 Welcome, everyone. It's so nice to see all of you. I'm Jenna Kolaski. I am the Community Engagement and Policy Director with the Vermont Council on Rural Development. And really challenging circumstances that are pulling us all together, but also just incredibly powerful and heartening to see all of you on the call. Lots of familiar faces, lots of new names. I'm really looking forward to the chance to connect with you all and have this conversation today. This call is put on as part of our Vermont Community Leadership Network. The VCLN is what we call it, is a network of over 3,000 community builders, community leaders, nonprofit leaders, municipal officials all over the state, like yourselves, that we regularly bring together for conversations, for workshops. But I think it might be useful to share that the origins of this network actually really formed during COVID recovery and response. In the early days of COVID, we, VCRD, we're a neutral convener of community process in Vermont. We're not an emergency management or emergency response organization, but we just started to see this incredibly powerful and inspiring local response during those early days of COVID. And we wondered, can we be useful? Is there a role that we can play here? And it turned out that it was helpful to bring together those local leaders that were responding on the ground to the challenges that people were seeing in their communities, to the challenges they were seeing their neighbors might have been having and their friends and community members. And so we did a lot during that time to bring those community leaders together, mostly just to connect, to share resources, share best practices, and then also help to sometimes connect the state and federal resources. Knowing that that was the origins of this network, it felt like, at least as a first step, we're all still listening. We're all still trying to understand what's going on in the ground. What will the needs be? What can our role be, especially in the long-term recovery? But for now, we felt like, let's put a call out there to all of you, all these incredible local nonprofit municipal leaders, to bring folks together, do a little bit of sharing and understanding of the current situation, and then think together about the future and what some of the needs might be as they're emerging in communities. So that's really the goal of the call today. What we've done for this session is pull together a few speakers for a short panel discussion that Brian, our executive director, will lead. And that's really to set the stage. We have a local leadership. We have federal leadership, folks that are working statewide in the ag sector. And really to think about what are they seeing? What are the emerging immediate needs they're seeing and set the stage? But really, a lot of this session is going to focus on turning to all of you and having an open conversation about what we're seeing. So a chance to share what do you want people to know that you're seeing in your community? What are the immediate needs that you're seeing? How are people coming together and rallying in your community? What are some early strategies and best practices? And then we'll really think about what's needed. What do you hope for in the coming weeks and months and what's needed as we look towards the future? So that's the goal today. A couple of key things that I want to mention. Brian will introduce our panel. We do have a few female representatives on the call today. Right now, many members of their team are deeply engaged on the ground in immediate response efforts. That's critical. They also are bringing folks into the state that are here in the long term to help rally resources to communities and help meet community needs. And they're really in the early stages of forming that plan and what that structure will look like in the ground. So they're here to listen and to hear from you what you're seeing and what those immediate needs might be. So we really appreciate their participation in the conversation today as well. Most importantly, I just want to thank you all for your time. This is an incredibly challenging time for volunteers, for community leaders, especially for those impacted directly by the flooding. And what an honor it is that you chose to share this hour and a half with us and with each other. And so really looking forward to hearing from all of you. I think, Brian, you may have some other words of intro, but I'll turn it over to you to introduce our speakers. Oh, thank you, Jenna. That was a great introduction. I'm appreciative of everybody who's joining today. And really just Jenna's point there that all the panelists and everyone on this call have really important contributions to make today. So the goal of today's discussion is learning more about emerging needs around the state and what could be done that could be helpful. The way this will work is that I'll briefly introduce our four speakers. And I'm going to ask each speaker a question or two. Then I'm going to turn it back to Jenna, who will facilitate a conversation where everyone is welcome to share some thoughts. To make this work with such a large group, I think it's really important that people stay muted during the initial panel discussion. And then I'll turn it over to Jenna for how she wants to facilitate the group discussion after the panel. I do want to just restate that the Vermont Community Leadership Network started during the pandemic. It grows out of a recognition of the vital role that local leaders, both in official roles and in very unofficial roles, play in providing a kind of community connection and mutual support and aid to one another. And that local leadership is really the kind of key building block for unity, for a common sense of purpose, and it's our best hope for making progress in the face of the challenges that we all see. And so with that in mind, I'm going to briefly introduce our panelists and turn it over to them. So Martha Dale from the London Dairy Select Board, Sarah Waring, the State Director for USDA Rural Development for both Vermont and New Hampshire, Liz Gleason, the Program Director for the Farm and Forest Viability Program at the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, and Jason Van Driess, the Chief of Staff at Front Porch Forum. Martha, I'd love to ask you the first question. I just, many of us have been thinking about your community and others that have been impacted by the flooding. Could you share a little bit with us about how the London Dairy Community is doing and what kind of needs you're seeing in the community? Great, thank you, Brian. Just so folks know, I'm retired, I'm a volunteer, I'm a select board member in London Dairy, but I do have nonprofit executive director leadership, which I think has been helpful. We in London Dairy, and we're really talking about the mountain towns that include Weston, London Dairy, Landgrove, Rossonville, et cetera, have actually been faring fairly well. We're currently hosting one of the MARCs, which are called MARCs. This is a mutual multi-agency resource center. So behind me in another room, we have all kinds of state, federal, and district resources here for these communities. So it's become a very busy place. We're operating out of an organization called Neighborhood Connections, which is our local social services agency that does counseling, benefits entitlement, and that sort of navigator work. And they have been a hub, and it's been extraordinarily helpful for this organization to host the MARC as well as be here as one of those resources for our community members. Asking how London Dairy is doing right now, we're dusty, the mud is dried, you drive along the roads, there's a lot of dust, there's a lot of rocks that have sort of gotten out of riverbanks and things like that, but it has been extraordinary, the amount of rebuild that's happened. Just in the 10 days that we've all been experiencing this, I would say that we've seen record-breaking road repair. They're not, obviously, they're not finished to perfection, but they are at least passable. All of our roads were passable by, I guess, Monday, or we had a select board meeting, and that was quite an accomplishment for our town. We have a lot of dirt roads. Those were the ones that really washed, but also even Route 100, which is a major thoroughfare and Route 11 had major gullies and breakaway of shoulders, which made them impassable at times. I would say our community is really sort of living one day at a time, but each day feels a little bit brighter, it feels, and today I hope all of you are experiencing this gorgeous day out there. This is a Vermont summer day that we've all been wishing we had. So I would say our community is resilient. We have had people drive up to our community organization here and just been astonished at how different this is in terms of a response from Storm Irene. I'll talk a little bit more about that later, but I think they're surprised at the services that we've got here, but there's also fatigue. So there seems to be fatigue and sort of burnout and people sort of gasping for breath, if you will, at this point. You were mentioning, Brian, sort of what are our needs. The key thing that everybody's asking us for are dehumidifiers, fans and bleach. Whoever is in the business of making dehumidifiers is probably making a ton of money right now because that's the key thing that we're hoping to have and don't have enough of. But I will say that the folks are really out there helping their neighbors in sort of a community spirit sort of way, friends and folks that we've been able to patch them together. So currently, we just need more people to say they need help. Believe it or not, we have an overwhelming number of people who've communicated to us through our spreadsheets and the like that we have volunteers up the wazoo, but what we don't have are enough places to deploy them. And we're getting calls from churches out of state, literally as far as North Carolina, who would