 some of the recurring conditions of vulnerability to disasters, migrants, farm workers, the specific focus on undocumented Indigenous issues. The panel includes perspectives from academia, migrants' rights organizations, organized Indigenous migrants, and California Office of Emergency Service. We participate in the California Listos-California campaign. We attempt to identify measures that can help improve communication of rich systems from migrants at risk and affected by disasters and support their engagement in disaster management for the benefit of the whole community. As we know, the pandemic has exacerbated existing vulnerabilities. Trices reveal the vulnerabilities that exist in society. Migrants facing marginalization, empowerment, lack of representation in normal times often end up being amongst the people worst affected in times of disaster. We are seeing this clearly during the COVID-19 pandemic. We know our migrants have gone unaccounted for public health and welfare efforts that are now struggling to recover from the direct and indirect impact of the pandemic. Our inability to design migrant-inclusive efforts has undermined our collective capacity to control and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. All over the world, countries are struggling to prevent and manage outbreaks in places in which migrants leave, work, or transit. The last months have shown us how fragile can be the societies that do not manage to protect their most vulnerable members. The pandemic, however, like perhaps no other crisis in the past, has also revealed a crucial role that migrants play in supporting the resilience of our globalized interconnected society. All around the world, communities have found themselves relying on migrant workers in key sectors such as healthcare and medical research, food production, distribution, logistics, and transportation, COVID-19 has reminded us that migrant workers, including those employed in low-skilled jobs, the undocumented ones, and those living in situations of marginalization and exclusion, are due to our societies in immediate need. Faced with COVID-19, many countries have rushed reforms to facilitate migrant access to healthcare, housing, welfare benefits, and regular migration status. Portugal, for instance, has launched a temporary regularization scheme. The U.S. has better farm workers, including undocumented migrants, essential. Australia has made its healthcare services more accessible. Singapore has improved the condition of its workers' accommodation. While positive evolution and key to controlling the spread of the pandemic, all these interventions are stark reminders of the conditions of acute marginalization that are experienced daily by many migrant workers. This trend existed before the pandemic. In fact, this is not the first time that we are confronted with the paradox of the extreme vulnerability of so many essential members of our society. COVID-19 is just one, not even the last, anymore, of a series of disasters and crises worldwide that have disproportionately affected migrants. Just to remain within our national boundaries, one only need to think about the fires and earthquakes that have affected California over the last couple of decades. Hurricanes, harbors, sanded Katrina, and all the way back to the 1987 Saragossa tournée. These are all well-documented instances of disasters hitting migrant communities particularly parts. In zooming out, even more examples come to mind. Hurricane Dorian hitting the Bahamas just over one year ago, the Tohoku triple disaster and the floods in Thailand in 2011, and even the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In all these instances, we have seen communication barriers, lack of access to essential services, isolation, and lack of trust in response actors becoming obstacles for migrants accessing essential information and assistance and to protecting themselves and others. This is a truly global concern, taking an in-depth look at how migrants, governmental and non-governmental actors have engaged in risk reduction efforts in the context of wildfires in California, and teach us valuable lessons to address current and future crises all around the world. Let me just conclude with a final word on IOM, MIKIC, and partnerships. International Organization for Migration has been at the forefront of the promotion of this talk and Air Force Global, through its engagement in the US funded Migrants and Counties in Crisis Initiative, which we call MIKIC in short, and through the implementation of the resulting guidelines. Among the key lessons that we have learned working on this topic over the last years, the need for strong partnerships stands out. Governments have the primary responsibility to protect all affected persons in disasters, but inclusive risk reduction and emergency management systems rely on strong coordination among all relevant actors, governmental and non-governmental, and in our case, international as well. And therefore, particularly pleased to welcome today such a diverse panel of speakers and such a diverse audience, community representatives, civil society organizations, employers, and private sector actors, academics, government institutions, all have key knowledge, capacities, and resources that need to be levered in order to provide appropriate opportunities and assistance to all people affected. I want to thank the colleagues from the MIKIC State Code Indigenous Community Organization, COALS, the University of California at Irvine, California's Office of Emergency Support, and for their commitment to this event. It is a pleasure for us at IOM to be on this webinar and we intend to leverage it to support experience sharing and evidence-based advocacy policies and programs normally. In conclusion, our experience with the implementation of the MIKIC guidelines also shows that all risk reduction and emergency management measures that include migrants need to be supported by efforts to reverse the root cause of migrant inclusion, industrialization, and winter. We need to ensure that the rights of all migrants are respected and that they have sufficient access, services, housing, employment opportunities, and participation in community life. We need to prevent and counter xenophobia and discrimination. We need to ensure migrants have pathways, safe, and diagrammatic. This provides us with a learning opportunity and we are fully faithful to all our partners who have been taking the time to reflect with us on their practices and experiences. As we look to building back our communities, we need to leverage these lessons to promote decisive, long-lasting change that helps us achieve more inclusive, more just, and more resilient society. I want to thank you for your attention and now let me go on stage to my colleague, Franco Padano, who manages the MIKIC initiative and could be more direct. Franco, sorry, I couldn't hear you. You bid it out. Could you please allow me to share my screen? Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Good morning for the people in the United States. It's such an honor to be here today to present our research on undocumented migrants and impacts from disaster such as wildfires and COVID-19. It is a true honor to present this information and show what is happening to migrant communities here in California and the United States and what lessons we can learn from more inclusive disaster planning. Thank you for the opportunity and let me share my screen. Great. As many of you know, as mentioned, and thank you, Luca, for that great overview in context of disasters built in the United States and globally and the need for more assistance for migrant communities during disasters. As it was mentioned before in California, we are experiencing a major climate change crisis. In the last 8 weeks, millions of people have been impacted by the fires, blackouts, heat waves, and the ever present COVID-19 pandemic. And of course, the loss of property and life. These are major life events. Currently, 3 of the 10 largest wildfires by acreage in the state are currently burning. These compounding of disasters have a corresponding cascading how social and economic impacts on people, especially people of color such as African Americans and Latinos in indigenous communities. In the state, we have experienced multiple weeks on how the air quality are worse. On this unhappy air quality, it has been so dramatic that in the globe and much of the wildfire smoke because of increasing jet streams across the United States has reached Europe as we can see from the map here. So the implication of this climate crisis in California has global implications, particularly on socially vulnerable populations. As Luca mentioned earlier, disaster risk reduction starts with social integration and migrants. Disaster planning resources are a basic human rights and we need to provide human dignity and opportunities to integrate migrants into disaster planning. Recovery and response and acknowledging that because of the pre-disaster marginalized status of documented migrants in the United States and globally, they require special consideration. Our presentation today will discuss the community's hardest hit on extreme wildfires and COVID-19. We examined a case study of the 2017 and 18 Thomas fire in Ventura County and Santa Barbara counties. These counties are about 60 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. And we highlight how stakeholders, particularly migrant rights organizations, collaborated to develop new strategies in the context of climate change and inequality. We will further analyze how to create an inclusive process of disaster prevention outreach, climate adaptation planning. We recently published our results in Geo Forum, which is one of the top dating human geography journals globally. And if you would like to see all these results, this article is open access and free available online. So a brief roadmap will be covering, I'll be covering understanding wildfire and inequality, an overview of the Thomas wildfire and impacts on documented immigrants, their demographics. Then Genevieve Flotis Hoppe and Lucas Zucker will discuss the specific disaster impacts from the Thomas wildfire and implication for the COVID-19 pandemic. And then I'll end with broader policy implications, very high level policy implications. And during the Q and A hopefully we'll have time to discuss specific prescriptive policy recommendations. According to a recent proceedings of the National Academy, climate change is making wildfire season longer and more severe in the western United States. On average wildfires in the western United States burn six times the acreage they did 45 years ago. In California, Sierra Nevada, the frequency of wildfire since 1970 has increased 250% as the mountain snowpack melts earlier in the fire season extends a year around. More over 15 of the 20 largest wildfire by acreage in California have occurred since 2000. And this graph on Cal Fire, the state agency that handles fires throughout the state is from July 20th. And you see when we in July 20th, the Thomas fire, our case study with a second largest wildfire in California's history. But then if we look at a recent updated statistics from last month, we see because of the recent wildfires, the Thomas fire has been pushed down to the sixth largest wildfire in California's history. So 17 of the 20 largest wildfires recorded in California since 1932 now have been the last 20 years. While climate scientists expect fires to become more frequent and severe, it is important to explore how some people in communities are more affected by these events than others. Differences in human vulnerability to wildfires stem from the range of social, economic, historical and political factors. These factors include access to disaster preparedness knowledge and resources, contrasting legacies of forest management practices and the expansion of residential development into the wildlife. Research at the University of Washington recently analyzed the unequal vulnerability of wildfires to communities of color. They use a sociological approach to determine wildfire vulnerability across 70 census tracts in the United States. This first math here shows wildfire