little bit later. And so we at IBHS, we have our circles of influence. We take research in the lab, in the field. We try to sort of transform that through communications and ultimately to come up with better building codes, people who want to go above building codes and the mention was made of our fortified program that we're working on with DHS in terms of Resilience Star. That's a voluntary program, make people want it. Come up with better technical standards that are underlying all these things and providing the appropriate incentives so that people have the means to make the changes that they want to make. So I'm always asked a little bit about insurance. We're not really, we're an insurance supported organization but we really deal in the disaster preparation and safety arena but what are the insurance implications of the work that we're doing? Well we're trying to come up with stronger relationships between theory and reality so that insurance companies can do a better job of understanding the risks that their policy holders face, helping them to reduce those risks and pricing accordingly so that people really are rewarded for making the right choices. We're trying to improve modeling so that the modelers do a better job of understanding risk. We're trying to reduce losses. We talk in insurance terms about the loss exceedance curve. That's, you have a lot of low severity but high frequency events, the small events, those happen a lot all the way down to the ones that don't happen very often but are very, very severe. The Hurricane Sandy's, the Hurricane Katrina's, the Joplin tornadoes. So we're trying to reduce losses for all of those types of events and ultimately to focus on the priorities of what are the things that really are causing property loss and are causing people to be displaced from their homes and businesses to shut down. For us that means getting the roof right because roofs are implicated in a huge number of losses both to the property and the stuff that's inside and the people that are inside and so a lot of the testing that we're doing is really focusing on that. But we're here in Washington so we have to talk a little bit about politics and we like to think about the bipartisan benefits of mitigation and I've been at IBHS about five years and during that time there certainly has been a switch in the house, there's been a switch in sort of the way that politics are dealing with these things and you know first we thought about 2009 switch really in Washington what are the resonant themes and we talked about mitigation being the 99% solution although I don't think they were quite talking about the 99% because it helps everybody. Vulnerable populations especially being helped by things you can do like better codes and standards and going green and building strong how mitigation and in the environment really do work hand in hand. Well then of course we had a little bit of a switch in the house and there was a little bit of change in tone so we wanted to still talk about these issues but in ways that made sense to the people who were making the decisions and we realized mitigation also encourages personal responsibility, fiscal restraint over the long term, spend a dollar now, save a lot of money later and related to that this concept of generational equity we're doing this for our children, we're doing this for our grandchildren so they don't inherit shoddy building and the costs that are associated with that and we sort of had those themes and then we realized you know there's some levers that really unite all these things what about first responder safety? Who's against first responder safety? Nobody. Who's against economic growth? Nobody. Who's against leveraging federal investments? Nobody. So it really does all work together and we just have to find the right words for the right audiences and deal with the right political pressures so that we can really transform our society as we've indicated. So what are some of the public policy implications? The work that we do showing it so publicly we think provides better credibility so that when we're fighting for better codes and standards we have really the oomph to do that because no one will question it once they've seen that in the laboratory. A lot of our guidelines are being adopted by federal, local and state agencies we've seen this with a number of DHS programs in the Gulf in particular our fortified standard was incorporated in terms of some of the grant money that's going there and public-private partnerships which were referenced and more specifically the reference was made to the combination of the IBHS fortified standard and the DHS resilience star. That's another type of example not at the local level but hopefully trickling down to the local level of a public-private partnership and as I mentioned going green and building strong making sure it all works together so as I said we're dealing with risk today and risk as we anticipate that it might happen in the future so I'm going to stop now so we have time for questions but thank you all for listening to me and not just watching my videos so thank you very much. Well I'd like to thank all of our panelists it's always amazing to me in forums like this where I sit here at CSIS which is a deep thinking think tank and we like to take a step back and a lot of us have prior government service or practitioner service but we sit here and then when you come to events like this and I am just so inspired to hear about the wealth of experience and the perspectives that you all bring I also would like to add my congratulations to Jane and the city of Joplin for this award but you know in the last say 18 months CSIS as I mentioned has had the CSIS Pennington Family Foundation on Community Resilience series and one thing that I've noticed is that recurring themes are innovation, public-private partnership and so I was so glad to hear that Chamber of Commerce involved in your CART ITF but in addition talking about legislative reform and we think about the Homeowners Protection Act which is in the house right now looking at things about standards and taking models and taking them a step further so innovation, public-private partnership and reform I think all belong in this but at the end of the day it is about the community and because today I'd like to make it about this community I'm not going to ask any questions the way we're going to structure the Q&A because we have about 10 to 15 minutes is I'm going to ask people to raise their hands someone will bring you a microphone if you could stand, state your name and affiliation and please ask a fairly succinct question we're