 Welcome. Thanks for joining us today. We wanted to talk about a couple of things that are going on in the city during this special period, but first how are you doing and how's your family? We are well, Lauren Glenn. We started out this whole episode with a little bit of colds and we're really glad that that is over and everybody's healthy and I think that's our first question to everybody we we talked to. So how are you, Lauren Glenn? We're good. You know I have a college child and she's home from college and you have a child that's about to go. How is this interfering with her plans for choosing a college? Well I think at some ways we're really lucky because she she applied early decision in the fall so her decision was made she knew where she was going and then she she technically she'll graduate in June but she finished all of her requirements in December though she still has an online gym requirement. I don't know what that means and perhaps it'll prevent her from graduating but we think we're pretty good. So as the as the city counselor for the southern part one of the southern districts of the city tell us your perspective on the city's response to this environmental and health emergency. I am proud of our community's response you know the directives we get changes day to day the problems just everything has to be done with the best judgment that you have today and we really have a team of people working to solve problems keep their wits about them and just get through this and I'm really proud of the city team and how they're pulling together and how people are stepping up you know people are being asked to do things that are way outside of the range of what they usually do and our our city workers are really stepping up and saying you know okay I'm not that familiar but I will figure that out and they're taking the ball they're running with it. And can you describe a couple of innovative problem-solving examples because I know people are thinking very creatively very quickly solving problems that sometimes we couldn't for years we haven't been able to solve but during this period it's just getting done. Are there any examples of that that come to mind in the city? I'm not the best one thinking about these things on the fly but I think generally the Resource Center is really taking a group of people that have all been working on different things and just putting them on the you know people are calling in with different issues and every every day they're trying to resolve the issues that arise and those are different issues you know in a lot of cases you're saying you know some some of these things are problems that we've always had maybe you think you know things like the homeless finding them housing and using North Beach you know we were able to get trailers for homeless people because we don't want to aggregate people in shelters to the extent possible we want people to isolate and it's one of the problems that we have and in our nursing homes and elder care facilities people are aggregated and that is going to be a problem with this disease so for people that we can you know short term we can solve this problem this way I don't know that it's really a long-term solution but it's definitely a good solution for this moment. So you're part of the Lyric Theater effort to create masks we need masks it's a big crisis tell us about that project. Yeah so this was a project I came into it the city was working with Lyric Theater on getting masks made and the city had procured the the resources that first of all they had worked with some other experts in hospitals outside of Vermont on you know what's the best mask to use and I don't know you know you could you could work all day and all night every day and the the true answer to that question you may never have but this is a mask that is being it's being tested and worked on by the chief medical officer at the Leahy Clinic is the one who has come up with the designs for this mask and so we worked with them to to come up with the designs of specs and then we had to source the materials and so we have done that then Lyric has a large facility where they make costumes and they can cut all of this fabric so they are cutting all the fabric making the kits and then they have volunteers who are making the masks from the kits that they're cutting we also have another group of volunteers from the Milton Artists Guild and so they're taking large numbers of kits from Lyric bringing them up to Milton and developing their own volunteer source up there and then all of these masks get laundered by Gadju's dry cleaners so that we know that the masks that we're delivering are clean and ready to go for for a facility also I should say we were able to procure a lot of these materials through Rags to Riches who gave us deep discounts on everything that that we need and we will as we work through we just got the first 60 masks today and so those have been distributed to a few places we're going to have them use them and make sure that that's working they are being used in hospitals in Massachusetts they are put on patients there I understand so then we're going to get some feedback on how everything's working and eventually we we hope to scale up the once we're sure that we've got everything right then we can scale up production and we are looking for more volunteers I will say that some people have had problems the fabric we're using is a very it's a it's a very stiff denim and that's hard for some sewing machines so some people have had trouble getting their sewing machine to work with this stem and denim but there are a lot of people who in their homes have like industrial type sewing machines and are serious sewers and those are the people we really need to help make these masks how many are you hoping to make how much material have you procured or plan to we have enough fabric well in theory we have enough fabric to make 20,000 masks we'll probably have a little bit of loss you know that assumes that you know where you was we're using home sewers you're supposed to get 15 masks out of each yard some people will only get 12 so