hazard potential as determined by the U.S. Forest Service by Census tract. Here we see that 29 people spread out to the United States are vulnerable to wildfire hazards. And this only looks at proximity to a wildfire hazard risk to not look at socioeconomic or demographics. This second math takes into account both landscape wildfire risk and socioeconomic factors to determine how likely an area to adapt to and recover from wildfire. They measure it by using data from 2014 census on race, income, language, education, housing and other factors. The researchers find that communities of color, specifically those census tracts with the majority black, Latino or Native American are 50% more vulnerable to wildfires compared to other census tracts. This research shows that the majority of the 29 million people who live in areas with significant chance of extreme wildfires are whites and socially economically secure. Traditional analyses often obscure the fact that black, Latino, indigenous people have worse prospects for recovery from wildfire. In California, why many of the fire prone places are largely populated by higher income people, they also include hundreds of thousands of low income individuals who lack the resources to prepare or recover from fire. These numbers will likely surge according to the California work assessment reports with projects that the California's wildfire burn area will increase by 77% by the end of the century. The state of California, until recently, has not analyzed wildfire vulnerability based on social vulnerability. For example, in the University of Washington map, identify those that are most socially vulnerable supported because in this map, we see that California's world low income immigrant communities, residents often do not have the required resources to pay for insurance, rebuild or invest in fire safety, which increases their vulnerabilities to wildfire. So this initial social vulnerability map actually does not show high levels of social vulnerability in our case study area because many of the people that are socially vulnerable in our coastal regions, Santa Barbara and Ventura are undocumented migrants and they're under counted in the census. So using social vulnerability mapping techniques that slowly relies on census data will obscure or render invisible undocumented migrant communities. Such outcomes occurring during and after wildfires have major environmental justice implications and in that certain populations due to their socioeconomic status may live with a disproportionate share of environmental impacts and suffer the related public health and quality of life burdens. In a few minutes, Lucas and Genevieve will discuss the specific impacts of the Thomas wildfire by providing a context of the Thomas wildfire itself. On December 4, 2017, the Thomas fire started north of the city of Santa Paula in Ventura County. They grew quickly to nearly 31,000 acres, 50 square miles and less than 12 hours. Its explosive growth was driven by a combination of climatic events, including dry foliage, low humidity and intense Santa Ana winds that gusts it up to 60 miles per hour. At the time of final containment on January 20, 2018, 40 days later, the Thomas fire would be classified at the time as the second largest wildfire in California's history. The fire affected hundreds of thousands of residents in the counties of Ventura, the blackouts, destruction over a thousand buildings and the fatality of one fire fire. Media outlets across the country focused on news reports on the loss of coastal and landslides mansions and impacts to wealthy homeowners and farmers. The Thomas fire, however, not only destroyed expensive property and crops, but also endangered the health and livelihood of thousands of undocumented immigrants. California is home to an estimated 2.5 million undocumented immigrants, many of whom are farm workers who are employed in service jobs such as housekeeping and landscape. In Ventura and Santa Barbara counties undocumented individuals are estimated to account for more than 9% of the population or 111,000 people. And there's a high level of racial and economic inequality and political and lack of political and economic inclusion. While relief efforts in Thomas fire have largely have been placed the price of defective immigrant workers were especially impacted from the fire due to the loss of employment. The lack of evacuation information or native language, confusion about eligibility for relief services and poor infrastructure and housing and immigrant communities undocumented immigrants. Social economic situation is usually precarious. However, the wildfire disaster intensified. They're already difficult situation. The Thomas fire revealed how undocumented migrants and those with seasonal work visas require special consideration and disaster planning. These individuals are often afraid to seek help and restitution during and after a wildfire for fear of deportation undocumented migrants are also unable to access disaster relief services because of language barriers. And prohibition from accessing federal disaster systems funds. Governments in the region overlooked the needs of low income farm workers, Spanish and indigenous mystical speakers and immigrant families. Ventura and Santa Barbara counties are both home to a growing indigenous Mexican population is estimated that over 25,000 indigenous. How can people from southern Mexico live and work in Ventura County while Santa Barbara is home to a population estimated at 29,000. Concentrating labor intensive sectors such as row crops and cut flowers, indigenous migrants perform an increasing amount of the arduous labor which contributes to the profitability and affordable ability of fresh foods and vegetables. In particular, me sex people and Ventura County are culturally and linguistically isolated. Many are illiterate and most speak neither Spanish nor English, but only their native, a language mystical. It is important to know that me sex people are not Hispanic or Latino, but are indigenous. They often are hemogenized with other Latino populations. The fact that they often cannot communicate with people beyond their own indigenous community impedes their ability to obtain appropriate health care, housing, education, negotiation, negotiate with their employers to improve the work situation and exercise their basic civil rights. With these variables in mind, our research adapts the work in the field of public health that examines issues of intersectionality. That is how social categories of gender, class, race and genetic immigration status and other aspects of human identity intersect with wildfire. The concept of intersectionality has been used to highlight how these categories of culture and identity overlap, hiding the effects of discrimination, exclusion, social inequality and systemic injustice in lives of specific individuals. An intersectional approach to wildfire disaster emphasizes how certain people and groups suffer worse effects because of poor factors that are often measured separately. In this respect, we define vulnerability to wildfires comprised of the risk of exposure, the likelihood that people will be affected, sensitivity, the degree to which people are affected, and adaptive capacity, the ability of people to prepare for and recover from the wildfire based on available resources. And finally, we ask the question, what does adaptive capacity mean for migrant communities? Most of the literature on adaptive communities of wildfires focuses on redesigning communities, hard assets, the built environment, such as homes and buildings, through land use and building codes. But what does this mean in terms of language access, worker health and safety rights for migrants, immigration status and access to disaster relief, and impacts to housing and transportation after and during a disaster? So now I'll hand it over to Genevieve from Micop who will discuss the specific aspects. So, good evening, good afternoon, good morning. Thank you so much for the space to share with you. One, this article that we go off with Dr. Mendez and two, just our lived experience as people who are on the ground going through it in 2017 and 2018. Really quickly, it's been interesting just because of the consistent wildfires. You know, this picture was taken during actually, I think it was a 2018 Wolsey fire with our consistent wildfires the last three years. And it's been interesting because with these current wildfires that Dr. Mendez outlined, this picture's been popping up as, you know, phone workers laboring up in Northern California during these current fires and really, you know, it's another fire from a different region, different year. It just goes to show just how impacted the state of California has been due to wildfire events. Next slide please. So, part of the work that our organization did during the Thomas fire was to provide language access to emergency information for the first 10 days of the Thomas fire. All emergency announcements were in English only English only. And so that includes road closures that includes school closures, evacuation areas. Well, water advisories, etc. And so in specifically into our county, a third of the population speaks Spanish. And that's not inclusive of the population that my organization, my cop works with, which are indigenous migrant speakers. And so, again, for those first 10 days, it was our organization putting out that information in Spanish in Miss Dekal. And then on the back end, really working with our board of supervisors and our state and local elected representatives to push to have the information put in the appropriate languages. At one point, we got a Google translate bar added to the emergency website. And the translation was so poor. It was translating a wild brush fire into hair brush fire. So again, in English, it's wild brush fire. It was putting in Spanish is hair brush fire. And if you understand the context, if you don't know what's going on, it definitely makes the situation harder to understand. Next, please. And so part of the work that we do at my organization is within language justice language access. And again, a lot of that information wasn't getting to our community members. And so it was up to us to do that. In particular, indigenous languages are oral. And there's different variants within those indigenous languages. So for us, it's crucial to make sure that we provided the information in a way that our community was going to understand it best. I'll give you an example that's COVID related, for example, because these languages are over 3000 years old. A lot of the terminologies don't exist. So, for example, if we think about COVID-19, if you're trying to explain that as a virus. There's no word for that. And so what our community has to do or what our team has to do is find the word or find the description that best arrive the closest to the word virus. It could be sickness. It could be symptoms. So the same was done during the wildfires. Just in terms of air quality in terms of what are your workplace rights. And Professor Mendes, if you could please just play an example of of me. In another presentation. These are videos. These are videos that we put out via our social media following. We have our local page for the organization. We have a radio station page in between the two. We've got about 16, 18,000 followers. So we're able to get out information quickly through these channels. So just really, really briefly, please, Dr. Mendes. So as you can see from that example, these languages are completely unlike Spanish, completely unlike English, their total languages. And again, it's crucial to get as close of a variant as you can to get the information out as quickly as possible, especially during a disaster. So next slide please. So this was the air quality five days after the wildfire. And so you can see near the burn zones, the purple, how poor the air quality was. But if you look at the red, you see the cities of Santa Paula, Oxnard, Camarillo. Those are the cities where a lot of our community members work in agriculture. For Ventura County, the agriculture industry is about a $2 billion industry. And that's where our community members predominantly