going to take three questions at a time so do we have any people with questions I'd like to come to this gentleman in the floral shirt first it's an awesome shirt, please sir yes, Britt Mitchell Renaissance Institute I lived through Andrew some years ago and the people of Miami made a saint out of FEMA you guys were absolutely fabulous then comes Katrina and we have a disaster Joplin, is there something that has happened some kind of evolution in those years that have brought it back to being effective thanks I'd like to direct that question to David but if we could have there's a gentleman in a ball cap up here, please I'm Andre Sauvageaux and I'm the partner and chief representative in Vietnam for the Interstate Traveller Company the boss has designed a high speed magnetic levitation solar powered vehicle for and we want to fund it as we get a prototype funded by public-private partnerships and I just want to say that one of the things I most admire about all your presentations is the methodological rigor of analyzing independent variables that bear on the equation so could you just give an example of a public-private partnership arrangement that has worked for you in one of these situations thanks I might ask Jane to address that question given your experience and there's a gentleman in the back of the room, please Hi Robert, Tourette International Investor my question concerns reparations since we're talking about the gamut here of natural disasters and even terrorism why is it that in some instances notably 9-11 and even most recently in the Boston bombings there was an immediate step up to have reparations for the victims and the victims' families but I don't see any such call for natural disasters very often and it seems to me that the suffering is every bit as great so I wonder if you could talk about the effectiveness of reparations if any of you ever get engaged in that and whether it makes sense that it may be dealt out in a more uniform manner Thanks, I'll actually ask all of you to comment on that briefly but for the first question, David So the short answer is there's a lot that's changed over that trajectory the agency has changed considerably as has the field of practice from the early 90s when Andrew hit in Florida through to Katrina in 2005 and yet again to today we've seen huge statutory changes on a couple of occasions over that trajectory huge changes at FEMA in terms of FEMA's size capability base, etc but also importantly at the state level and local level in emergency management organizations at those levels and a real evolution in focus in the early 90s you were really coming out of the civil defense area as the principal area of emphasis and moving into a time where we were focusing much more heavily on natural hazards and Andrew being one of the key things to catapult that and then with 9-11 you see the introduction of terrorism into the picture in a new way with the first experience with it and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA's incorporation into it and then post-Katrina very significant set of reforms yet again in the post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act there's no single answer to that picture except to say that sort of the statutory architecture has shifted over time as has the focus and the investment in capabilities within the field and you have a network system that's working and so when you're talking about different kinds of events affecting different areas of the country these are all inherently police powers they're reserved to the states and to the people under our constitution and so you are operating through and in support of different infrastructure setups in each of those states and so those all come into bear as well so I fear that's not a great answer for you but I'll leave it at that Jane if you could talk a little bit about a public-private partnership that you've experienced in Joplin Sure, for the sake of modesty I didn't want to give up my third set of initials which was I'd shared the master developer review team, the MDRT and so we realized that it was certainly beyond our capacity to recover Joplin with the resources that we had within the city so we contracted with the master developer to look at innovative ways we could bring together public and private partnerships and the one that's come to bear at least to date is that we had an outdated library that wasn't in the recovery zone but felt like we needed to move it there to be able to increase its size and to increase the people that were able to get to it but we really couldn't afford it as part of it so what we did was we worked with the master developer and also the Economic Development Administration and so we're about to build an organization first run movie theater and library in the same building the library on the first floor the movie theater on the top floor we had 40 million dollars from EDA to seed the project and then we have the rest of the money raised locally and through private development to make that project happen I think that's fantastic I personally in DC would like to have a library slash movie theater but I would say Jane if ever you want to move to DC your command of acronyms right in on the final question does anyone want to take a stab at compensation in the aftermath and I might actually ask Deborah to give your perspective on I know you're sponsored by insurance industry so this is a topic that you probably are overly familiar with well not really with respect to reparations it's an excellent question and we are a humane society we always want to alleviate suffering when we can and this is just a personal view this is not an area where IBHS deals with but I know one of the challenges that we also face and I've read some of the work that's been done at resources for the future on sort of how do you balance post disaster alleviation whether you know the different types of aid against not providing disincentives for preparation and I think in the case of 9-11 or the marathon bombing it's just not an issue that there isn't these are people for the most part we're talking about severe injuries or deaths people away from their homes at the time and you don't really run into the same issues that you have when you're talking about an event that results in both property damage and certainly in the case of Joplin loss of life injuries but I think it gets a little bit more complicated with some of these natural disasters because they do bring in other dimensions you ask an excellent question and I'm just trying to answer it I don't know that's the right answer but you look at those the two events that you've mentioned and well