want to come up and deploy their folks. And I think the other thing that we need, and it's something that people have to dig deep at times to get, but it's that hope, hope that they can either rebuild their business or that they can begin to look out on their fields and not see them scattered with boulders and be able to use them for hanging and the like. So it's just a sense of hope and being able to find that. And part of that is homegrown, part of it is what comes in from our agencies that are here. Martha, thank you. I want to follow up on something you mentioned that you had wanted to come back to. And I think you and I had a chance to talk a little bit last week as well. Just you mentioned that the flood and its impacts in some ways was different this time. You know, could you share a little bit more about what you're thinking in there? Like kind of differences from past experiences. Sure, yeah. We had a very active food pantry and Margaret who's our director of that said to me, you know, Martha, this is a very different storm. In Irene, many people lost electricity so they lost their refrigeration capabilities and she was overwhelmed with need for replacing food stores. Right now, certainly in Lunadir, I know this is not the case everywhere, but people really maintain their power. So that has not been as much of an issue in terms of having lost perishable foods, which is a blessing. I would also say that I think in difference with storm Irene, there feels like there's a lot more interconnectivity between our leadership or our de facto or de jure leaders. And it may have been because we all survived Irene that we learned how important those interconnectivities were and that's been critical in terms of how we communicate, how we share resources, how we make sure that the boundaries between typical silos are blurred and that those borders are permeable, if you will. If you think about, you know, can I get resources from one agency or one department to another? I think people recognize that you need to be right on top of that and break down any kind of barriers in those silos that might prevent resources from moving or people connecting. So those are just some examples. I guess maybe the last one is that I think after storm Irene people thought we got to just rebuild and yeah, we're gonna put some things in place that look further down the pike about what we can do to prevent this from happening. After having had snow happened twice in 12 years, a hundred year storm or a thousand year flood or whatever, I hope we're thinking in a much different way as we come out of this one in terms of long-term planning because we've had store owners who've had this happen now twice and they're just devastated by it. Martha, thank you. If we have time at the end, I may come back to some of those, you know, what drives those differences but I think your last comment there is a great segue to a question for Sarah Waring, really. You know, just Sarah, I feel like you've got such an interesting perspective to bring here. You know, you have a ton of experience in Vermont and you're leading USDA World Development which is an organization that has a lot to offer when it comes to disaster recovery. So I've got one question for you about kind of your experience and observations and then a second about your work and just that first question, what are you hearing and seeing as you work now across the state in terms of the impact and the need resulting from this flooding? First of all, thanks for letting me join you all today. It was an incredible group and just speaks to how well we can work together and create relational strength in our state and in our community. So it's an honor to be here with all of you, a hundred plus people who are here today. So, you know, I think what is interesting, I may meld both of my answers together a little bit, Brian, but what's interesting in what I get to hear right now is both what I'm hearing from the news, what I'm hearing from folks on the ground, partners like our RPC's Rural Planning Commissions or councils that are actually doing those local liaison calls, checking in with town managers and select boards. We're getting to hear slowly sort of the data points that you can put on the impact of the flood, how many roads are washed out, how many roads are now reopening, how many landslides, right, or actual geological changes are we looking at, where are the disaster centers being stood up? I'm getting more so than ever before, a lot of the data that comes behind a disaster like this. I won't go into it too far because I think that Martha has already shared one of the things that we are seeing, but the sense of cooperation and collaboration is high. We as humans as a species, I think, are good at learning from our collective experience. And one of the things, and this call is sort of indicative of it, right? One of the things that we have learned not only from tropical storm Irene and other natural disasters, but also from COVID is that we can rely on each other, both in terms of mutual aid. And I'm thinking of, is it Wendy Rice, who's on the call right now with the great Facebook page and the mutual aid work that is going on? This is something we have stood up, we're doing it again. Everybody is pulling together their volunteer lists. There's this sense of, oh, we know how to re-engage in an emergency. And that part I think really is bringing a lot of people a feeling of confidence and resilience. It's not like, oh my God, where are my resources? It's like, let's pull back together. We know each other, let's pick up the phone, let's recreate or strengthen that relationship that we had 12 years ago or that we had three years ago during COVID. So that part feels really phenomenal. I also think that there is a level of disparity that we're seeing as we look at the different communities around the state. Some communities are getting an overwhelming sense of volunteerism and support and resilience. And others we are still finding are in desperate need of first response emergency work. The difference, for example, in my community, I'm in East Montpelier, I'm about, I put it in the chat, I'm like an eighth of a mile from the Wrightsville Dam. So we literally were watching the water rise along the dam last Monday and Tuesday. Some communities have a lot of support from each other. Other communities, maybe not as well connected, are still struggling with some of that first response. So I think that's one of the things I'm watching for in my current position is who's being left out? And how can we do that redirecting of those volunteer services mutual aid in the first place, but then longer term, some of the resources that state and government have to those places that are not as quick to be helped in an emergency? Yeah, no, I'll stop. No, no, I'd love to ask you, just try out a little bit more. I mean, are you willing to share just a little bit from a USDA World Development perspective, just a very brief synopsis with some of those programs and how people could learn about them outside of this call? Yeah, yeah, I will. One thing I did want to say though, Brian, is that I feel like the conversation that I think we should be having right now is a conversation about how to rebuild differently. Martha said it perfectly, right? It is a 12 year cycle now, and these kinds of disruptions, whether they are natural disasters or something else are gonna continue to come at a pace that is gonna make us use these emergency services more quickly and more often and be more familiar with each other. But as I watched our road crews rebuild the roads here in my neighborhood exactly the same way. And like Martha, they're not done yet. They still have a long way to go, but they're exactly the same. And there is a question that I think is hanging in all our minds of how do we do the planning, land use planning, resource planning, and then infrastructure building differently so that we can be ready for the more frequent disruptions? Okay, that's my last, now I'll tell you a little bit about USDA. So in an emergency or disaster situation like this, FEMA is really the coordinating agency, right? So what happens with FEMA is that they intake a lot of data and they share that with many, many folks, including USDA. So our role is both to give them our data and then receive data from them. So for example, we provided them all of our borrowers, all of our home owners in the state of Vermont, all of our community facilities, all of our wastewater treatment plants that we have funded, and they then intake that data so that when the time comes to be able to find eligible applicants for our programs, we know the universe of people who have actually been impacted and we can get directly to them faster. USDA Rural Development is a longer term recovery agency. So for farmers, FSA, the Farm Service Agency is a bit of a first responder. They have emergency loans for things like livestock, forage, and so on. NRCS, which is the Natural Resources Conservation Service, is gonna have emergency watershed program money that actually helps people to change the way the water flows a bit and manage and mitigate for future disasters. For rural development, our first response is really for our current borrowers and home owners who may need payments waived or may need some other exemption to the relationship that they have with us. And then the other thing that's really exciting that we're gonna announce just this week is that our grant, our home repair grant program in a disaster goes from a $10,000 grant to a $40,000 grant. And that's really exciting. We're gonna be releasing that news either at the end of the day today or early tomorrow morning. So that's really for anyone who is eligible, very low income, anywhere in the disaster, impacted individual assistance counties that FEMA and the state have declared. So different agencies doing different things and all coordinating with and through FEMA and the Vermont Emergency Management Services. Sarah, thank you. That's