work. And unfortunately, because they weren't getting as quick access to information, a lot of folks didn't realize there even was a wildfire going on. They didn't realize how poor their quality was. And they continued working in the agriculture fields without proper protection. The picture, I guess in the intro for myself and Lucas, it's a picture of me. I had a meeting with one of our healthcare systems and I was just driving through City of Oxnard seeing workers and they had masks. So, you know, getting out, getting to the field, that was a salary field and handing out the N95 masks. And so that was our work. You know, I was out there. Lucas was out there. We had our staff volunteers just again trying to get out the safety equipment to the workers because of how poor the air quality was. And just informing them like, hey, it's pretty bad out here. And so, unfortunately for our workers, you know, there's not the opportunity to do well, you know, I have my money to stay home. It's an economic issue. Our farm workers, even though they're picking the luxury crops of strawberries, avocados, you know, citrus, they're only making $15,000 to $20,000 a year. And Muslim can't even afford to purchase the fruit that they're picking themselves. So, next slide please. So, here is a map and you can see the area in the pink are areas where the fire had impacted the water. Basically, with the water, there wasn't, you couldn't drink the water. So, it was a recommendation by the City of Antara actually to boil the water. And the City of Antara tying it back to the language access piece. They put out a statement of press release, but the first two lines of the press release were in Spanish. And it basically said, you know, make sure you understand this or have someone explain it to you. And then it goes into English on how that you needed to boil, boil your water before you drink it. And if you see this strip of pink, that's an area inventory known as the avenue. And it's where a lot of lower income, working class, people look like communities. Again, most plan makers live so they weren't getting this crucial information that could impact their health. Next slide please. And so, worker and health, this is coming. And so just really quickly on health and safety impacts already farm worker communities have higher instances of respiratory issues, whether it's from the dust, because the fields, you know, there's a lot of dust on the fields or it's just from pesticide exposure. So they're already, they already have those preexisting conditions. You, you compound that with poor air quality and a lot of our community members, you know, we're developing pneumonia. They were developing if they didn't have them before they had it now. And so there was a real impact to their health just because they couldn't stay home and and and not work. There's the double edged sword. I believe Lucas will get into of where. Okay, if they, if they're sent home, a lot of our folks got sent home, but then there's economic impact to that because they weren't given. They weren't paid to be sent home. It was basically they're being sent home for their safety, but it was unpaid and that definitely impacted them as well. But yeah, so a lot of what we saw during the Thomas fire is these residual health care issues. We had 1 community member actually who he got sick because of the fire. Believe it, what he had pneumonia and he couldn't he couldn't work. He's basically out of work couldn't go back and he decided to just go back home to his hometown is Mexico. So these are just again, real impacts that we think about wildfires. You think more about the housing loss. You think more about like the people who, who locked their homes, but there are these secondary impacts that definitely go under the radar for. For a lot of these major events next, please. And so here we have direct quotes from some of the farm workers that we worked with. And you can see, you know, the 1st farm worker. 3 days without the mask, like we mentioned, a lot of the companies weren't providing them. There were headaches, watery eyes, cough. And then they weren't given masks until the city came out to regulate. They had someone had to tell the employer to provide masks. And then the 2nd quote, quote, you can see from another farm worker that their whole crew got sick that the throats were closed. The kids couldn't go to school and a lot of them ended up having to buy their own protective gear, their own masks, their own goggles. Next slide please. And I will leave this to Lucas. Thank you. And I think as Jen, we spoke to a lot of the health consequences for workers, particularly immigrant workers in California during wildfires are really driven by economic necessity to work during dangerous conditions because of a lack of access to the safety net. So for farm workers, particularly a majority of farm workers are undocumented, undocumented workers in California throughout the United States are excluded from unemployment assistance, as well as other forms of disaster in like female assistance. And typical pay is often on piece rate pay. So a worker might be paid $2 per box of strawberries that they pick. Take a large flat, not, you know, like a little clamshell box. And particularly with the high cost of living in coastal California, the central coast region, a lot of immigrant workers are already living on the financial edge and can't afford to lose even a few weeks of work. And as Jenny mentioned, there's often this double edged sword where there will be a surge of work and initially because companies want to harvest their crops, prevent them from being damaged by smoke and ash. And then afterwards will send workers home for, you know, during the Thomas fire, the smoke conditions lasted for about a month. And so there were there were weeks where people were out of work. So for, I think this raises a broader point that for workers whose livelihoods depend on the land and working conditions outdoors, their, their economic survival will continue to be heavily impacted by climate disruptions. Next slide please. So here you can see some of the examples of further, further kind of impacts and testimonies for workers. This also brings in not just the impact to farm workers, but also to some of the domestic workers, housekeepers, landscapers who do service work in some of the wealthy areas around Santa Barbara that were hit not just by the wildfire, but later by the debris flow, the mudslides that occurred when the rains hit and carried a lot of that land downward that was no longer held in place by vegetation that had been burned. And so we saw a series of impacts there for both farm workers and and domestic workers. Next slide please. And so, so particularly with domestic workers, you know, this is this is often kind of, you know, it's, it's, you know, more informal work often, right, you know, often, often pick cash, you know, sometimes, you know, without kind of more formal employment contracts. And often the wealthy areas of the region where there are these large homes on the hillside, we're both in the, you know, major fire evacuation zones as well as the mudslide zones afterwards. And so these are these absolute areas there are there are a few immigrant workers who live there, but so many work there and that gets to some of the challenge of a lot of our climate adaptation strategies are based on, you know, mapping census and we consider vulnerable to natural disasters. There are often many people who don't live in those census tracks who are extremely vulnerable populations, but who every day during the day work there are exposed to health hazards from working there, and are at much greater exposure to some of the economic impacts. What you often saw was was wealthy families who live in some of these evacuation areas were able to simply pack up and move somewhere else, you know, stay in a short term rental Airbnb, stay with family member, maybe even out of state, you know, and simply wait out until the till the disaster was over. Many of these workers, not so much folks who who both, you know, have have, you know, economic and other barriers to evacuating, but also really cannot afford to lose that work that they depend on, you know, in housekeeping, landscaping, caregiving, gardening in some of those homes. Next slide please. And so, so another major area of impact is in the service economy. The turn Santa Barbara County is particularly Santa Barbara area has a large hospitality and tourism industry, which really saw was the complete shutdown during the natural disaster. No one wants to, you know, take their beautiful Santa Barbara vacation when the the places on fire. And so a lot of the immigrant workers are what you call back of the house workers, folks who are really in jobs that have been caused dishwashers, line cooks, you know, in restaurants, hotel housekeepers, who who lost weeks of work as well. And so this really what you see is domestic workers, hospitality workers, farm workers, all of these industries that were most heavily impacted by fire and natural disaster are also the industries that most heavily depend on immigrant low wage workers for their for their workforces. And so part of the the issue is this policy choice that we've made as a country. We have a, you know, we're essentially, you know, and now you see this during COVID-19 where we're saying, Oh, these are essential workers, many of these workers, but as a side work, we're saying that their labor is essential, but the survival of their families is not essential. And so we don't provide unemployment insurance, we don't provide a safety net to folks whose whose work that we we depend on, but if they're working, it's it's work or start. And so the the 505 a document to meet that policy void was created by my cop cause and then the third organization, FLA in the region, three immigrants serving organizations that raised over $2 million to distribute to about 1600 families who applied for that aid. This was a model that we replicated from from another part of California, Northern California that had first experienced the wildfire and created an unoccupied. Now it's been replicated in many places all over the state to to address the COVID-19 pandemic. But I think the big challenge here is that we are not government. We were able to do a significant amount of fundraising. But this really took a long time and it was very difficult and it was largely volunteer run clinics. Many workers had to wait a long time to get get aid. And so we saw this even more during the COVID-19 pandemic where five times as many people as we help during the Thomas fire applied within just the first couple weeks of the of the pandemic. And we really saw that the a kind of charitable approach is not adequate to replace policy change. Next slide please. Here's here's a testimony from a worker, you know, who was served by the Next slide please. Two other impacts to talk about. One is the loss of regional housing stock, you know, it's already an area with with a limited supply of affordable housing. But now you saw a lot of these high income homeowners who had lost their homes with insurance checks of, you know, for $5,000 a month competing with low wage renters for the available affordable rental stock. Next slide please. And then the the final impact is the one on one freeway is the only way essentially in and out of the community of Santa Barbara, which is surrounded by mountains and ocean on the other side. That freeway was really demolished by the mud slide and people in order to get to work who live in more affordable areas of the of the region and had to do things like take one distance, computer trains, travel all the way around the other side of the mountain, you know, or or simply not lose their lose their work altogether. And so we also see the way the housing interpretation systems intersect with this. So thanks. I'll pass it back to today. I'm going to skip over some of these slides, but we can talk a little bit more in the q and a about the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. Essentially, had it not been for the organizing of social organization, migrant rights groups in the area, the COVID-19 pandemic, while it has large implications