 All right, well, people are still continuing to join, but let's go ahead and just get started with some intros to the evening and then make sure that we're getting to our breakouts on time. So welcome everyone to the Washington County Recovery Forum. Really appreciate you taking the time to be on the call. I am Jenna Koloski, I'm the Community and Policy Manager with the Vermont Council on Rural Development. Usually I'm doing this in partnership with our Executive Director, Paul Costello, who was very sad to miss out on the Washington County Conversation, but he's taking some much needed time away this week. But I just wanna give a quick intro in this opening session and we'll hear from Josh, the Commissioner of Housing and Community Development as well, and then head off into our breakout group. There's some echoing right this one. So basically the Vermont Council on Rural Development is a neutral convener of public process. Many of you, we've had the opportunity to work with before in normal times. We typically are going community to community. We facilitate community conversations to help communities decide what's important to them to choose priorities, to build action plans and connect to resources. And as you can imagine, that person to person working community shifted pretty quickly when the pandemic hit. But we've been really lucky since then to be able to continue even in a virtual format, continue to connect with Vermonters around the state through various different convenings online through these county to county recovery forums and through our connection to the governor's local solutions and community action team, which Paul Costello has been chairing. And so before I get into the details of this evening, I want to invite Josh Hanford, who is commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development and also the state liaison to the governor's action team to just quickly frame up the action team's work and why we're here tonight. Great, thank you, Jenna. Yeah, welcome to the Washington County Recovery Forum. Thanks for coming out and participating. And as Jenna said, I'm sort of filling in for Paul, which is an impossible task. But I have served as the state liaison for this action team. And this is one of three action teams that the governor established under the larger economic recovery task force. There was three teams stood up to sort of respond to the pandemic in real time, make recommendation to the governor and others. And I'll just quickly give some folks some background that don't know about those action teams. One of them was to look at restarting businesses that were shut down. So, as folks know, in March, we sort of had a quick halt to most of work out there. Most businesses, we were in a position of shutting them down, which is very different for an agency of commerce and community development. And the governor saw the value in bringing different industry leaders together with Ted Brady, the deputy secretary of the agency. To covers and shit. To establish a restart task force to look at how to orderly open businesses back up and work with the industry leaders to make safe reopening guidance. And so that task force has essentially finished its work. We're in a position right now where most businesses are operating at 50% and many are back the full time. The other action team was for financial support. It was really to make recommendations to the governor to help guide what sort of financial incentives and use of the corona relief funding from Washington would have the best impact in restarting the economy. What were the best strategies there? And much of that work has also ended with that action team. Where this third action team, local support and community action had had a much different and longer task and goal. And it was really to make sure we were hearing from sort of underrepresented Vermonters folks that maybe aren't always heard that maybe aren't connected to Montpelier or the different organizations that carry out a lot of this work. So that was a goal as well as bringing back to the local communities and discussing with them their needs for recovery, their experiences with recovery, sharing best practices and really learning from one another. And so that's what this action team is still doing. There was an interim report to the governor after the first month or two that sort of laid out some broad recommendations for broadband and childcare and housing goals to end family homelessness and a whole bunch of other recommendations that we learned from reaching out to the community through surveys and other groups. And this community forum is really part of that work, ongoing work. As Jenna mentioned, we've been carrying out one every week or two. All the counties in Vermont and really have to give a big thanks to the local sort of leaders that are setting up the topics for these meetings and spreading the word and really helping us have a robust dialogue here. So we're gonna get started in a little bit and Jenna's gonna give sort of the game plan for how this is done. I just wanna say that, I think we all wish we could be together in person and do this. That's really a way to have a healthy discussion but we found these virtual forums to be working pretty well and allowing folks that actually can't drive to a night meeting from somewhere or meeting childcare or other limitations having a chance to participate. So we really, in one way are thankful for that opportunity to really allow folks that maybe couldn't participate in these virtual sessions, they've proven valuable. We also wanna thank, before we get into it, the facilitators, they have a tough job, just sort of drawing out the discussion that we're gonna enter here in a few minutes. And lastly, I just wanna really thank the experts that have joined us to the visiting team experts as well as all the staff at the Council of Rural Development, Jenna and Margaret and Nick, as well as my staff that's been helping with all these two from the Community Planning and Robotilization Division. One thing about these virtual sessions is they take a lot of people to sort of organize and the technology behind the scenes. So a big shout out to all the folks. So Jenna, fill in what I missed and what I didn't do justice for Paul, so please. No, that's great. Thanks, Josh, I appreciate it. And yeah, I think that's absolutely right. This evening is all about hearing from all of you. The governor's action team and the NVCRD, we're not here to tell you what should be done in Washington County. We're not here to redesign or implement any sort of strategic plan. We know that you have leaders like Bonnie and Jamie Stewart and folks that are leading on that planning in the region. So tonight is really to just brainstorm together around what's happening today, ideas for the future and any challenges and needs that are still going unmet in the region. And also hopefully to connect the resources to support the work that's going on. So you'll see on the screen here, as Josh mentioned, a list of our excellent visiting team that's here to listen. They'll be broken up into each forum to listen in, share some insight into what's going on in other regions. And also to reflect towards the end of the breakout forums to share some resources and thoughts and advice. So really quickly, Margaret, if you wanna scroll down to the agenda for the evening, just gonna walk through in a moment here, we're going to break out into the four separate forum topics. Nick, why don't I hand it over to you to just walk through the structure and quickly walk through the structure and then give us some advice on how to break out into those separate meetings. Sure, yeah, thanks, Jenna. And hi, everyone, Nick Kramer, also staff at VCRD. So hopefully this will be relatively painless. We've done this a couple of times, it seems to work fairly easily. Obviously, as Josh said, it would be great if we could all just stand up from our chairs and go into the next room for these breakout sessions. What we've found to work instead is if, so we're in a couple of minutes here, we're gonna break out into four sessions, arts, entertainment, community, unity and health, housing and homelessness, and rethinking employment, supporting business recovery. So you're able to choose between those. Whichever topic seems most interesting to you, we encourage you to join. You don't have to go to the one that you registered for. The way to get there, I think if Jenna or Margaret will.