 Start us off the day. We're going to hear a little bit from Charma Bonanno from the Westin Playhouse To share a little bit about their experiences in Westin to kick us off. So thank you. Oh good. My clicker's here That's so awesome, but look it's already clicked. Good morning. My name is Charma Bonanno I'm from the Westin Playhouse Theater Company And I think the most important distinction that you should know is that there are two separate things the Westin Playhouse Oh good. It works. The Westin Playhouse is an historic building. The Westin Playhouse Theater Company are people, right? And I think that's Present for my story today You know like many of you in this room The Westin Playhouse Theater Company was greatly impacted by Tropical Storm Irene and in the days the weeks the months that followed The Westin Playhouse is on the village green in the middle of Westin. It's a town of approximately 550 full-time residents. It is a 300 seat proscenium theater. So a proscenium like the one that's here That was converted from a congregational church back in 1937 and a professional acting company was Brought in that summer under the guidance of Boston Conservatory's Harlan Grant for the very first time so a professional theater company Established in this historic building the building as it is today is Reconstructed after a 1962 fire in that fire all that Survived was what you see here. Was this facade? Oh, we're a little hazy there But in this facade with the Greek revival building The flood that following Tropical Storm Irene was the second major flood in this building Although with its back to the West River in Weston, which runs through the village. It has endured numerous minor floods On August 28th 2011 the Westin Playhouse Theater Company was in production of a world premiere musical called Saint X It was about the life of the author of the Little Prince Saint Exupy This the cast of this show had 11 actors and five musicians and Simultaneously on our second stage. We were presenting Annie Baker's three-person play the aliens on our second stage One mile north of the Playhouse on Vermont Route 100 The company also had other staff members on campus at this time artistic administrative technical Weston owns two houses used for company housing and we supplement in Supporting our visiting artists and staff with another that summer was about another 10 rented houses And because there's not that much rental houses in the town of Weston our company is spread out over in Weston in London Dairy in Ludlow surrounding towns As well. This is our 2011 company, so this is the summer company at the time of Irene some of these contracts had ended We were probably down by 30, but I estimate that the company was probably about 75 people when the storm hit in a town of 550 people That's a significant number for us Good so the Playhouse has a balcony off the back lobby Overlooking the West River and this picturesque waterfall that falls over the mill dam Ahead of Irene the National Weather Service anticipated three to seven inches of rain and Sustained wind speeds of 30 to 45 miles per hour and gusts of up to 65 miles per hour We canceled the Saturday evening performance and Sunday matinees ahead of the storm and Prepared the basement of the Weston Playhouse Which includes a 60 seat restaurant a 70 seat cabaret Dressing rooms orchestra pit prop shop. We prepared the these spaces for up to three feet of water but tropical storm Irene as we know shifted and We did not get the anticipated high winds and instead got almost no wind But 11 inches of rain. This is the back of the Playhouse building during the storm So not quite at the crest of the West River What we had was the the crest of the river came and backed up right over the windows of the basement so here's a different view and you'll see the balcony there with the columns and Just below that balcony are the windows down into the restaurant in the cabaret space so the river crested just above those above those windows and It jumped the banks of the river Obviously flooded the town of Weston and washed out Vermont Route 100 which passes the main thoroughfare through town So what happens in this moment the power goes out Cell phone service even on a good day is pretty spotty And we have 75 company members that are in our care at this moment So then managing director Stuart Duke assembled a handful of senior staff and sent them to all of the company houses to check on the residents How are they doing? How are they faring? Some people had to be evacuated others You couldn't get to because the bridge to their house was washed out, etc But eventually we got there we got into contact social media was a great help in that moment and Thankfully everyone was all right Let's see what we have here. So this is the entrance the outside entrance to our restaurant I'm not sure. This is quite high water. This was maybe after the rain slowed And of course it continued to go up at that moment And this is inside our restaurant after the flood you see good You see that the windows are we're completely pushed in so it wasn't even a matter We've added since then storm windows to block some of flood water that comes in But you see that it just pushed the window out of its way to get into the basement the high water mark in this area was about five feet and Interestingly, it's not just water that poured in as so many of you know it was river bottom that came in so What it left was? significant mud In the bottom of our basement it left inches of mud on everything And down into our this is our orchestra pit It's a swimming pool and that large object in the center