for my communities would have been far worse. Within the three years of the Thomas fire, the strong social infrastructure has been developed in the Central Coast area where migrant rights organizations are now considered disaster experts in their own right and slowly are becoming invited to government organizations, government meetings and disaster planning to provide more inclusive disaster planning. But we can talk a little bit more about that project. But the Thomas fire did set up a social infrastructure to help pressure local and state government to be more inclusive of undocumented migrants, both indigenous and Latino. And as Thomas, as Lucas mentioned, there's strong implications of limits of vulnerability mapping or disaster on how we define who we're going to serve. And there's a lot of secondary impacts of the migrant communities. And then thinking beyond property values. So the final policy application that there is no social safety net and that we need to understand the disaster risk reduction start the social integration disaster resources and planning should be a basic human right afforded to these essential workers, these essential people of our society and acknowledging that existing inequalities are only exasperated due to disaster and political choices are being made about withholding important planning and recover resources from these migrant communities. And they're rendered invisible because of cultural norms of you have citizenship and issues of racism that decide who is a worthy disaster victim. And then finally, broader on policy implications to ensure inclusive disaster planning, draw immigrant community knowledge that lived experience of Genevieve and Lucas, our disaster experts in their own right now. We need to embrace immigrant communities and disaster planning response and recovery. And then finally, while civil society plays an important role, they do not take the place of government. So according to not only bolster civil society, but also bolster the funding for a government to reach out to these meetings. And then finally, like to put a little info here if you want to learn more about California climate change impacts and inequality. My book climate change from the streets through Yale University Press really talks about the history of climate change impacts and how environmental justice and people color have been changing the policy in California and globally. So we'll cover more of a perspective policy implications and recommendations and are doing this opportunity. Thank you very much, Mike, Lucas and Genevieve for his presentation. Much appreciated. And it was really interesting to see how the vulnerability that you were describing really it's multifaceted that goes from lack of inclusion in risk assessments lack of awareness of the system about the presence of the people to community that cannot have access to the same level of information and the same level of preparedness. Then down to mobility restrictions, the type of indirect impacts that show throughout the recovery phase. And it was really interesting to see how kind of a hazard independent all of these. You were Lucas in particular was mentioning that the debris flow and the fires alongside each other and then you have COVID coming in. And I'm thinking now about the situation that just happened with Hurricane Delta in Cancun that's affecting an area where there is a high concentration of foreign workers in the tourism sector as well. And we are likely to see similar issues at play there too. So, and all these I think leads really nicely to the next presentation, which is more about some of the solutions perhaps that can be that can be leveraged in particular from the public sector from the government side in terms of trying to address a few of these specific challenges. So, I will give the floor now to Justin and Karen for their presentation and I will be sharing the presentation myself. So, I will be waiting for your input to drive. Thanks. You have the floor. Well, first of all, thank you so much Lorenzo and Dr Mendez and Genevieve because what an unbelievable presentation and a perfect description of the problem statement that Justin and I kind of walked into and what I know our governor and the legislature saw glimpses with past disasters when they decided to make a really important investment in what we call the least of California emergency preparedness campaign, a $59 investment here in California. So, we're going to go ahead and get started and Justin, my co-chair, if you want to go ahead and kick it off. Sure. Again, thank you Lorenzo and team for creating Luca, for creating space for this conversation at a time when California and our communities are being impacted with this crisis within a crisis within a crisis, right? The global pandemic, wildfire, I mean the light, historic racism and oppression of communities and we take a moment to have this conversation to hopefully inspire and motivate other actions that reach solutions. I will say, you know, this work was one of the early actions of Governor Gavin Newsom when he assumed office in January of 2019 as an action to invest in diverse, vulnerable populations specifically around disaster preparedness and, you know, give credit to work credits due. The report that Dr. Mendez and his colleagues, Genevieve and Lucas, walked through the early findings were shared with Governor's office to help create the motivation behind investing in a campaign like this. Groundbreaking has never happened before in California and so we're really grateful for their work and ongoing echoing of critical issues that our communities need and decision makers need to address head on. So, thank you. Next slide. And if we're able to play it thumbs up Luca or Lorenzo, if not, we can move on. That's okay. We can, we can share the link with everyone after this is just more of our anthem to help ground folks in this, what we're calling people centered preparedness movement. But please take a look at this when you're, when you have a time, when you have time. Karen. Yeah, so this is a quote from our governor, which really kind of tells you kind of where he's coming at this from, which is a people centered approach that he really wanted to usher in this new era of emergency preparedness. And you'll see in the design of the least of California campaign embracing, of course, the vulnerable communities that we wanted to touch, which were defined as people in poverty, non English speakers, people with disabilities, older Californians, and other diverse populations, and really wanting to hit those communities with important targeted, meaningful, disaster preparedness information. And impact a million of the most vulnerable and diverse Californians with this information, but doing it in this culturally and linguistically sensitive and way that would make a real difference. At the same time, wanting to leverage volunteer and service assets. In here in California, we have AmeriCorps, we have search a community emergency response team, which is a group of volunteers that are embedded with fire and law that are great resource in community. We have a program out of Santa Barbara called the least dose program, which has been grown because of this investment. So, we wanted to be able to leverage all of those assets in order to get the word out and educate communities, ideally, beginning with a person to person education approach. But after COVID hit that went more online, more on Facebook live more, more on with the other strategies that we'll be sharing, but we'll go to the next slide. And this is just more about our investment of how this campaign came about. The $50 million of state funds designed as local assistance dollars to really inject resources back into community so that this really from its architecture and the requirements of how the money is spent requires that we work with community directly on every aspect of this work from our ground game and what it looks like to actually solve problems and helping to get communities more prepared for disaster, kind of changing the channel in our minds from victim to kind of a more of a first responder mentality of being able to be empowered with the information on knowing what to do before disaster hits. So that folks, hard to reach communities are more able to not only protect themselves, but their members of their community, their neighborhoods, the communities in which they work and live. And so this really helped motivate and give us the authority to really lead a very different effort that was community forward versus traditionally how efforts like this go, which is kind of through the systems of government from the top down. And so this is really advancing a community approach. I'll just add a little bit to that. I want you to take the next slide anyways, but just so that people can understand the structure, the $50 million was then given out it through a competitive process. There's 58 counties in California and 24 of them were able to receive funds through a competitive process to be able to build their own disaster preparedness campaign based on how they understood how their community would best receive information. You know, what were the assets in their community that they could lean on? Who are the right communicators? Who would be the right sub grantees that would reach the community as they looked at their community? Is it, you know, 20% people, disabilities, 30% older Californians? How many immigrants are they really trying to reach in their community? What languages and cultures do they come from? These are the kinds of considerations that were looked at at the local level by the community based organization that received a grant. And then that entity worked in partnership with the volunteer and service teams to be able to reach as many people as possible so that we could hopefully reach that $1 million goal. But I'll turn it over to Justin on the research. So, you know, what we needed knowing that we wanted to lead and really advance a community centered approach to this work and do something that has never happened before in California, we needed the data and evidence and as much research and proof points as possible to move our colleagues and everyone along. And it's been instrumental both from Dr. Mendez's research, but also a lot of research that we conducted ourselves. And so where Karen and I are both sitting is here in the Governor's Office of Emergency Services and the State Operations Center. Actually, from the state level, the intersection between FEMA and local county emergency managers, the state plays a role in helping to coordinate emergency response. And so our campaign is here. I bring that up to say that we, one of the first things we did in working with our colleagues here is take vulnerability maps for every county in the state based on wildfire risk, earthquake risk and flood risk. Those were the original kind of staple disasters that this campaign was meant to solve for or boost preparedness around and overlaid that with census tract data of the vulnerability indicators of the communities that we are intending to work with and serve. So that we know for the first time in the state where the first vulnerable communities live in every county in the state as it relates to their hazard vulnerability. So this not only was instrumental for the ground game to help our partners that even though they know community and they know their communities and where they live, have more data on communities that they may not be as familiar with. So they know how to target resources based on neighborhoods and other outreach and where to channel messaging on wildfire, earthquake, flood. We use this data on a statewide level to do and conduct some opinion work, opinion poll work through message testing, specifically phone surveys, focus groups and a poll to really understand what are the barriers of preparedness, what are the gaps. And our kind of ethos data points that we use to help guide whenever we're not sure what the right message is or the right strategy is. The message point that we really use to help guide us is the finding that 88% of diverse and vulnerable Californians know that they need to be prepared. And in a state like California