great. And I know as you were speaking, there was some kind of activity in the chat as well. Oh, good. I'll go look. Just like lots of thoughts about this. I do think it may be too early to know, but as people identify disparities and how towns are being impacted, is there a public way that that is shared? It seems like there are some mutual aid networks that are highlighting that. I mean, it may be too early to know, but is there a formal channel or is there anything you'd highlight as you identify these disparities? In terms of identifying the disparities. Among towns, yeah. I think it's coming out, Brian, right? Like I think what we experienced in downtown Montpelier was, I don't know, 2,000 people coming to volunteer. Plus, yeah. And Barry was looking for volunteers, right? So one of the things that we are noticing, and again, it relies on having internet, which here in our neighborhood was knocked out for a week. But one of the things that people need to be able to do is to stay connected via those social media sites so that they can transfer, if they want to help, they need to be willing to go to different places. And I think different organizations need to communicate with each other to ship the resources to where they need to go. And I think it's a natural recognition of that. It comes, right? Once your immediate reality is a little bit mitigated, that recognition comes. But I still think we're discovering which communities are a little bit behind. Great. No, Sarah, thank you. And just so folks know, we are taking notes of all the chat information and so we can circulate notes from this meeting at the end as well. Sarah, thank you, both Sarah and Martha. I wanna shift gears a little bit and ask a couple of questions to Liz Gleason. And Liz, we are really grateful to have you today. This is kind of shifting a little bit of our focus towards, in particular, farms that have been impacted across Vermont. We wanted to highlight this in particular. And so my first question, Liz, to you would just be, can you tell us a little bit about your work and organization quickly? But then, even though it's still early days, can you share a little bit about some of the flood impacts and how that's impacted farmers so far? Very, yeah, thank you, Brian. And it was so great to hear from Martha and Sarah also, definitely learned a few new things. Yeah, my name is Liz Gleason. I work for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. We do a lot of different work across the community development spectrum, from affordable housing to all kinds of land conservation. I run our Farm and Forest Viability Program, which is a business coaching program for all kinds of working lands businesses. We also have a program called the Rural Economic Development Initiative, which helps small towns and working lands businesses access complex federal funding. So we work really closely with USDA and the Council on Rural Development to help support that group. It is early and it's not early. We compare farmers that I think the effects with farms are very immediately devastating. There's still a lot of people collecting information on sort of the extent of the challenges. There's several different places where farmers should be reporting damages in addition to 211, which is very important as we all know related to FEMA. But if you're working with farmers or helping get the word out in your community, also having them look out for a survey that'll be coming from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture would be really helpful. And also they should be reporting damages to the Farm Service Agency. So that's just an important PSA. Yeah, it's interesting. Like this was obviously a really catastrophic moment early last week, but I think what's important to know in the agricultural world is that this year has been really hard already in terms of weather events. Farmers we know are at the forefront of the climate crisis and we've already seen a lot of small crises already. We started the year basically in a drought. Then it's been sort of wet the entire summer. We had a freeze that was really hard for a lot of produce and vineyard and orchard operations. So people really had already gone through multiple climate crises already. Even folks who are not flooded, which there are many farmers in flood plains because typically that's great soil. Even if they weren't flooded, a lot of moisture at this time of year can be pretty devastating for the rest of the year and particularly for produce and berry growers. Basically you've spent the last six months spending a lot of money and you were planning to spend July and August and September making money. So we have people who are already sort of taking out operating loans, not bringing in a lot of revenue at a really sort of vulnerable place. And in terms of our dairy farmers and livestock producers, there's quite a bit of concern about haying, being able to get grain or corn in. Again, it's not just the moment of the flooding, but it's how does that additional moisture affect the quality? I was remembering back to Irene, I worked in the same program after Irene and we had, for some farmers, they were dealing with moisture issues for years and their stored feed that was causing a lot of health problems for animals. So like Sarah said, this is just the beginning. Our program is really more focused on long-term planning for farmers. We also work with all different kinds of forest-based businesses too, who have certainly seen some effects for the most part, not as catastrophic as farms who are flooded. We are starting to consider as a program really beefing up our sort of risk management strategies. We partner really closely with the Northeast Organic Farming Association, which is rolling out some new programming around climate management and we'll have like technical staff doing that work. UVM Extension does a lot of that. We work with an amazing network of agricultural service providers, including the Interrail Center, where all their farms were under six feet of water. UVM Extension, NOFA, the Center for an Agricultural Economy up in Hardwick, which was really affected and another organization called Land For Good. So there's lots of folks within our program and others in the state that are really out there trying to support farmers. And I do think now that most colleagues I work with have been through Irene with farmers and now COVID and now this, we do as a service provider community, we're starting to have a lot more understanding of what it takes to respond to these disasters. Liz, thank you. I mean, just a kind of follow up on there that ties some of what Martha and Sarah and you have all said, like it has been really inspiring to see how many people are rallying to support communities, volunteering to help clean up homes and businesses. Each farm situation is gonna be so different though. And do you have any initial suggestions of how people can keep local farms in mind and support them, not just in the immediate aftermath, but in the months ahead, things that we should be thinking about as we think about farmers over the next couple of months. Yeah, that's a great question. Before I answer that, I also wanna just clarify that one thing we're noticing is that a lot of the gleaning work that has been done statewide is also gonna be impacted by this. So a lot of farmers contribute to the charitable food system and there's just gonna be less local produce going there this year or there's anticipated, that's anticipated. So that's also ties into a way that you can sort of support that is whether it's working with a local farmer or the charitable food system, like making sure that people in your area have enough to eat. I think in terms of directly supporting farmers, there's a couple of grant and emergency loan funds that are great places if you have the interest and means to donate. The NOFA, the Northeast Organic Farming Association has an emergency grant program that they've bumped up to $5,000 per farm. That is not at all tied to any county-wide designation. It's people can apply no matter where they are and what type of damage they had. The Center for an Agricultural Economy Up and Hard Work also runs a zero-interest loan program that's accepting donations that go into a revolving farmer loan program. And there's a couple others as well, probably too many to mention. NOFA is also running a volunteer sign-up sheet. I can find the link and drop that in the chat later. And in terms of farmer to farmer resources, there's also going to be a lot of sort of sharing of materials and equipment and sort of within the farm community, a lot of mutual aid is going on. So I can drop those resources in the chat. I guess I'll also say that I just want to reiterate what I said at the beginning, which is if you are working with farmers in your community, reminding them that there might be a lot of forms to fill out and a lot of people to tell about what is bad on your farm right now, but it's really worth trying to share that information with the Agency to Ag when they have a survey coming out with 211, with FSA. So I think those are the primary sort of emergency response things that farmers can do right now in terms of getting sort of federal resources down. Great, Liz, I really appreciate that. Thank you. We've got one more speaker I want to make sure we hear from and then we're going to open it up to others to share their thoughts as well. So Jason, you have a unique perspective here as well. Front porch forum, it's an organization that I believe has forums in every part of the state, maybe even every town in the state at this point, Jason. And those forum and message boards can be really useful resources for people in different communities. Across those forums, particularly in the parts of the state that are more impacted by the flooding, are you seeing any kind of early themes in the needs that people are identifying for themselves? Yeah, thank you, Brian. So glad to be here and just super useful to hear what's