and a tremendous amount of aid did go out in a variety of ways it took a lot longer and it was a much more sustained recovery and I'd like to use that term for recovery in progress I think it's probably the right term but I think that when you have a natural disaster over a wider spread area it does bring in additional dimensions I think it makes us less humane as a society but I think that it's not quite as concentrated please disagree with me other panelists if you think I've gotten that wrong No I think the nuance that I'd add to that is the different legal frameworks and I'd bring in Deepwater Horizon as another example of a different legal framework in the cases of terrorism in the cases of natural disasters where declarations have been made by the president and in the cases of terrorist attack there is support provided under a different set of mechanisms but they are different legal frameworks they're different legal distinctions the claims filed under Deepwater Horizon the First Order Payment is the responsible party because that's the legal framework that's set up in that context it's a different legal framework for natural hazards where there is public assistance provided to the affected communities and there is individual assistance provided to qualifying homeowners and survivors and there are other means of support but those are different mechanisms the thing that I wouldn't lose sight of however that cuts across all of those is there's huge broad based grassroots support the overwhelming majority of financial aid in the aftermath of the triple disaster in Japan was by private citizens and NGOs and you see that same effect happening here look at the huge sums of money that came through private donation and NGO networks in different ways in each of those events that I just referenced and then most recently in Sandy you have crowd sourced funding support which is a whole new very small dollar amounts by comparison but a whole new phenomenon in the way support is the word I'd give is provided to affected populations I do think there are some victims who really are tornadoes whatever it might be who don't have their needs fully addressed as well as some others that are more prominent thank you sir I think when we talk about public private partnership we shouldn't forget the role of NGOs and philanthropic organizations crowd sourcing after Superstorm Sandy or Hurricane Sandy was significant and it's something that I think as we look at figuring out how to capture the goodness that comes from new versions of philanthropy and crowd sourcing will be key I'm going to ask Jane to think about a good example of an ongoing project that they're undertaking in Joplin to maybe give us a sense of how they're moving forward I liked her phrase of not look around but look forward I think that was useful before she goes into that I'd like to ask if any of you have further questions if we could have a lady back there and then this woman up here and then we can have them answer thanks my name is Abby Braul and I work with Interaction which is a coalition of US based international humanitarian assistance and development NGOs and thank you all for your presentations and what struck me a lot about your definitions of resilience is that everyone has a different definition particularly within the government if you looked at the USAID they have a whole other different definition of what they would say resilience is and bringing me to my question is that in the international arena especially amongst INGOs we talk about resilience as the ability for people to absorb shocks and stresses without huge interruptions to their livelihoods so really addressing those underlying risk factors that cause people to be less resilient whether that's their precarious living situations their employment their social and kin networks and their ability to reach out to them so a lot of what you're talking about what I heard today is preparedness and recovery but not necessarily addressing those underlying risk factors that make people less resilient to disasters or conflict or anything like that so I was just wondering how any of you are looking at those underlying risk factors to really build the resilience of people to absorb these shocks and stresses I'm asked David and perhaps Deborah if she's got thoughts on that lady up front please I'm a Kathleen Koch former CNN correspondent and author of Rising from Katrina how my Mississippi hometown lost it all and found what mattered and I just wanted to ask you a brief question it's very tough economic times how do you get cities to be willing to invest in resilience in something that might happen preparing for the possible when they are dealing with so many pressing issues right now again the economy, crime, etc thank you I'd like Jane first to lead off by talking about a project that she might be working on, thanks David mentioned that I'm working on a project that might happen because we've been so blessed in Joplin and we've certainly not become experts by any means but I do think we have a set of practical experience so I've collected so far about 40 essays from people across all sectors of Joplin who are involved in recovery from hospital CEOs to the police chief to the city manager to the fire chief to the superintendent of schools about what we learned in our first year that we think are lessons that we could pass on and what we wished you know, the more I publicly state my goal the more it has to happen and so I'm hoping I'll be done with that by the end of September and that we'll be able to give that out to anyone who's interested in the way of a community or an organization in terms of investing in resilience that's a hard question to answer from our perspective because we need money in every sector for so many things right now that it's hard to think about it but I will say that FEMA and the insurance companies help us in getting back to where we were but not to where we want to be and so you know even in Joplin with as tight at times as we've been experiencing related to the tornado we passed a $62 million bond issue to invest in ourselves in safer and more resilient schools that had a different face than they did before I think I would add that when you look at involving cities and helping them make investments it is a tough fiscal environment for them there are organizations like the Center for Disaster Philanthropy which kind of tries to help donors target their donations and time, effort, money more effectively but the question of getting cities and the federal government too and David may be able to speak to this in terms of investing in resiliency however it might