with this much impact of climate change in the last 10 years of all the disasters we've experienced, like check the box, we know we have to be prepared. And our communities know that we have to be prepared, but they aren't getting prepared and they don't because of three key barriers because they find that it's scary, time consuming and expensive. And so that presented a big challenge for us in kind of taking the system as it always has been and redesigning it and reshaping it to address those barriers. Of course, there are substantial and significant other barriers that exist based on the communities and their unique challenges, especially with this presentation of indigenous communities, you know, working as essential workers across California. And all the other older Californians, the refugee community, like all the other communities that we are really trying to connect information to. But at the end of the day, these kind of barriers or perception really became our guiding light. Karen. Okay, next slide. So, part of another thing that we was part of our infrastructure before we kind of kicked off the campaign was making sure that we developed a 25 member advisory team that really reflected the diverse communities that we wanted to make sure we touched. Hence, my cop that Genevieve is a part of their director is a part of that advisory. And these are both subjects and population experts. We also relied a lot on those community based organizations that know their communities best. The best way to educate community members insist you County maybe be very different than how you do it in San Diego County. And then offering our materials and all of our efforts with an eye toward the language diversity that exists in the 24 counties that were funded. That's why these were the languages that you see on the screen English Chinese Filipino among Korean Spanish and Vietnamese were the selected languages, given the concentration of people from the 24 counties. If we were to do this in all 58 counties, other languages would pop up. Also, depending on the effort we ended up developing, we're getting to that a very special effort with farm workers, because we this approach needed to be broadened. And we'll get to that in a second. Next slide. So part of, you know, our charge on this campaign has been to not only provide information that is both accessible in language, but also accessible culturally. So a lot of our work with both our community based organizations, our service and volunteer teams, our advisory council members that include groups like my cop and in groups like. On the Latino coalition for healthy California and other groups that are really helping us kind of shine a light all are working towards this this end goal, these five steps. So, as I mentioned before, the barriers of getting prepared and there are substantial. We really are focused on advancing a culture of preparedness in which we are removing those barriers to start from an individual kind of community level. What can, what can a majority or what can more Californians do to get prepared. That doesn't require a lot of money time and none of our information is presented with images of fire and destruction and death. It's all hopeful and powering using artists to help and commissioning artwork that resonates with community that makes it more culturally competent. All the things that are needed to make sure that these five steps become more related and connected to the people that, again, we're working with and to serve. And so these are the five steps that are not the end all be all of being prepared and will not address the substantial challenges and issues that exist and getting many communities prepared. But in an effort that has never happened before and in work that is so desperately needed and we need to continue to make this investment and do this work. This becomes our first square to start to, you know, change the narrative of what getting prepared is and start to work with communities more directly to get these five steps of which the last step becomes critical and continuing the conversation of preparedness from, from all the communities and throughout all the corners of the state. Karen. And I'll go through the next two slides really quickly just because I do recognize we only have about six or seven minutes left before questions. You'll see here kind of the centerpiece of the materials that we produce. This is the disaster ready guide. It folds in a really creative way. It's an eight and a half by 11 is in the seven languages. And as you can see, really bright graphics, a lot of real ease and really understanding what you need to do to get ready. We also provide curriculum, text curriculum, online curriculum, scripts in one hour, 15 minute, five minutes. There's also additional materials that we've developed for intellectually, developmentally disabled folks for, and we're about to release a brand new guide on our disaster workers and homeless that are coming up. So if we go to the next slide, this is just a little picture. It's hard to read any of the content, but this guide will be in print right now will be released this Friday and an event with over 5,000 farm workers in Zoda, California. This is a disaster guide for farm workers that really helps farm workers better understand exactly how can they both be ready for COVID and for disasters with tips from coming home from the field. It also has for I think the very first time as in a state document that a recognition and this is a lot due to my cop and other great organizations that we have got to create. In this case, we created audio files to ensure that this was accessible to those communities of indigenous communities that needed. I had oral language that just needed to be able to get out there. So there is a text you can be sent or making its way across community be able to enter in a number or just see a list. It's up on the right in the orange. You can't see this very easily here. The list your village that you might come from. And so you'll be able to recognize, you know, what or language presentation you might want to listen to. And it's both for COVID-19 and a disaster preparedness. I really can't encourage enough going to our website, the least dose, California.org website, because it's a farm worker initiative is there. And that's where this guide is in both English and in Spanish and then has the audio files, which also includes Punjabi mom. And other languages. You see below it people experiencing homelessness guide. This is just another demonstration of another niche vulnerable community groups that need a very specialized support. And so that's what we're going to be producing and announcing in another week. Yes. So, you know, in addition to kind of our ground game and advancing the steps to get prepared using a designed partnership with community organizations that know their community. First and foremost, to actually reach the people and help get into those communities that are experiencing rightly so, you know, trust issues, other barriers and challenges to really help get to our goal of reaching 1 million Californians to help support that is our air game, which is the public awareness campaign that really helps it again, advances cultural preparedness and kind of remove some of the traditional uses of wildfire, death, destruction and darkness and really elevate examples of people and community and art and cultural relevance and all the things that really speak to that. And as part of that, leveraging many, many events and media opportunities from, you know, in language media and in culture media from as the media services that helps with our message being driven through API publications and broadcast outlets to Spanish language media across the board. California black media is a network that we've been able to partner with to get into traditionally black newspapers and radio stations and other outlets that really help us kind of advance the message and we're looking at more now to look at how we can reach even more communities and special initiatives. One to highlight is Informa Jente, which is, you know, a campaign that we've really partnered with the LULAC, the oldest civil rights organization in the U.S., kind of advancing the needs of Latinos in the U.S. but also the National Hispanic Arts Foundation to help build partnership with Latinx celebrities with state leaders from the California Department of Public Health to Governor's Office and others that can help have a conversation in language to make information about COVID and disaster preparedness a little bit more approachable and accessible to folks. I'll just mention, especially given kind of international interest is really vibrant partnerships that we have with the Consulate General of Mexico. Those offices work in partnership with us. We provide them with materials, both obviously in English and Spanish or what other languages they're interested in, and they go with us to migrant camps when we have distribution events. So that's just another example of a special initiative that we unfortunately don't have time for all of them, but just so you have a sense of what we've got going. I'm going to go to the next slide. This just tells you where we have our partnerships. I'm going to go beyond that and keep going. And this just tells you the impact. Our goal had been 1 million and we reached over 1.1 million with that very intensive education that we really wanted to have to make sure that people really understood how to be prepared. But in addition, when COVID hit and we had to pivot, we recognized it was really important to reach those same communities with COVID-19 education. And so that was another 11 million that we were able to touch with very COVID-19 specific information. Again, with the same pot of money, it's an 18 month campaign that has $50 million behind it, just so we understand the numbers. And so as of right now, we're at 12 million. We'll go to the next slide. And this is really a call to just learn more about us and our work and we have a variety of resources of information. One of the lessons in our audit of just all the preparedness information that we conducted in the beginning of this campaign from kind of statewide work, local county work, national work and international work happening in disaster preparedness and really an effort to build resiliency. We noticed that there was either too much information, that it was a lot of private consultants or entities that required you to sign up or pay for information or it was disjointed. It was not presented in a way that was designed to be accessible for an individual to enter into a training themselves or to be able to have the information in the curriculum and presentation materials to conduct a training for their community. And have all the information and resources and guidance to be empowered to do so. So we've really helped to, we think, kind of disrupt the preparedness world a little bit and making all this information not only accessible to individuals, the text curriculum that Karen mentioned that's on our website, the web-based curriculum that's also on our website, but also to make, to empower organizations whether or not they've received funding to be able to access our presentation materials in our curriculum and our guidance on how to lead a conversation that is both simple, straightforward, but also motivates behavior change, making it all available and accessible on our website. So we hope all of you listening here can take some time to look at our materials and information and see how you can integrate it into your work. I think with that, I think we'll wrap it up. And I think our final slide just has our contact information once again. There you go. Thank you so much once again for this opportunity. It really is an honor to be a part of this great community. We look forward to any questions that you might have. Yes, thank you. So thank you both very much for all these words that you have to do with these approaches and engagement of community, the organization of community representatives. That is really a truly fascinating and really an example of this type of inclusive communication. And I think we are all right to receive a couple of