going on in other sectors. And we're really honored to be playing a part in helping the state recover from this disaster. First, just a tiny bit of background about front porch forum. We are a Vermont-based, Vermont-owned benefit corporation. Our mission is to help neighbors connect and build community. And we do that by hosting a network of, as you referenced, online community forums in every community in the state. We have over 230,000 members. That's just by way of comparison more than Facebook here in Vermont. So a huge number of Vermonters participate on their community forums and people join and sign up for the forum where they live or work and it connects them with neighbors for local needs. Specific to this disaster in the last 10 or so days, we've seen a total of about 10,400 postings total on our forums across the whole system. About 1,650 of those have been specifically disaster related, including 650 and growing locally specific and this is critical locally shared mutual aid requests, people asking for help that gets distributed to their neighbors and seen by a critical mass of their neighbors in pretty close to real time. In that context, I did a review of all 1,600 and some disaster related postings that we've seen come through so far and really four big themes emerged regarding needs that are happening. One, I'd characterize as direct and individual needs, meaning people need items and we've heard this over and over or some pumps, shop backs, dehumidifiers, et cetera, where people need help, help mucking out, help with demolition, help with an excavator to make their driveway passable. So that's the most obvious kind of need we're seeing with that direct and individual need. The second category that I saw was direct and centralized need, people who are putting out calls for volunteers to meet at a centralized point to then spread out or to meet at a centralized point to provide centralized services to give out food, give out supplies, et cetera. And then also centralized calls for donations of goods, people who are organizing, collecting truckloads and then bringing trash bags, bleach, et cetera to specific communities and handing them out. So that's the second is direct and centralized. Then there's two more. One need that we've seen a lot of is a need for information. There's a lot of requests for reliable and up to date information specifically about local conditions. Is this road passable? Can I get through here? Can we drink the water? And then another is people are looking for actionable info on the services and supports. How do I document stuff for FEMA? How do I know if my water is drinkable? What do I have to do in order to start making repairs? And then the fourth, in addition to information is a coordination need. There's a huge need that people are filling in various ad hoc ways for being able to track and follow up on requests and offers. A lot of that is happening organically, but then there's also people who are stepping in and trying to provide a more structured way to do that. And there are many people who are eager for that more structured approach. And then there's also a real need for tools for communicating, or finding specific people or connecting with people in a certain sector or neighborhood or area that has a particular issue going on. So those are the really the four things that are emerging, direct and individual, direct and centralized needs, information needs, and coordination needs. Hey, thanks, Jason. And I see like we have a very, very active chat. So I'm anxious to turn it over to Jen in a moment here, but I do want to ask one last quick question of you. Just, I know the report form has changed some of its processes to allow people to post specific to the disaster. Can you speak to that very briefly as well? Absolutely. Last Monday, basically as soon as it became clear that this was going to be a very significant disaster, we started doing a couple of things. One is we made it so that any posts that people submit that are about the disaster don't count towards posting limits. And some folks may know we try to keep a lid on how many posts there are from businesses and government, et cetera, to really keep this neighbor to neighbor. But in the context of a disaster, there's a need for free flow of information. So anything related to the disaster we publish immediately and it doesn't have any effect on people's posting limits. And then the second thing is we started publishing more frequently. As soon as an urgent request came in, we put it out. Our team of online moderators, instead of our usual practice of waiting till the end of the day and publishing an end of day digest would push out an addition as soon as there was a time sensitive post that came in. So we've been publishing from six in the morning until 10 at night every day since this started. And then the last thing I'll mention is that we created a network of county by county disaster response sort of bulletin boards. And what these do is they compile all of the posts from an entire county that are in any way related to disaster response or mutual aid. And the key thing about that is that our model, as you know, is a very localized model. You get to see posts from your own community and the immediately adjacent communities. For this disaster, it was very clear that a mutual aid and information awareness at a broader scale was important. So we made it so that everybody can see all of the posts related to anything about this disaster for their entire county or for the more rural parts of the state for groups of counties, the Northeast Kingdom, Northwest Vermont, et cetera. And sorry, one last thing, that board is at frontportsforum.com slash disaster response. I'll put that in the chat. Hey, thank you. I think that's a useful tool. And I just want to thank all of our panelists, Martha, Liz, Sarah, Jason for your wisdom here. And I think it's time to turn over to Jenna to facilitate the next phase of the conversation. So Jen, I'll let you explain how you'd like to leave that. Great, thanks, Brian. Thanks to all our panelists for sharing your experience. Yeah, I want to hear from everyone on this call. We've got about 111 people on this call. So I want to be careful with our time and make sure that we are all being as concise and clear in our comments as possible. But it's important to us. Really, we wanted to pull this group together to have an open conversation about what you're seeing on the ground and what the needs might be that are emerging in your communities. Let me just first say, the chat is wild right now. There's so much information, so many resources. I'm both like inspired and amazed by how much you all bring this conversation and also entirely overwhelmed by everything that's there, which some of you may be feeling as well. So I just want you to know, we're gonna collect the resources that we're sharing here, at least for now, at least for this call, and share that back with all of you and everyone who's registered to be sure that nothing's getting missed. But I don't want you to stress that you're gonna miss things. Oh, and thank you. So I'm gonna be starting a talk about links. That's amazing. So know that you won't miss any of that and we're recording this and we'll share this back as well. But I also want to open up the conversation to hear. I want to start with just what you're seeing on the ground. So let's start there with, what's the current status, current situation, either in your community, in your response efforts, in your volunteer efforts, whatever that might look like for you. It's all welcome here. What's your current status, what you're seeing? And then after we talk a little bit about that, I wanna shift to, what do you hope to see? What are the needs? What do you hope to kind of come together at your ideas for how we can kind of pull together in future recovery? So I wanna kind of hold that for now and right now really focused on, what's the current situation? Where are the major needs that you're seeing, the major gaps? Or also I would welcome, what's working in your communities? Where have you seen effective response efforts, best practices? I will say just because our time is fairly limited and we have so many people on the call, we probably, I know so many of you are so in it right now with the response. We probably don't have a lot of time to dig deep into kind of specific examples or scenarios. I'm kind of thinking more thematically, what are you seeing and what's the status of communities on the ground? To participate, I'll call on people. If you are able to check out, on the bottom of Zoom there's a little reactions button. If you click there, you can use the raised hand function to speak. Or if you need to kind of wave at me or unmute and let me know that you wanna weigh in and we'll try to get to as many people as we can. So where are you seeing current status that you're seeing on the ground? Let's start with Sultana. Hi, Jenna. Hi. I work in Barrie, I work at Mosaic Vermont. We've been pretty deeply infected. We have transitional housing units for survivors and families that are seeking safety from sexual violence. And I would say the thing that I see most is a lack of housing availability. That is consistent for every one of our partners. I would also say that in our immediate need, we're finding people being helpful. So we've already found one permanent housing offering for one of our tenants. I know that some of our partners who have been looking for transitional housing for their own needs are, people are opening their homes and in the middle of a housing crisis, that's no small thing. So I'm appreciative and back to that kind of community resilience aspect of things that is hurting. We're right next to the Turning Point Recovery Center in Barrie. They have had to outsource all of their recovery meetings and they've managed to do that within the course of about three or four days from their networking, a networking meeting that was through Central Vermont Prevention