be defined and if I could actually on that question the second question David if you could talk a little bit about how FEMA defines resilience and the role of underlying factors so I'd be happy to and maybe I'll use that to kind of lead into the other question as well so I think the definition issue is a bit of a red herring everything that you described definitionally is entirely compatible with how we're thinking about it and for me resilience is a lot like prosperity every one of us would define prosperity slightly differently but we can all appreciate the value of it and have a good conversation with respect to it I think the important thing is not so much quibbling over the specific language because the phrase the term shows up in different ways in many different fields physical sciences biological sciences etc but think about again that application and this is where your point about what are the underlying risk factors when you heard me speak about underlying community conditions or when you heard Deborah speak about I forget the phrase that you used but when you were talking about the built environment and how do we adjust building approaches in ways that they will better withstand those are all about addressing the underlying risk factors that's what's being targeted exactly and I apologize for speaking for you if you were going to say that but I think that's inherently it what's going on beneath the surface that the event may interact with in the physical domain and in the social domain and what are the opportunities for intervention in manners that can build the capacity of that community of that system to withstand that shock to rapidly recover from it and to adapt going forward and so tremendous parallels in the international development space as well for me the answer to the second question is I don't think you try to market investment in resilience directly I think you instead of looking back and think about what are the areas that we're already focusing on you know as someone in a discussion like this pointed out to me when I go to the grocery store to buy milk milk is usually at the back of an aisle filled with either cereal or cookies right because most of us don't go to the store just to buy cookies but we walk by cookies on the way to get milk and those things go well together and maybe we have a kid with us and so we end up with cookies and we can make it as well it's that same premise find the entry issues what are the things we are investing in what are the problems that we are working on I had a great discussion this was philanthropic side but with the community foundation where there was two foundations having meeting and I was just a bystander in the discussion and one was saying we want to make an investment in your organization to run an initiative on resilience and food security we don't have room for anything else and I'm sitting here saying you just describe two of the biggest challenges in crisis these are not mutually exclusive this is about how do we tackle the food and housing security issues on a daily basis in a way that can pay dividend in a time of crisis Deborah if I could turn to you while you guys are blowing houses down how do you think that helps resilience in terms of the underlying factors well let me let me answer that but in the context of the two questions and the question about vulnerable populations that certainly is something that we think a lot about in the context of blowing down houses and that's one of the reasons we are such strong supporters of building codes because they are regulatory requirements for the people who can't demand more and there needs to be a basic life safety standard in place including in Missouri I might add I don't have a statewide building code but pardon the knock there the other thing as far as the vulnerable population space is concerned is one of our greatest partners I'm very pleased to say is Habitat for Humanity and they are understanding the benefits of going Code Plus and insurance companies individually have funded a number of Habitat houses and we've worked with them in terms of our standards because this isn't about sort of wealthy people have safe houses and people who don't have that kind of economic means are living in the kinds of things that are going to blow away Habitat has been effective both in terms of new construction and retrofits they've been in the Gulf I'm not sure if they've been in Joplin but they're trying to make that affordable so that we build in that resiliency into the infrastructure I loved your question because it's something that we think about all the time and we're actually going to be working with some social scientists in December they're coming to our lab they're going to see the work that we do in our lab and we're going to talk about the question of how do you move along that continuum that I just mentioned and the way that we've sort of framed the discussion for them and if there's any social scientists in the room that would like to come please let me know is capturing hearts and minds addressing the issue of the finances and the financial incentives and dealing with the politics and capturing the hearts and minds is the work that you're doing it's making people really understand why it matters it's making sure that if they want to do that if a homeowner or a business owner that you provide them enough incentives that they can sort of make that work from a cost benefit perspective and ultimately dealing with the politics and one of my very favorite people in the disaster thought community is Howard Conruder at Wharton and he has another acronym which is I forget the letters because you'll have to tell me what they are after I say it not in my term of office and that is something that we really need to get around whether it's local politics whether it's state politics or whether it's those guys in Congress is that you've got to put the investment in understand the difference between a first dollar investment and a long term investment and a long term savings and at the local level we really need to make sure that the people by the people wanting it once you've captured their hearts and minds they make it clear that this is a value of this community and you can't short-shift it and think that over the long term you are going to get savings because the winds are going to come and it's all going to fall down so. Thank you all we've gone a few minutes over and I hope you agree with me that it was time well spent. So again congratulations to Jane and the citizens of Joplin and thank you all for being here please join me in a round of applause for our panelists thank you all