questions through the chat box. A couple of questions in particular from Linda. And she's asking what do all of the employers in this program and providing an organization that is my own employee for the fundings that are offered by organizations that are sustainable. These are all employers and then representatives of the department. Let me just repeat that question because Lawrence, unfortunately, you're coming out, at least on my end, muffled. The question is, what is the role of employer of the employer in reducing the vulnerability and providing a safety net for the undocumented migrants to employ? Whose responsibility is their safety and welfare currently? So perhaps I'll let Lucas and for Genevieve tackle that first. Sure. I'd be happy to help answer that. You know, I think in an ideal world, an employer's responsibility would be to provide paid time off for workers during a natural disaster. I think we know that's not the case for the vast majority of the workers that we engage with. California did pass a workplace protection standard. Cal OSHA is now enforcing a standard that requires once the air quality index reaches 150 or that unhealthy level for employers to provide safety equipment, the respirator mask. But we also know that there's very limited enforcement of that in reality. And it really depends much more on a complaint-driven system where vulnerable workers are much less likely to file complaints about violations. And within that aspect of violations, as Lucas mentioned, it's complaint-driven. And under current data, Cal OSHA, which is the Office of Occupational Health and Safety, the Statewide Office, current data shows that there's only 26 field inspectors that speak Spanish. So that's for the entire State of California. And remember, we're a population of 40 million people. And that's only Spanish. So no data listed or do any of those field operators speak Miss Decal. Just to add to that, I think one thing that we've consistently asked of Cal OSHA is to not let the employer know ahead of time. So for example, when we see just like every day outside of natural disasters, right? Like the everyday issues of dirty bathrooms and clean water. Typically, Cal OSHA will let the employer know so they can clean it up. Like, hi there, Bertie Laundrie. And then the next day goes back to business as a tool for the farm workers. I think under COVID in particular, what we're seeing in terms of who is responsible for these workers, there's a, they're passing the ball. So let's see there. The employers pass the ball to public health, public health passes to the employers for the agriculture commissioner. So there's no real accountability or enforcement of much. And I'm talking more on the lines of like social distancing at the workplace, mass wiring, et cetera. So it's kind of like everyone's pointing their fingers at each other as an advocate, important thing is that everybody and that's just the unfortunate reality at this moment in time for the farmers. And one last note, I've been doing some initial interviews with advocates in Northern California where the fires are happening. And what you may know as a wine country of California, Napa and Sonoma, Sonoma in particular, the agriculture commissioner issued nearly 400 access verification permits. These are, these are permits that employers ask to allow workers, outdoor workers to enter mandatory evaluations. So these are mandatory evaluations that are considered hazardous, that maroon color that we see in the air quality index. That's hazardous for the general population, but they're asking for these permits for outdoor workers in hazardous conditions and mandatory evaluations. So it's unclear if agriculture commissioners at the local level are speaking to air quality management districts, public health officials, and of course first responders such as fires. So it's important to understand that. And then when we decide about to allow these workers to enter into these hazardous field sites that have hazardous air quality, it's proper PPE, N95 respirator mass being given to these individuals. In some cases, I've been told that it's uneven throughout the state so there's no uniform enforcement. And as well, there's difficulty in understanding how they decide it reaches that harmful unhealthy air quality because much of the air monitorers are stationary. And many of them are miles away the actual work site that individuals are working in or where the access permits are being granted. So if there may be a need to more handheld air quality sensors, which are called purple health sensors that can give real time exact air quality measurements on the actual work sites that they're requesting permits for. Thank you. If I could just add a comment on that. Just because one of the interesting effects of these folks in this has been people that have been involved from the community based organizations that are not affiliated with farm workers. Who saw in Napa and Sonoma people going back to work. Right in the field and feeling completely mortified. How can they be doing that when the air quality was so poor. So calls were made to the governor's office complaining about this. We found out that the permits were approved by the local sheriff. That's the entity that has the, the, you know, the authority to approve those permits that you speak of. And so that is not an individual that necessarily has been given a protocol to check on air quality, etc. The N95 math may have been to employers, but the question is, there's a lot of protocols about and challenges about how those N95 masks have to be put on and training that is required. So that they're warned correctly. And otherwise. A legal implication. So there's reasons why farmers are not distributing the masks. Because of that, that, that challenge. I just say that because I think we're starting to kind of unwind. You know, all of the legal challenges that people have out there. And we've got to keep, keep getting more people along with the important critical activists that are at the heart of this. And the farm workers themselves, we've got to get a larger community to get involved in caring. And when they do, they can make a lot of additional noise. Time. Are we able to go a few minutes over to respond to that other question that came in the chat? Yes. So I would say that I think we already saw with COVID-19 the way some of those systems are not sustainable. The creation of the 805 undocumented in our area. That was really overwhelmed by the massive need of the pandemic. And I think, you know, you can. I think this really speaks to it's a, it's a, it's a policy change that's needed around inclusion of everyone, regardless of immigration status into our safety net. And figuring out how to make the unemployment insurance work, system work for everyone. I think even when you look at the unprecedented, you know, funding that California gave out for disaster relief undocumented folks, it was, you know, $500 of a one time payment to a, you know, a fraction of the undocumented population in the state. You know, that was less than most people were getting every single week who had unemployment insurance. And you can imagine, you know, if you're unemployed for months, how far $500 really stretches. Thank you. We also have a few other questions that have come in. So I will just read it out and address it to the panel panelists. So one of the questions that we got from Joanne is, in terms of when January was speaking, I think the intervention of how social solidarity for community work was being recognized by government and the increasingly consulted. So the question is, to understand the role of local or regional authorities, how much are they being, how much they are being involved in this now that such networks have been more recognized. I think any of the panelists who would like to understand to comment on it. I can start off with that and Genevieve can also assist me with this. And I'd like to acknowledge that, yes, local governments, this is a learning process. We're in a current climate emergency climate change, crisis California, Australia, and, you know, small islands are at the forefront of these climate impacts. It's a learning process and we're all adapting and local governments don't have the resources or the know how or didn't invest ahead of time in some of the disasters. So we see a patchwork of enforcement and development of protocols as Karen mentioned. And you like to think the governor's office and taking a leave and trying to create uniformity. But it's a strong process and Karen also mentioned and Genevieve and Lucas is this strong political pressure that these social organizations, these coalitions that are developing, engaging with legislators and the legislature, particularly those of Latino in indigenous descent that are also being allies and also developing and creating audits and creating new programs and temporary disaster relief funds, such as in the governor's office that issued earlier for COVID-19. So it is a process we have a patchwork, not some counties are doing better. Ventura and Santa Barbara are much better than they were 3 years ago because of Genevieve and Lucas. Sonoma and Napa are there as well but much improvement is still needed and more uniformity is needed in developing these protocols and policies. Genevieve. I would say the only thing that I would add, you know, this has been a learning for us. And I certainly did not get into profits to do the disaster relief work that we've been doing. But I think what we're seeing right is, you know, there are going to be uncomfortable situations. There are going to be uncomfortable conversations to be had a lot of, you know, what we've done has been because we have relationships with certain entities. Right. And since the Thomas fire, we developed new relationships with new entities, but that's not to say we're going to agree all the time. And I think we also just need to remind ourselves that ultimately we're working for and to support, you know, the same community. But like I said, we're it's not always going to be eye to eye. And we have to recognize that and name that those uncomfortable moments. I think the other thing that's coming up for me is in terms of being involved in certain certain policy development or whatnot is to also make sure that whatever decision making entities involving and like my copper group like cause that it's not tokenizing. I feel like more often than not in certain spaces, you know, we get invited and we just check off a box. And we, you know, my cops here and and and really if my cop was there, where was my cop voice was the space accessible for a lot of our so for our organization. A lot of our staff are bilingual English, Spanish, Spanish, so a lot of our names are in Spanish. So truly, if I were to bring some of my colleagues in some of these spaces, could they even access space because they are community, you know what I mean. So I think the question is that and thought that we're pushing our partners. And again, it's finding that comfort and discomfort, right? But ultimately, our end goals to support the same community throughout these disasters. I would just add to that, you know, this idea that when we think about disasters, so many of us think about response efforts and recovery, what happens during what happens after. And what we're really trying to do, at least as California and the question about how do we integrate groups and work with community more is if we can get more entities that are working with community to focus on resilience and what's needed before disaster strike. What are the conversations and fixes from the top down, bottom up that we have to solve for before disaster strikes. It's going to, it's going to put us a lot further faster. You know, our kind of thought processes, you know, there's a lot of work happening to invest in the kind of economic health, kind of political civic engagement space of community. But what is the point of those investments in that work if communities can't survive the effects of climate change? And so really helping to at least do what we can with our campaign to create that space and really help motivate that both within government that also help connect the dots for communities that may not see disaster preparedness so front and center. Thank you. I think we have two, three more questions that have come to us. So I will just address it to the panelists quickly. No, one is, I think this is something Lorenzo, he covered in the chat box, which is that when we were developing the Mickey guidelines itself, there was concerns of how undocumented workers could have access to government-initiated assistance. So was that apparent in your work as well and what measures you think can help address them? This is mainly through Jennifer Lucas or Michael. Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely concerns from community when accessing any assistance from government. I think, especially since we're leaving in the time of, you know, public charge folks, like, it's so unknown. And it's so like, you don't know what falls under public charge and what doesn't. You know, we saw with the Thomas fire, you know, when, straight up with their call recovery centers were popping up in community. A lot of our folks weren't going there and they had folks that volunteered and were ready and willing to receive them, but our folks just weren't going. There's a sentiment and at least the community that we work with of like, that's not for me. You know, I wasn't impacted by the fires. I didn't move home and we had to do a lot of well, but you were impacted. Like you lost work, you know, your kids had to stay home to your grocery bills went up. There were impacts that actually members weren't seeing. I think the governor's office was very smart when they rolled out that $75 million pot of money for undocumented folks to collaborate with community based organizations because we're the folks on the ground. My organization has been in Ventura County for 20 years now. And so that trust is built in when when us and cause created the adoption fund with our partners there with that sense of like, are you government? What are you going to do with like, and we had to say, no, we're not government didn't know us. So there's a comfort in knowing that, you know, it is a nonprofit versus government. But again, to Lucas's point, it's not sustainable for us. And so how can we cooperate with government to make it more welcoming more friendly to have them have staff that speak the languages that are from community. To have that that more like, and like closer touch. Yeah, I'd like to get the, thank you, Genevieve and this idea of public charge or federal authorities such as immigration authorities coming in and deporting these individuals really creates fear and suspicion to access disaster services. Particularly shelters when they're entitled to to access those shelters in about 12 years ago and the fires in San Diego County, which is the most southern, one of the most southern cities in the state of California. You have immigration officials at the shelter. So that created a lot of fear and people not going to the shelters. Luckily, we weren't in a very different political environment in California where that's not existing as much. But also in terms of federal federal disaster relief funds documented migrant, of course, is we all know it's not eligible to support those federal funds. But if they live in a household with a US resident or a US citizen, what they call mixed household, they're eligible for disaster relief assistance for the entire household. But what's happening in the recent fires in Northern California, the federal government because the existing political environment at DC has a disclosure there that on what I've been told that the information may be shared with Homeland Security. So there's this fear of perception that even if you're in a mixed household that you're eligible at the US citizen or resident of people living with you that are undocumented. If you get that assistance then US federal government ICE, the immigration service is going to be able to track you and maybe use for deportation services. So there's a lot of fear and perceptions even when a household is eligible for some of those assistance. I also just want to add a quick comment about what I think we can just be here to confirm what you're sharing in your experience. And you know, as people who work for the governor's office of emergency services, this agency, the mission here is to protect life and property. If you look at these fires, although there's been some life, which has certainly been tragic. It hasn't been a large loss of life. And they try to protect property, but that's typically people who can afford to own property. They aren't looking at people who work in these communities who may or may not own their property, right. They're looking at, they're not, I would argue, they haven't yet chosen to look at the entire community, right. And that's why it's been set up the way it's been set up, which is to be there to prepare people that come from privilege, as opposed to people that are from all elements, right, of a community. And I know that this effort is just hopefully the first of many steps. And I think we are seeing in this governor's office, someone who really does get that the community based organization. The my cops of the world are the ones that are trusted by the community. And if we care about the people of California, wherever they come from. That that's really our charge is to protect the people. So I just want to share that thought. Thank you Karen and the other panelists and we have. We are taking a lot to questions right now. This is addressed to the panelists by side rears her question is regarding the agriculture industry. There are disasters before cobit 19 that and wildfire such as pesticide drift and valley fever that exacerbate the economic social and housing disasters of California. But it seems that we have not addressed the agriculture industry itself. What can the agriculture industry do or what has it done to address wildfires in terms of adaptation or preparation and their impact on some workers. It's generally addressed to the panelists. So I can start and then if anyone else wants to jump in, I think what's fundamentally needed is a cultural shift in the agriculture industry. You know, what we see is, you know, there are policies put in place, you know, at the top level, but what what gets put in place at the top. Once you filter it down to like a, like a supervisor, my role for leader to the workers. It's completely different. And I think we just need to be better at how can we fix that gap and fix that disconnect. I know in mature county, we have a program called the form of the resource program. And they have done some incredible work to try not to to the cultural change. I think that's a little bit too radical. That's kind of where we step in. But, you know, as a government entity at the county, you know, they're trying to bridge that between growers and between and between advocates and actual form workers themselves. But I think that's that's why we haven't seen that. I think a lot of what I hear from growers is, you know, we're over-regulated. We want to be punitive, you know, the workers don't want to wear the mask. Kind of to Karen's point, like, there's these legal implications that the mask isn't worn right, so the growers don't want to incur that. But I think there needs to be that cultural shift to how what's decided at the top gets disseminated to the workers. And more than anything, I think, you know, we have these little fixed advantages put in place. But really, you know, we need the industry to pay a little wage to our workers so that they can afford to take time off during, you know, wildfire. So if they can afford, you know, health care, they get sick and they're not waiting until they're literally dying to get care. So those are the kind of cultural changes that I think needs to happen in the industry. And, you know, we do have allies. We do have, you know, the players in the column, but it needs to be a lot bigger than that. Yeah, I 100% agree with Genevieve around the cultural shift that's needed. Even outside of the disaster, farm work is one of the most difficult, deadly and dangerous jobs in America. And the person asking the question spoke to some of the, you know, other respiratory problems even before, you know, wildfire smoke and COVID of, you know, if one of the pesticides, you know, dust, the Dalai Fever, you know, there are so many health risks. And a lot of this is also driven by structural issues. The agriculture industry in recent decades has really shifted to become much more kind of segmented with layers of contracting and some contracting, you know, farm labor contractors, you know, distributors who are different from producers. And this allows some of those folks at the top of that industry to, you know, have less responsibilities and obligations for who's directly employing the workers. But it also means when kind of a risk goals is putting out information, you know, and putting out the guidelines for their producers, their producers are making their own decisions. And those producers are, you know, giving information or guidelines to the actual supervisors throughout the field. And as Jeremy spoke to, it's, you know, sometimes it's English speaking, you know, agriculture, you know, managers and landowners communicating with Spanish speaking supervisors, communicating with indigenous language speaking workers who are actually on the front lines. And so there's there's a lot that can be lost along the way. There's also the structural issue of both the extremely low wages and kind of the insecure employment and piece rate pay that makes it so that the workers really have a strong necessity to kind of work hard and fast, even during a disaster. You know, are not able to kind of have that kind of economic security year round. I think that's a that's a major, major issue that needs to be addressed. And I think there's a lot more that, you know, companies could be doing to really prepare on the front end, you know, having those stockpiles of respirator masks ready to read the training before disaster even happens. Getting rapid response systems of information to place often, you know, you have to look up on an air quality website, you know, on your local air district website or on airman dot gov. What the air quality is, you know, those supervisors in the field are not at laptops able to, you know, to, you know, check the air quality. Someone needs to be getting that information out to them. And so there's there's a lot of kind of structural changes, but a lot of it really is cultural and around the idea that, you know, even at the beginning of this, this webinar we spoke to like low skill jobs that are kind of considered, you know, to be, you know, low paid or, you know, not have that kind of same respect. I would say, if anybody on this webinar right now wants to go out in the field, you'll find that this is not a low skill job. It's an incredibly difficult, incredibly complex job that should be compensated for how difficult it is. And, you know, those workers need to be treated much better, even outside of disasters. And thank you. I would just like to add, yes, it's cultural shift and this very issue that the basis of my continuing research exactly how are the industry agriculture sector, speaking with other sectors such as public health, air quality, and how are they developing disaster management plans, particularly their issue access verification. Are these large, particularly large employers are they creating their own plans ahead of time? So that's a basis of our continually disasters that are happening and knowing that these individuals are going to be working in hazardous conditions that growers themselves, particularly the large ones that have the resources should have their own disaster management and emergency plans for the route to our workers. And the other compounding issues that we also are very aware of outdoor workers as heat waves that California is continually happening and drought. So it's been a continual pressure of the community water center has been really at the forefront of issues of drought that has primarily affected migrants and undocumented migrants in the central part of California. And so these are multiple avenues that social