Coalition. So through the connectivity portion of their advocacy work, they've managed to find resources just through being part of networking events, which is pretty amazing. I would say the one thing that I think is most important for all of the nonprofits that I work with that we have collectively said is most important is that if the state would release at least 25% of funds upfront, which is the thing that they used to do, that would be incredibly helpful for cashflow in the upcoming months and years. And that was something that used to happen. It doesn't happen anymore, but for nonprofits who are operating on reimbursable funds, this is gonna be a real hardship for small nonprofits, not just for recovery efforts, but just to be able to keep people employed. So as the state is thinking about ways that they can be supportive and helpful, that is the number one thing that I think would be helpful to small nonprofits. And it's a thing that I'm hearing from all of my partners. Great, thanks so much for sharing all that. And I was seeing you got some support from Sarah there on that last suggestion. Let's go to Jay, go ahead. Good morning, everyone. My name is Jay Green, I use they them pronouns. I am here representing some of the mutual aid community networks that have popped up in. I'm a member of the LGBTQ Two Spirit Plus community here in central Vermont. I spent a day coordinating volunteers out of the Rainbow Bridge Community Center, which has been serving as a distribution hub for supplies. And just for sort of what we're noticing on the ground here, the Red Cross, I know that they've set up a disaster center at the Berry Auditorium. That's on the top of a big hill. And expecting people to come to them has been a barrier to access for people with disabilities. There are people who can't walk up the hill. Other people with disabilities are stuck in their homes and they can't use their cars due to blood damage. So it would be really more helpful if some of the emergency response could focus on canvassing people door to door, like our volunteers have been doing instead of sitting in one location and expecting people to come to them. I also wanted to echo some of the comments that have been put in the chat about tenants being asked to take on landlord responsibilities in terms of repairing properties. A lot of folks have been saying that their landlords are really leaving them behind in terms of helping them repair their homes. And it's been really frustrating to hear from multiple people that they are requesting assistance from their landlords over and over again and just being expected to take care of things themselves or being expected to, you know, volunteers are being asked to do back, frankly, fairly dangerous work of mucking out this flood waste. Yeah. And yeah, it's a really, really big problem. And I also really agree with the point that was put in the chat about tenants getting monetary assistance and not just landlords. The final thing I'll say is just putting in a plug for all of the mutual aid support from the LGBTQ Two Spirit Plus community that has been really just responding in droves. And I want people to remember who showed up to help them. And, you know, when you're organizing transphobic events at your school districts, remember who showed up to help you in the flood response. It's the LGBTQ Two Spirit Plus community who has been showing up. And all we're asking for is respect and dignity. And yeah, thank you for your time today. And I'm gonna leave it there. Yeah, thanks so much, Jay, for those comments, but also for your work on the ground as well. Really appreciate it. Nicole, why don't you go ahead next and then, Greg? Thank you so much, Shannon, it's great to see you. So I'm representing a couple of different groups. So I'm with the Berry Rotary Club, but also represent the whole district of Rotary 7850. It's like 40 clubs, many of whom were impacted, you know, have residents in their areas impacted. I also represent Norwich University and many folks have been reaching out to my office I'm in the Center for Civic Engagement. Back in 2011, you know, we deployed hundreds of students over thousands of hours during 2011 Irene. And so we've been getting a lot of requests. The students aren't back yet, but I'm here to just let you know that we absolutely wanna be helping, helping as many communities as possible on the ground with whatever might be needed. They might not be here for the immediate muckouts, but I wanna just reach out and let you know that, you know, please put my name down and my contact information. If groups of, you know, student volunteers, you can do a lot of heavy lifting can be of service. I also wanna just say from, you know, the perspective of somebody, I live in Berlin. And so, you know, looking to the right and the left of, you know, I'm right in between Barry and Mount Helier. And I've seen a lot of friends going through things that, you know, I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy and not just residents, but also businesses. And I feel like not only have the nonprofits been hit, but some of these small businesses that have applied for funding that are getting, you know, or insurance claims are getting rejected already. And just knowing that it's gonna take, you know, so long for them to recover if they can at all. And it's just, you know, the streets of Mount Helier post-apocalyptic. I mean, it's just the most bizarre thing. And so, yeah, so either as a Rotarian or as a member of the Norwich University community, we're here to help. So please be in touch. Thank you so much, Nicole. And if you'd wanna put your name and your contact in the chat there for people to reach out, just really appreciate your sharing. Thank you. Greg and then Wendy. Hey, John, thank you. And a big thank you to you and Brian and the team of presenters to pull folks together. So I'm Greg Stavanski. I work at Lemuel Health Partners and part of what we're calling the Lemuel flood response team. So it's a team that looks very similar to the team that we pulled together to respond to the impacts of COVID. We're using the incident command structure as a foundation for our group. And I guess just to highlight, you know, Nicole, thank you, Nicole, for reminding us of the devastation that's impacting friends and neighbors and businesses. And also just remember that, you know, we can all, there's also a significant impact in terms of responding to what's going on and just being aware of, you know, burning people out. And it's amazing to see the volunteer supports that we're getting, but hearing from communities about just being overwhelmed about volunteer support. So what we found during the response to COVID was having a structure and a team and real clear roles really was helpful in terms of people getting work done but also not burning themselves out too much. And so our, for our Lemuel Valley area, the four towns that have been most significantly impacted are Cambridge, Johnson, Wolcott and Hardwick. So those are the communities we're focusing most right now. And what's really been helpful, Emily Lev is on the call here as well. And she's our lead for communications. Just been doing some amazing work, just getting information out through our local United Way website and also a newsletter that goes out, sometimes on a daily basis depending on how much information is out there. We have a bunch of operations teams and shelter issues. We're working with the American Red Cross and a shelter up at Vermont State University in Johnson, but that's not gonna be available come August one. So, and then we're seeing the ripple effect in terms of the significant increase in terms of the population of people who are experiencing homelessness. So it's an immediate shelter need and it's then the ongoing, how do we address homelessness in our community? And also wanna highlight what we're hearing a lot about is mental health needs and substance use needs, that this event is similar to, raid happening in a community and disrupting connections in terms of people getting the substances that they use. And also hearing from the surprise has been that we're hearing about mental health issues not from mental health providers, but from select board members and town managers who are seeing the impact that each time it starts to rain, the anxiety is going way up for folks. And so we're looking at how we can bring mental health and also medical resources to people who are not wanting to leave their residences. And so bringing mobile units to people because we're hearing that people are not willing to leave their location and not willing to go to supply centers in their community or to shelters. And last thing I just wanna give a shout for the Hardwick community working with their town manager. They are in Caledonia County, which was not identified at least initially as a disaster community by FEMA. We understand that's gonna be reviewed and hopefully will be changed. Yesterday they also were expecting a FEMA truck in their community and that did not show up. And just hearing sort of the impact in terms of feeling like left out and lost. And so I think Sarah and others mentioned the disparities between communities and all it takes is one or two pieces of information or one or two actions or events that don't happen and a community can feel really lost. So I just wanna raise up Hardwick as a community that's looking for support and feeling like they're falling off people's list right now. Thank you. Thanks for that, Greg. And just to acknowledge Greg and Nicole both and others, it's just so, I just wanna acknowledge openly with this group, there are many sides to this, to what's going on right now. And it's, of course, housing, infrastructure, cleanup, all these things are critical immediately but also just acknowledging this other side of mental health and how are our communities doing? How are we the future wellbeing of our communities? I just wanna make space in this conversation for that too, it's an equally important but