is our baby grand piano floating upside down in the water The orchestra pit and new dressing rooms were put in at the beginning of that summer We did nine hundred thousand dollars worth of leaseholder improvements in the Western Playhouse and This was at the end of that summer So it was not a great day for us there and with those leaseholder improvements Lot of that work was done in a subbasement So it's even lower and that watermark was really at the ceiling in those subbasements And and so you may remember I said earlier we prepared for three feet of water We're not new to flooding, but this was beyond anything we did experienced and again. It was not just water It was mud we were in the middle of Producing so the basement was costumes props Wigs, you know all of which were put up high, but we're swimming and floating in water So there's the piano floating The piano was in pieces afterwards electric keyboards and the prop shop Was just swimming. It's many dollars worth of equipment as I'm sure you can appreciate in that moment and The next day what we experienced was an outpouring from the community And this is a common story around Vermont is It's residents and communities pulling together to help out institutions like ours in recovery So the next day it was like the cavalry arrived and dozens of community members in our very tiny community who were fighting Their own disasters at home came out to help us clean up We started pumping out water out of the basement the fire Department the volunteer fire department showed up with their pumper and actually pumped what mud and water out of the basement And so many community volunteers showed up to help us hose off So much looking like here. We are looking like the world's most disgusting tag sale Right on the green in the middle of a Weston This gives you a bit of the scope. I mean this doesn't include the the kitchen Equipment etc was all Down the down on the other side of the building But the amount of staff that we had on hand was key for our recovery also volunteers The Vermont Country Store, which is one of our best benefactors sent over Outdoor grills food staff and they cooked meals for those doing cleanup every day Well, we did it. We managed to reopen St. X just a few days later in sort of a concert version. We couldn't use most of these costumes in this photo were Destroyed at that moment, but we did a concert version on the stage just four days later Which was astounding it never could have happened without the community helping us to clean up in that way Meanwhile the Weston Playhouse staff the senior staff met every morning first thing they got together and Determined marching orders and assignments for volunteers and staff someone to coordinate though that work That happened every day and that varied from shoveling mud to hosing down furniture cleaning wigs cleaning clothing cleaning restaurant equipment Contacting the press Communicating with ticket buyers the state agencies insurance companies the outside world and all the time Ensuring the safety and comfort of our company members We were also blessed with a quick grant from the Ford Foundation, which helped us in recovery And We were the recipient of a Vita loan so monies came in right away to help reduce some of that renovation a Group of recent company members organized a benefit concert in New York City Where news of the flooding was on the front page every day if you recall Irene was supposed to hit New York so every newspaper in New York saved their front page to talk about the storm and then they had no story the Story was in Vermont so the newspapers in New York ran on their front page pictures of flooding every day in Vermont and This benefit really helped Capitalized on that press. This is where communication becomes so key in recovery But truly we were the most fortunate To be receiving Help from our community that was really what got up us up and running the fastest Obviously repairs continued over the next nine months or so in the Western Playhouse where we redid you know stripped everything down to the rafters sanitized everything to the ceiling and Rebuilt all that renovation, but there was absolutely no way without that quick community response That we would have been able to reopen our show So I know a lot of you have had the same sort of experiences and again our communities are our biggest strength in that moment and That's my story So thank you We're here to provide and I'm an archivist, so I'm all about context So we want to give you a little bit of a sense of how this network has come to be in Vermont and why it's maybe happening now my primary role as historical records coordinator is to Go about the state offering technical assistance to historical societies museums town clerks public libraries with history collections local history collections and other I've worked with some private individuals other places that have Stuff primarily historical records paper-based stuff And one of the things I found as I went around is there was a real interest in getting more training and Support around emergency preparedness and response Tropical storm Irene was still fairly fresh in people's minds even if they had not been directly affected as Sharma was in Western There had been Networks in the past in Vermont. There was a cultural heritage and art Their acronym was V chart if you think Vaktarn is awkward Culture cultural heritage and art recovery team and there are some folks in this audience who were part of the forum that they put on Ten years ago at the Billings farm to get that network launched. I wanted to Bring that network back to life