movements are putting political pressure for structural change. California has been a leader in trying to address these things and passing legislation to address the drought and provide affordable and safe drinking water to residents in these agricultural regions. Thank you. And I think we are on our last question so that we can wrap up before we overshoot on time. So this, the last question is addressed to Karen. So the question is from Michael from Anders University. He wants to, his comments is it seems like most of the weight falls on the hands of the workers. How do corporations who own the land be made more accountable? Also, do workers have a reporting hotline where they can report such incidents? And do workers have lawyers and translators to represent them legally to possibly get compensation? I can speak to some of those, but I think also others can speak to this as well. Here in California, there's the ALRB, the Labor Relations Board, that does get put out, I think, some very helpful materials that tries to educate workers about their rights, which includes, you know, up to 80 hours of leave should they come down, let's say, with COVID or other illness. There's other rights that are articulated in their brochures. And we are in the process of working in a heavy partnership with them to get that material out. In some cases, I think it's growers that don't know the rights and don't make it their business to know the rights. In other cases, they know it and don't think I think they'll get caught if I had to be guessing here. There's a lot of other players too. You've got not only the workers, you've got the kind of the middle, the middle men and women, you've got the growers themselves. You've got ad commissioners, some of which rely on great partnerships with CBOs that they trust. Like, I know that's the case in Fresno and Madeira, where they will give N95 masks to the CBOs to distribute to workers as opposed to in neighboring counties, those ad commissioners will only give them to growers. You know, so it's really interesting to see how it's implemented very differently across the board. And I think that's the kind of big cultural shift that everyone's kind of leaning in and talking about. There just has to be a more consistent understanding that, you know, farm workers need to be at the table with growers at some point as these rules out of these regulations as these guidances are produced to ensure that it's workable. And how will it be really implemented because it's in the implementation that everyone takes it in so many different directions. That's at least my perspective. Some people are well intentioned. Some are not. I'm not here to judge that I'm just to say it's just not being done in what I proceed to be a very kind of thoughtful or consistent way. I'll turn it over to Genevieve who may have some comments on this. And over here. I don't know, Lucas. We've locked him. Yeah, I think there's real challenges in that, you know, the agriculture industry and advocates and government are often, you know, starting in a place that's very far apart. There is, you know, some level, I think of hostility among certain leaders in the industry of feeling that they're, you know, over overregulated or being being blamed. But ultimately, the responsibility does lie with them to to collaborate and to, you know, start these collaborations early. I think we've had some, you know, success in Ventura County, you know, around things like creating this farmer for resource program. You know, we're actually starting conversations right now on creating a text rapid alert system for wildfire smoke for workers. But I do think that we need to get over, you know, some of the, you know, unwillingness, I think, to examine, you know, flaws within the agriculture industry of folks who feel like everything is an attack or kind of a broad brush stroke, you know, saying everybody's a bad actor. I think, you know, not everybody's a bad actor. There are actually real, you know, complexities to actually, you know, following some of these worker protections that I would for sure acknowledge. I mean, it can be difficult to get, you know, rapid information about, you know, the constantly changing conditions of wildfire smoke. There are, you know, barriers to communication and training. You know, but if the response from industry is always a no, you know, you're attacking us, we don't want to, you know, we don't want you to be putting more restrictions on us, then we're never going to solve this problem. And industry is going to continue to be kind of, you know, seen in a bad light by media and public. I think the one thing that I would add, and I think it's not wildfire, because I get against COVID to do it, because it's kind of the world we're living in right now, you know, at the moment. You know, for example, there's these agriculture advisories that have protocols in place in Terry County, in the Barbara County, in the Monterey County as well. But they're just guidelines. There's a hesitancy to be like, this is what we need to follow or else. And I don't know if that's from a person, kind of, kind of what you're saying Karen, like, you know, but there's a hesitancy to say, no, this is what's required. There's a hesitancy to have that kind of leadership to say this is how we're going to be protecting our workers. And yeah, I just wanted to offer that as well as this conversation just within the context of COVID. And for some reason, there is that like, that not want that the hesitancy to not put something to paper, like it's a guideline, you can follow it, but we're not going to regulate. They're also ignored in my mind, some of the just kind of the reality of the power relationship. The N95 masks are required to be provided by workers who request them. But what worker who may not be comfortable with the grower requesting an N95, right? Like, what about that? You know, so like, it doesn't need to be worked through a different way. You know, so that's what makes it complicated, I think. And I'd like to add to the role of the university. The university has a large role to play, Karen. I'd be happy and just happy to talk to you about this. The University of California has agriculture experimentation throughout the state of California, primarily in the agricultural areas. And their charge is to engage on innovations and education around agriculture to farmers, farm workers and residents in general. So that could be 1 avenue of how do we create proper training of a neutral party outside of the government or nonprofit that can help educate some of these growers and farm workers themselves about their rights and the use of N95 masks as well. So that's something that probably offline we probably could talk more about. Great. So just really quickly that Inventura County was piloted a program for supervisors and that's through the farm worker resource program. Whether or not, you know, it's been evaluated, whether or not it's been, you know, impactful, I'm not too sure, but there is a pilot out here. So things to do to do work with Don so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel to learn off of that too in terms of training. I will just say really quickly, speaking to political will, I mean, I think, you know, with this governor coming in, Governor Gavin Newsom in fostering an environment in which more people are asking the question, how do we reach community in a better way? Who are the CBOs and the partners on the ground who are doing this work? I know Karen and I are, you know, regularly asked among our colleagues, what's the best way and strategies to reach older Californians or API communities or kind of farm worker indigenous communities? We are by no means an expert in those communities, but we do know how to work with community and help connect the dots. And so just from this vantage point, I will say it's a really positive and hopeful moment with so much interest. I think now it's upon both governments, private sector, CBOs, public sector to, you know, not let this moment pass us by and kind of double down on the work to make sure that we're creating systemic change, not just riding a wave of the moment. I wanted to add a little bit to Karen's point around power dynamics, and I think that's absolutely so true in the field, in the workplace, the power dynamic that prevents reporting and, you know, in asking for the safety crosses that are needed. I think it's also really true in government where in a lot of our rural counties, you know, in California and across the country, the agriculture industry is the single most politically powerful entity. And migrant farm workers are the single least politically powerful group of people. And it does require a willingness, I think, on part of government and time in crisis right now to be to be willing to, you know, take a stand on the side of folks who are not very politically powerful. You know, often, you know, challenging and contesting the political power of those who are and say, we're going to do what's right here. And we're going to work to make this, this solution happen and it may create discomfort. But as Jeremy said, we have to become uncomfortable with discomfort in order to adapt to this kind of crisis. Thank you to all the panelists. I am going to pass the mic on to Lorenzo for Joseph. Going to check whether you can hear me this time. Yeah, we had them before. All right, great. So thank you so much. Thanks for this discussion. We are 30 minutes over the time that we are located. And I feel we could go on and on and there are 50 people online that are listening to all of you. So this really was fascinating. Interesting in terms of both understanding the complexity of the challenges that we're facing and some potential responses. I mean, of course, beyond all the technical interventions that we can deploy in terms of inclusive disaster risk reduction, there are these structural issues that you have. All of you have mentioned the need to be addressed. The policies and immigration enforcement, the way economic and political representations interplay in creating vulnerability for these specific groups of people. And of course, the thing that you have mentioned about how important a conducive environment at the policy level, it is to really be able to do this groundwork for a successful inclusive disaster risk reduction. And I really like to close on two points that you highlighted throughout your presentation. First of all, that these cannot be reached if they tackle in isolation. We need to consider the specific vulnerabilities of this group alongside many other groups that are part of our society that might share some elements of these two vulnerabilities. By themselves. We might create even more marginalization if we focus exclusively on migrants and the program that Justin and Karen you described actually is a great example of how you look inclusively at all the different components of society. And the other thing is, I think what Lucas was mentioning about how we have this perception that these low skilled work that these are people that basically are not necessarily recognized for the value that they provide to communities. I think this is really a point that we need to keep in mind as we go towards the recovery from the pandemic and when we think about a disaster as well, we have recognized the essentiality of these workers and the contributions that they give to the society. We need to extend this thinking to all the contributions of migrants to for our societies. So it goes beyond these work that is essential for this crisis right now for the survival of communities in the face of copied. We really need to think long term about the variety of contributions that we get from the presence of migrants for more sustainable, resilient and interesting vibrant societies. So I would really like to thank you all for these contributions to all the attendees for taking the time and remind everyone that the recording of the webinar and the materials that have been shared the presentations we all deal online. And again, I wish you all a good rest of the day and I really hope that this was useful and I really thank you again all for your participation. Thanks and have a good rest of the day.