really challenging piece. So thanks for highlighting that. Let's go to Wendy next and then Catherine. Hi, Wendy. Good morning, everybody. I just wanna first thank all of you for your passion, time, commitments, everything you're bringing to this disaster and the way you're helping your neighbors. My viewpoint is more at the 20,000 foot level because I'm on the backend really trying to pull together resources and information and help coordinate the flow of information across communities. I just wanted to jump on here so it doesn't get buried in the chat but if you are actively coordinating mutual aid in your community, I would love for you to send me whatever Google Docs, spreadsheets, sign up forms, et cetera that you're currently using so I can centralize that information. And then Jason, cover your ears for the purpose of the amazing local resource. However, the Facebook page has almost 8,000 members. We have a team of six illustrators approving every minute requests are coming in and the more precisely we can direct them back to a precise resource and a person who can help them volunteer, bring donations, provide supplies, whatever the case may be that is very helpful. So I'll drop my email in the chat. If you can email me any of those links so I'll upload them into a central place. I know I will probably put it back too and get back into the resources of this public. Thanks. Great, thank you. Can I just take a second to give a virtual round of applause to Wendy for a second, for all that you just jumped in. You didn't have to be playing this role in any way. Just thank you for that time. I know having done some of it during early days of COVID it's a lot of work and I know, and it's mentally and emotionally challenging too. And so just thank you for that and for sharing the resource. I said I'd go to Catherine next and then I see Sarah's hand up after that. Yeah, I'm with the Vermont Rural Water Association. We help drinking water, wastewater facilities around the state. And there's a mutual aid network within the water and wastewater community and we're seeing the same sorts of things that the first speaker mentioned where there's lots of offers for volunteers we even have offers of workers from out of state. But even though there's been a lot of water and wastewater facilities impacted there's not many requests for that aid. So I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on why we're not seeing many requests why folks aren't taking that up. I think maybe Liz mentioned that there is a lot of mutual aid going on in the farm community. So I would be curious to know like, how is that successful and how can we get other mutual aid networks to be more successful? Thanks for that. So just to take up that question for a second I do wanna when we shift to thinking more about what we hope to see I'm making a note of this Catherine cause I will say these conversations during COVID very similar concerns about these mutual aid efforts a lot of offers and not a lot of needs to match up to. So I do wanna talk about that a little bit as we think about what we wanna see for the future but really quickly I'm curious to know what others are seeing are you seeing a similar pattern? Is it different this time? Maybe some stories about what's working to make those connections. Sarah, do you want me to go to you or do you wanna hold it if others have it? Okay. Sultana, it looks like maybe you have a direct response to Catherine's comment and then we'll go to Sarah. Yeah, I think there's two responses that I have to this. One is that there have been a lot of out of state folks coming to offer help who are incredibly organized. And so I wanna name that like a couple of the organizations that showed up within 24 hours to be helpful who are FEMA certified have been like the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief Organization showed up immediately, we're on the ground they're FEMA certified, they came in, they looked over things and so there's a level of organization and disaster preparedness for outside organizations that are coming in and doing things that meet immediate and specific needs for natural disasters. So that's one response that I would say they were in my inbox within 48 hours. So that's one thing. The other thing that I would say is that like for our organization, we had decision fatigue really early on about what could be done. So there was so much to be done that it took us, we have like incredible leadership that had a list of things to be done but there was so much to be done. It was so overwhelming that we were doing a lot of things internally just because to be able to coordinate with volunteers outside of our organization to be asking people to do things for us was more work for us than it was for us to just do it ourselves. And so, we've now transitioned to having like an externally facing document that just says here are all of our needs for this day. If you can do it show up at this time, here are all the items that we need. If you can provide this, please write your name, please label it with your name on it, drop it off at this time just because we're so strapped for capacity that organizing people to show up and we have so many people calling us to say how can we be helpful, what do we do? And that required so much more effort from us to organize volunteers and to have people come help us than it did for us to just take on the work ourselves. So there's some like organizational skill development for us that we're realizing as like how do we mobilize people in a way that's actually less effort for us than it is for us just to do it ourselves. Okay, thank you. Do others have comments on that topic of kind of how to identify and engage with folks that may have needs? And also I just want to acknowledge in the chat, I am seeing the needs there around educational materials and materials on health, especially long-term impact. So just noting that that's a need that I'm seeing there. Sarah, I want to go to you first. You had your hand up and then, and I think, I don't know if it's Sharice. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but let me go to the next person. Go ahead, Sarah. Yeah, I'll be brief. One of the things that I was seeing in the chat and also that we identified day before yesterday in an interesting conversation between Vermont Housing Conservation Board, Vermont League of Cities and Towns and then VCRD was really this navigator role, right? To help people to, you can do all the resource providing. You can assess all the impacts, but then there's the, how do you get across the table through the paperwork to the other side, right? And there's a need for that navigator role in some cases. And I think Martha's example was a great one. There are communities that are asking for help from like retired town managers, because town managers often have that municipal experience to be able to write a grant or get through that paperwork. And we were talking about like a network of retired town managers that we could tap into going forward sort of like score for businesses, but have it be from municipalities, right? But the other thing that I think is important is that the job of many of these first responders is to provide the resources, right? The job is not to fill out the forms and that that is one of the systemic gaps that really exists, right? So like my staff support people in filling out forms. Absolutely, I'm at half staff and I have been for eight months, right? So like in an emergency, it's not that we get all of a sudden a whole lot more staff. What we get is an enormous surge of more applications. And the same thing happens with FSA, with SBA actually does get more staff. So their loans are actually processed with disaster teams, but it is the bubble of that. Like how do you get through the paperwork? How do you have people help you to gather the documents you might need and imagine if your documents are gone because you're in a home that has been washed out or you can't reach them? That's one of those systemic gaps that I feel like we do the food and the water and some of that other stuff really well, but that I will sit with you and case manager paperwork piece is a piece that we could work on how we figure out and how we respond to because I don't think given the way our society works, I don't think we're gonna get away from the paperwork. I don't think forms are gonna get less, right? There is always an eligibility check for a lot of the taxpayer dollar relief programs. And so that is one of those roles that I think is really critical. We can always hope, yeah, I like that. I'm trying to follow the chats at the same time. We can always hope, absolutely. And that's a fight in Congress, which is not worth the time right now. What we need right now is people who are actually gonna support in terms of that navigation. So anyway, one of those concepts of a gap that I think we're seeing. Yeah, thanks Sarah. And I'm curious, I believe I've seen examples at least in little pockets of that kind of support for application help. And I'd be curious if anyone wants to chime in and share examples of what they're seeing. I think I've seen examples of that, at least at the kind of local level. Is it Cherise, correct me if I'm saying that wrong? Hi, it's Cherise and I actually didn't put up my hand. I think somebody volunteered me to put up my hand and I'm curious who that was. So do you have something you wanna share or no? I didn't put my hand up. I was content to be typing in the chat. Okay, a different version of you has your hand up. While I'm here, I've been coordinating with a group, a national level crew called Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. And there's some folks in the chat who've been putting resources from that group in the chat. And just so you all know that that's there. And it's a national work that's been funneling resources towards Vermont since day one. Well, that's super helpful. I'm glad that you accidentally had your hand up and could share that. It