and make it a bigger umbrella not just collections based repositories But to bring in other arts organizations performing arts organizations places where events happened Studio artists, how can we all together because this is not a big state. They're not that many of us And we want to try to make this a sustainable network. So we need more people involved and There also happened to be a funding opportunity available the performing arts readiness project had funding from the Mellon Foundation a cool $2.5 million worth of funding to support performing arts organizations in being better prepared for disasters like what happened in Western and We applied for Regrant from performing arts readiness to get a new network going We were successful and we decided we wanted to do a really intentional process. I Come from the stuff side So I approached the arts council and was thrilled to have Amy and Michelle say that they would love to join and Co-lead on this project and we decided we would use our funding to bring in a facilitator to really guide us through this process To not assume. I know anything about Vermont. I'm not a Vermonter. It came from Massachusetts and to really get some assistance in Identifying what it is this network might do Who we might serve and how we can make sure it's sustainable over time I'm so thrilled to see people in this audience that have been helping us with this process since we had our first meeting last November And I'm also Delighted to see people I don't know out here Who I hope will continue to be involved and be active and know and let us know how we can support you through this work Thanks so much for being here today And don't hesitate to talk to us Ask questions Participate give us your ideas and now a little bit more about what we're doing as A network and where we came from what our guide was Meg was our guide in part today's Gathering to formally launch the new cooperative disaster network is the culmination of 10 months of study Dialogue and leadership by a planning group of committed state agency staff and a mix of stakeholders from the arts and culture and emergency sectors in Vermont in Fact it is also the outcome of nearly two decades of pioneering efforts at the national level To catalyze a readiness movement through new community-based infrastructure So to contextualize the formation of that darn, I'd like to briefly Give you both a snapshot of the back story and the bigger story of network building now underway Over the past 20 years at the national level there have been two distinct strands of emergency management network building activity initiatives to safeguard collections and cultural property on the cultural heritage strand it Involved it would focused on protecting art artifact archives and other physical assets The focus of the other newer strand is protecting people and operational assets There has been some cross-fertilization between the two, but they've mostly been functioning in parallel a little bit more about the network building initiatives to safeguard collections in 2003 Heritage preservation launched the Alliance for Response program. It was a groundbreaking program to foster connections with and integrate cultural heritage institutions museums, historic societies, historic sites, archives, libraries, preservation groups and others into the emergency management infrastructure within a city, county, state, or region Over time 26 chapters were catalyzed including one in Vermont This program is now coordinated by the F A I C which stands for the foundation for Oh for advancement in conservation change the day change the acronym in 2007 F A I C itself began an outreach program to train and deploy a new volunteer network of conservators and other professionals For both online and on-site triage assistance for collecting institutions during and after a disaster Vermont based art conservator M.J. Davis was one of the lead trainers in this program, which is now called national heritage responders 100 responders were trained including a handful of Vermont professionals who have helped large Institutions and small throughout the country deal with floods fires, etc Turning to the network building initiatives for the creative community in 2006 in response to the devastation of hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the creative communities and creative economies of the Gulf Coast a Group of major arts funders including the national endowment for the arts other types of arts agencies and foundations and major arts services service organizations participated in a summit To address the lack of an organized safety net within the arts sector particularly for artists These 30 arts leaders had served as arts responders many for the first time and a few had a long history of emergency support such as the craft emergency relief fund or surf a National artist service organization based in Vermont Indeed the summit in DC was organized by surf in cooperation with Americans for the arts Surf which has evolved into surf plus the artist safety net is one of the few full-time Arts responders for whom emergency management is central to the mission From the summit was born a small voluntary national task force called and Caper which stands for the national coalition for arts preparedness and emergency response For the first ten years surf continued in a leadership capacity Including the management of several initiatives initially The task force focused on artists issues But soon realized that to accomplish systemic change it needed to adopt a more comprehensive approach the early discussions Were about artists issues, and