there will be some loss there but we have enough fabric to make 20,000 masks and how what's the math on that how many volunteers are you hoping for and how long would it take we haven't done all of the math yet we're getting as many volunteers as we can and we're then distributing them I've been reaching out to residential facilities and you know finding out how many masks that they want and then when I have I now right at this moment I have requests for 1200 masks so I stopped making those phone calls we need to work on the production end of things to meet the demand and we do want to know from people and facilities and other frontline workers working in grocery stores and other essential businesses the you know we want them to have these masks so they are also on our list for getting the masks when we are ready to scale up we're hoping to enlist the help of some production manufacturers who can help us you know professionally make the mass and then we could probably produce possibly like 2000 a week and so these are not medical quality masks meaning they're not designed for medical workers they're designed for civilians well the n95 they are not n95 masks they're not n95 quality masks so for a healthcare worker that is working with a COVID patient this is not the mask that they would use but my understanding is that in the hospitals where they're being used they're being used on patients so you can put a mask on the patient and that's going to make the patient it's going to make the healthcare environment safer and I think we're more and more we're starting to hear the CDC today say that they're going to relook at this recommendation should we all be wearing masks so this is this is a notch down I would say from that n95 and 95 masks and how can people obtain the kits how are you recruiting volunteers what should where do people go what's the public information on that and up till now I've been I've been kind of intaking the people who want to make masks having a brief conversation with them and then sending them over to Lyric as of today we're asking people to contact the Burlington Resource Center okay and let them know that they want to volunteer to so and then they'll they'll feed that information over to me and is there somebody there they should talk to or they could call anyone yeah they can call anybody okay and then folks would come to Lyric and pick up the kids or they would yeah yes we can also arrange drop-off if they needed we can kind of coordinate that if some people some people want to help and they're really very homebound because they just don't want to take any any risks going outside and we can we can drop a kid off for them they can let it sit outside you know if they have a place safe place to let it sit outside for 24 hours and then take it in we've also tried to be really careful we didn't touch the fat when we first received the fabric we didn't touch the fabric for more than 24 hours Lyric then brought it in and they do their best to cut it all in a very safe environment and wear masks so but I think at each level if we can try and and protect ourselves we're not hearing the fabric is really a transmitter of the virus but at the same time it never never hurts to take extra precautions so it sounds like you're looking for a thousand volunteers to do this a lot of people to turn out 20,000 masks is that right yes probably not a thousand a probably less than a thousand volunteers but certainly we could use a few hundred volunteers and we can also use the professional manufacturers got it all right so so if you have a menu and you know people have these manufacturing businesses that aren't necessarily on our radar and I think we are in a phase of retooling businesses so if you have a business that has sewing machines and you can help with this effort we definitely need you and if you have an industrial sewing machine at home or something that's got a good motor on it we definitely need you to awesome all right Joan so we'll direct people to the Burlington Resource and Recovery Resources and Recovery Center correct okay that sounds great well thank you for this organizing do you have any other messages for your constituents or the people of Burlington hang in there you know I think this is more of a marathon than a sprint and we all have to keep just encouraging each other and I have really enjoyed getting to know zoom we have our our friend groups on zoom and it makes you feel a little bit more in touch so thank you to channel 17 because you're also one of those great resources that helps us all still connect and we are new learning new ways aren't we new I wonder I wonder what it's all gonna look like when we come out of this I know it'll be fascinating well keep in mind that zoom does scrape your calls for personal information and resells it so just be careful what you you know don't meet with your therapist if you can avoid it that is good to know I did not know that but what about all the all the cocktail party conversations I'm having with my friends well look up look up zoom and privacy and you can see basically that they make their money by reselling content like pretty much every online provider of content so do you have a recommendation I think well I think there should be a statewide public switch network like a Vermont interactive TV that's adapted for this purpose but that I think we have to build that for the next time that this happens so well I think we have to work on a resilient connectivity network that's publicly available for education work government telemedicine and that's what we're doing it's what we're doing in our spare time is working on that design well you know I actually had I did a show on channel 17 I think it was like 2009 when we had the previous pandemic scare with Wendy Davis and and Seth Blasker and so we were talking about that it's odd to think but we were talking about pandemics on channel 17 ten years ago all right well look it up because it's in the files it's in the file yeah we've learned Glenn thank you Joan so much we'll talk with you soon just get in touch with us anytime okay take care bye bye