sounds like a really important resource. So thanks for sharing that in the chat. Jason, your hand is up. Great, thank you, Jenna. I just wanted to offer a little bit of context about reach, because I think it's super important. While Mutual Aid, from one community to another, is critical, the foundation of Mutual Aid is always neighbors helping neighbors, especially in disasters like this where the disaster is spotty. People along rivers are incredibly hard hit. People who live up on hills, in many cases, have little to no impact. And we've been seeing a lot of neighbor to neighbor offers and requests and offers for help on Front Porch Forum. And one thing I wanted to emphasize is the importance of those messages reaching a lot of people in a given local area right away. So for instance, in Berry City and Berry Town, Front Porch Forum has 6,200 members. In Hardwick, we have 2,500 members. In Cambridge, we have 4,000 members. In Johnson, we have 2,000 members. All of these are very hard hit communities that are very actively using Front Porch Forum in a very localized way to help neighbors figure out how to help each other. And I'll share just one post that came in in Wolcott from somebody who posted and said, many of our neighbors in Wolcott Village, especially on School Street, had their basements badly flooded and some had flooded first floors. A thick layer of mud covers everything and their lives have been upended. There is great need for volunteers to assist with mud removal, yard cleanup, and many other urgent tasks. These folks are suffering from some very difficult circumstances. Many of us that are high and dry in the hills have an ability to help. Please help however you can. There were that same day and the next day, five responses on the forum itself, public responses. And I'm sure many, many more directly to that author or of people who are simply inspired to help because of the fact that in Wolcott, we have, I'm looking right now, nearly 900 members in a very tiny town. So that kind of very localized neighbor to neighbor outreach is critical. It's no substitute of course for the large scale response that's happening. They compliment each other, but I really think it's critical not to overlook the foundational importance of neighbors helping neighbors and of systems that help them do that. Great, thanks so much, Jason, for sharing that. I'm gonna come to you next, Emily. I wanted to quickly, I wanted to double check it so I knew that I wasn't wrong, but I wanted Alyssa on our team to share. Alyssa works for BCRD, but is on the select board in Waterbury. And they've done little pockets of, or is still in the works, this kind of application assistance. And so I just wanted her to quickly share what it is that you guys are working on in Waterbury. Yeah, I guess I would just say it's a bright spot and thanks to Sarah for highlighting really just that piece of like sitting with folks. And again, I'm seeing it in the chat, but it's really that piece of like, yes, there's the logistics of how you fill out a form but just sitting with folks to think through like, what do you have to do? We had a community member, who needed to copy and upload forms. And so we had a volunteer work with them for two or three hours at the library, not on the mechanics of how to fill out the form, but literally like, you need to scan this document at the copier, then the librarian's gonna email you a PDF. And I'm a young person who's very tech literate and able to help upload that into the FEMA portal for you. We're fortunate to have FEMA folks in town right now. So navigating, you don't want the blinds leading the blind and you wanna have, make sure that folks are realistic about the support they can offer. But I think the emotional piece of sitting with folks as they're navigating this and that's oftentimes immediately responding to flood response is really important. So it's just a way we're thinking about how we asked volunteers if that was a service they would be willing to provide. And I think we're thinking about matching that in kind of the more long-term recovery phase. Great, thanks, Alyssa. So I'm gonna call on Emily next. I do wanna just quickly, we've got about a little over 15 minutes left. And I do wanna shift. And some people already been sharing ideas for your hopes and strategies going forward, but I do wanna shift to start to think more about like what do you see as the need here? If you could have, if you envision the next couple of weeks of response or even in longer-term recovery, what do you think would be useful to communities, to you, to the state as we go forward together? What do you hope to see? So Emily, sorry if that's not getting directly at what you're gonna comment on, but wanted to tee that up. Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna, I wanted to respond to what Jason said. So, you know, I've been doing public information in Lamoille now for three years since COVID hit. I came in in the incident command and we had to come up with a system that was really effective for a rural community and not a rural town, a rural community, we're a county. And one of the things that's really interesting in a lot of our communities is the disparities that we've talked about, the disparities in being up a hill versus not, wealth versus not, you know, so we have a county where Morrisville was on a not even do not boil order, it was a do not drink order, like they had no water and a clergy member needed water to distribute to Morrisville and putting that out in Morrisville's front porch forum was not gonna be as useful as when it went out on Stowe's front porch forum. And what happened is Stowe started filling up jugs and driving to Morrisville and dropping them off at the church, you know, like it because we had this community-wide collaboration that we've had in place now for three years, that water library you guys heard about started literally with people in Stowe filling water jugs and driving to Morrisville and then eventually other towns. So one of the things we've learned with front porch forum is that the most effective thing in our communities is to have people in other towns knowing what has to go out because sometimes this town has, but that town doesn't. And we really try to, like our newsletter goes out to 600 community leaders around LaMoyle and then you see people reposting parts of it all over the place, all over LaMoyle. You know, this part is relevant to Johnson, this part is relevant to Stowe, this part is relevant to Hyde Park and it's been super duper effective to utilize that front porch forum network that way. So thank you, Jason. Great, thanks so much, Emily. So really shifting now to think about, you know, what's needed, what do you hope to see? How can we meet some of these emerging needs? We'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it Yon, Vanette? Yes, that's correct. Well, I hope everybody here realized this is gonna happen again. And when it does, it's going to be worse. And I don't say that as a doom and gloom person but simply as a practical matter, quite a bit of earth and rock has come down from the higher elevations into the rivers and has raised the river bottoms. And that's a process which I suspect has been going on since about 1830 when Vermont was heavily lumbered. And so you have accelerated erosion as a result of the removal of the forest cover 150 years ago. I would suspect that some of these rivers and streams that probably have a bottom elevation, 16 feet higher now than they were 150 years ago. So if you get another rainstorm, it doesn't have to be anywhere near as severe as this one. This one was what, nine inches of rain. You're going to get exactly the same flooding consequence the next time around probably with six inches of rain. I mean, I'm just picking some speculative numbers here. You don't have to go all the way to nine. And that's simply because the river carrying capacity is no longer there. So no one seems to want to focus on removal of the spoil that's sitting in the bottom of the streams. And there have been some half-hearted efforts back in the past along the White River. And the argument was made by various eco-activists that you would be disturbing the fish if you remove the spoil. Well, I think it's a bit silly. The fish are just going to go 100 feet away from wherever the dredging is going on. And then when you move to the next section, my guess is the fish will move back. So arguing that you're disturbing the fish and then having a multi-billion dollar disaster is a bit, in my view, kind of silly. You're going to have to get rid of the spoil out of the rivers. And then the second thing is you have to remember that there was a program that was constructed many decades ago from the downstream states, the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts. They put up quite a bit of money to build flood control dams on various rivers feeding into the Connecticut River. Those dams have been neglected and ignored. I know of one, I believe it's north of Waterbury where the reservoir is now so shallow that you could just walk across it. One of the waters is only four feet deep. Well, if you build a flood control dam and you allow it to fill up with mud 40, 50 feet deep, then you don't have any place for the water to go. And so you might as well not even have it because whatever rainstorm comes, you're going to just wash right over that and keep right on going. So there has to be some thinking in terms of restoring the flood control systems that have been installed and also to undo the damage of the last 150 years and all this spoil that's washed down into the streams and into the rivers. Otherwise it's just going to keep getting worse. You're going to go through this again five years down the road or three years down the road or maybe even next year. I want to make sure that we're getting to other comments but I just want to acknowledge the really critical thing you're bringing up for many reasons. One, because where we didn't acknowledge