then there was the recognition that it we really needed to adopt a more comprehensive approach because Disasters don't hit disciplines or types of stakeholders i.e. artists arts and culture organizations and arts businesses they hit zip codes and The arts and culture sector is really an ecological system where there's a deep Interdependence of all the stakeholders all the way from individual artists up to large-scale institutions From the discussions during the early years also emerged recognition of core problems Due to a variety of awareness gaps first creative communities are under prepared for emergencies Not only because they lack information specific to their operations, but they also lack an understanding of emergency management infrastructure Secondly creative communities are underserved by the general leaf providers when disaster strike because they lack awareness of our needs and Finally creative communities are under recognized by the Emergency management community as key agents and resources in post disaster community healing recovery and rebuilding The task force produced various policy and planning guides to address these issues The first was a blueprint to strengthen disaster safety and build a national readiness movement in the arts and culture sector Which was released in 2010 as a green paper for Americans for the arts 50th anniversary among the core concepts were the disasters are local in terms of their impact and recovery process and Building resiliency meant activating new communication and support networks within our sector that emphasize both local service delivery and mutual aid in 2011 the Coalition and produced a primer for managing arts relief Programs for novice arts responders The essential guidelines was actually a first step towards a bigger long-term initiative a Planning guide for developing an advance community-based arts emergency management systems The cultural Placekeeping guide was a seven-year project which I directed in my capacity of surf plus's director of special projects Working with arts emergency management specialist Amy Sir Amy Schwarzman surf plus produced a draft Publication called the arts responder handbook it drew on the initial vision vision outlined in the 2000 blueprint and practical information developed for the essential guidelines It went through a few iterations most significantly after being field tested by culture aid a Coalition of arts and culture groups who came together after Hurricane Sandy to do future disaster management planning in New York City The lessons learned from heritage preservation and FAAI sees efforts to build and sustain cultural heritage emergency Networks also influenced the final version of this new playbook for emergency planning at the community level As part of the revision process we all we decided to change the name And we coined the term cultural placekeeping to signal that it's a corollary of creative Placemaking a movement Promoting the central role of arts and culture in community planning and one that had gained Attraction in American cities and towns in recent years and secondly that it is a collective enterprise Which draws on existing assets social capital and social networks to safeguard and strengthen Local arts and culture communities So that's a quick overview of the back story now the bigger story What's significant about the creation of VAC darn Within the arts and culture sector it knits the two strands of disaster planning and coordination into a holistic network and Also from the get-go. It is being organized as a cross-sector Bridge building an education initiative between the arts and culture and emergency management sectors in Vermont Vermont is one of ten sites around the country integrating the cultural heritage heritage and producing presenting And service assets of their arts and cultural community into a more comprehensive Emergency management network six of these are already are expanding existing networks and Four are building new ones and as you can see from this quick list. There are different kinds of there in different kinds of geography There's an island there is a state. There are a couple states their cities This planning work as as Rachel said is happening through grants from the Performing Arts readiness project a National three-year initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to improve emergency readiness and recovery both at the organizational level and at the community level and Caper is one of the participating partners in this project But grants to foster cooperative disaster networks are only one component of a multifaceted Technical assistance project which encompasses new online preparedness materials webinars conferences and on-site trainings There's a very exciting development in California with the support from the California Arts Council par project staff including Jan Newcombe who is somewhere in the audience Hello To train staff of local arts agencies in network development in nearly all of their counties using the cultural place keeping guide So besides the ten networks around the country and culture aid What California one of the most disaster-prone states will have 20 new county level arts emergency action networks So we have the beginning of a community of practice Thus the initial vision spelled out in the 2010 blueprint is Beginning to take shape that is a nationwide network of community based readiness relief and recovery networks That address the full spectrum of specialized needs of our sector and are linked into the larger management Emergency management infrastructure But just to close out this quick overview