before, like there's all these different elements of what's happening and another one is that you're bringing up. Many people understand this could be a new normal, right? We're going to see this again. And that's scary and daunting. And I just want to kind of anyway, so just the point that that long-term resilience and recovery pieces is really critical going forward. See, Lydia, you've got your hand up. Hi, Lydia. Can you hear me? Yeah, okay. I know somebody before mentioned needing hope and I kind of wasn't sure whether to even say anything because I know so many people are experiencing the immediate needs and the devastating losses but a little tidbit of hope from Northfield. We were hit horribly in Tropical Storm Irene as I'm sure many people know. And as we're starting to discuss like long-term change and planning, one of the things that came out of the area where we lost 11 homes was a park that was designed to help mitigate flooding in the future, the Dock River Park. And I know that many people here feel that that park really saved us this time. So I hope that something like that project could be possible in more communities and might help more people. Yeah, thanks so much for sharing that. I think Northfield and there's a couple other communities that have shared some stories like that where some of those mitigation measures, they really saw working this time around, which is just great. So Carys is saying that somebody else may be on her link, which is why the hand keeps getting raised. Is somebody on that link that wanted to weigh in? Oh, Carys, this is Tyga. That was probably me. Sorry about that. No worries. I joined from, yeah, I joined from the link that you shared. This is not... Carys, I totally volunteered to talk about Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, which is great. Totally fine. This isn't... This was only relevant quite a ways back, but I just wanted to throw out, I'm Tyga Christie. I work for Vermont Emergency Management and have also been a bit plugged into Mutual Aid networks. And I just wanted to throw out that if people have volunteers who, if you have people or organizations contacting you wanting to do volunteer work, who you don't have the capacity to work with and organize, you can point them in the direction of the state's volunteer page, which is vermont.gov slash volunteer. And they can plug in there to state-level efforts to match volunteers with requests from organizations for volunteer labor. That's like everything at the state level. It is slower and less efficient than people locally on the ground working together directly. But if there are people who are beyond your individual organizational capacity to work with and you're getting those requests and wanting to direct them somewhere, that's a option. Great, thanks so much for sharing that. A couple, so we've just got a few minutes left. And I want to draw out a couple of things. One, I just want to make space that like, for people that I know it's hard sometimes to chime in on a big Zoom call like this, but if you haven't had a chance to weigh in or maybe if you don't know how to use the raise hand function, that's okay. You can kind of just like wave at me to let me know if you want to say some things. I want to give everyone a chance. And while you're thinking about it, I just want to pose the question too. This is maybe a little bit selfish on VCRD's part, but while we have you all here, I am curious, you know, there's a lot of comments here about kind of coordination and disparities between communities and kind of sharing of resources and needs. I'm curious to hear whether people think that there is usefulness in convenings like this. You know, VCRD's role as a convener across the state. We did a little bit of this during COVID. We did some of that kind of state federal resource connection with people on the ground, but we don't want to make assumptions about what, you know, what's needed or whether people want us involved in any way. So just curious, whether it's in the chat or out loud, whether there's ongoing kind of convening or resource collection needs. But other than that too, I would welcome any last comments people want to share about what you hope to see in the coming weeks. It's not something that they need. Anyone else have something they want to chime in with? Cynthia, go ahead. Hi, thank you. I think there is a lot of use in this kind of convening. Just the amount of information getting shared is tremendous. And I really am grateful that notes are being taken and circulated because I wasn't able to take notes on everything I wanted to take notes on. So thank you for convening this. Speaking as an individual remontor, not for my organization, I would say that something that I would, and maybe there already is something like this. So this is a question and a thought. I'm curious whether there are, whether as part of climate action planning groups or in other venues, whether there are watershed planning groups. And I'm also curious as to whether there are funds available for landowners, homeowners, to develop water management on their own properties that is effective and helpful to the whole watershed. So for instance, like even in a neighborhood, making that has water flow problems that are as well known only going to continue and get more extreme. Making French drains that actually hold water as opposed to just shunting water out to your street, which actually adds to the neighborhood burden. And I'm wondering if anyone knows what kind of planning is happening on that level. And if it's not happening, I think that would be a really helpful thing to happen. Great, thank you, Cynthia. And I'm gonna ask if people had, just with only a couple minutes left, if you have a quick answer to chime in or feel free to put information in the chat too in response to some of these questions or about whether that's happening, but if not noted as an idea that might be a need going forward. Jim, I wanna give you maybe the last word here unless anyone has one other thing to add in. Go ahead, Jim. Sure, this is actually meant to be a helpful tip is because there's been so much information in the chat and I know folks are gonna take notes. I wanna mention that there's a way for any of us who would like a copy of those exact, the whole chat. There are, if you look where you can enter something, at the very, very bottom of that box, there are a few icons and then there's three dots. If you press on those three dots and then hit save chat, when you leave, you will get a copy, just a straight up text copy of the entire chat. So I just wanted to make that as an easy thing. And then secondly, I've been trying to capture just, I know there's been a few other people trying to capture, so we're coordinating, but I'm gonna set up resource directory dot org and collate all this stuff. So that'll be one more, but right now it's, server isn't up, so add that to whoever and we'll just build that as a common place to aggregate all of these things. And thank you so much for doing this. Thank you, Jim. And thanks for that tip. I totally forgot that that's possible to do. Really appreciate that. People want that right away. I would love to spend the rest of the day with you all, but we do need to wrap with our time. A couple of things I wanna just mention really quick. First of all, I think our team needs to kind of convene and think about how we can be useful, but I think that it sounds like there may be some use in continued convenings and conversations like this. We're happy to do that. And so if you're on this call, consider yourself on a list to reach out to about future convenings if and when those happen. And please share that with others that are engaged. I know, especially right now, so close to the impacts of this storm, some people are probably out mucking out basements right now and not able to join this call and maybe over time can engage. So please share with your networks and find ways to bring folks in and we'll think about the way to structure these in the most useful way possible going forward. So more to come with the potential in that. I wanna mention one opportunity for tomorrow. And my colleague, Laura, will put some information in the chat, but she convenes a group of climate catalysts that are folks doing kind of climate, community resilience and climate economy work in their own communities. They're doing a session tomorrow of kind of a case consultancy workshopping and they're opening that up to folks like you all who are working on the ground. If you have kind of a specific challenge that you're working on and would benefit from a group of really smart, engaged, thoughtful people, reach out to Laura and we'll send it out over email as well so that you can join in that conversation and those folks welcome you into their cohort. I'm gonna turn it to Brian to close. Let me just say thank you all so much. Like I, this brings so much value to me at this moment. It's so challenging to see what's happening around the state that we all care so much about and knowing that people like you are out there doing this work on the ground, getting things done. I know it's so hard, but what an incredible gift that we can come together in this way and share. So just thank you for the time and for your leadership. And Brian, I'll let you close it out. Thank you, Jenna. And I think your words are just great. I've really been struck by the comments and the people gathered here how much people are already doing for one another and for their neighbor. This continues, I think, like as we think about kind of our changing climate. Maybe one last point to make. Everything you're doing for your towns and your leadership, it really matters. It is what is gonna make the state and federal response more effective if there is strong local leadership. Thank you for what you're doing. You will definitely hear from us both in the form of notes and in future convenings. And I look forward to connecting with you more. So thank you, everybody.