of the significance of this network I want to say that in Vermont's changing 21st century economy for the first time Creative the creative economy is emerging from its minor position to being considered now as one of the state's major drivers However, concomitant with the growth of the creative economy are the increased threats of natural and man-made emergencies That could undermine its stability So the formation of back darn is timely and critical now more than ever. It's vital to have a mobilization System to keep our cultural community intact Great Meg Meg has really been such a leader in this work around the country and for such a long time And we just really wanted to have a sense of how we got to this day And my job right now is to kind of talk to you about how how we got to today working within the state I was thrilled to get a call from Rachel in 2018 to let me know about this opportunity to to work on this project. I grew up in Rutland, Vermont My I'm the I'm the baby of five. I'm the only one who moved away I by 91 year old father and 89 year old mother are still in Middlebury So I was very happy to have a chance to kind of come back I just have to interject and say you went to high school with Joseph Watson. I did and We discovered through this process that we were in bye-bye birdie together 1979 folks, maybe you maybe you saw it anyway Do we have the the slides that I? Submitted are they I don't Don't see anything coming up anyway But anyway, I got the call from Rachel to kind of come up in and working from this cultural place keeping guide that Meg Talked about we thought okay. It's time to design this organized safety net. Thank you for Vermont We've seen repeatedly as Sharma said You know artists and arts organizations and libraries playing these really important roles post disaster And this was really a time for us to kind of put our own mask on first To kind of prepare ourselves to move into that role in a more coordinated way And that's my kid at smirkus camp several years ago So using the place keeping guide it this guide is really tremendous Actually for this and kind of spells out a number of steps to take in all the things that you should think about and trying to Organize yourself to be better prepared working with Michelle and Amy and Rachel We set out to design a process that would use this as a guide but keeping in mind that this was a guide developed in New York City and in kind of a tight region and that we were Going to be looking at doing this statewide and we would need to adopt this for the way So that it would work in Vermont We also said about kind of identifying volunteers to help us in an organizing group to move forward on the effort so our first meeting was in the end of November and Barry hosted by Eileen Corcoran and We gave us a chance to meet each other to hear some stories other stories of people running cultural organizations Who've experienced disasters so we could kind of be grounded in reality To hear from Meg about you know kind of this movement writ large across the United States and to begin to kind of identify Our perception of risk what we thought were risks to the work that we did so we could understand what we thought was important in moving forward Our next step then was to again go back to the place keeping guide and think about what this network was going to do What were the actions that we thought needed to happen to motivate people to get involved and to really help increase people's preparedness? So using this as a guide we got together in March at the Bethel Town Hall and Went through a process to kind of brainstorm what those actions might be Working in these broad categories that were identified here whether they be research or advocacy or education and training We we worked to identify potential actions and also did Talked about what potential resources there were that might be already be feeling these functions This is a terrible slide But what happened after that March meeting was we took that brainstormed list and sent it out in a survey to this Organizing group and had them rank it give us information based on three things How how big a priority how important a priority that action might be how much impact they thought it would have if you could Sorry identify a grid, you know high impact to low impact and how much they thought it would cost We thought if we could identify high impact things that were of low cost That was a no-brainer but also to understand what might be more costly but important to do in terms of moving forward We took the information from that survey and brought people back together to then kind of try to hone in on the top 10 list of things that we thought was important for this network to move forward on we also talked about how this network would organize itself and we picked a name we went through lots of different Possible names, but we thought that this kind of incorporated a number of elements that again tied together this various elements of the Who would be participating and and what we intended to do as a group? And then again a slide with a lot of text, but I wanted to just throw this up here I'm not going to read it, but these were kind of the top 10 Actions that were identified by that group that was working and we use this as a guide to kind of set up today You know so that there would be some practical hands-on things there would be ways for us to build Relationships there would be ways for us to learn about some of the existing resources in Vermont We'll come back to this and part of the thing of the network development is we want to hear from a broader community too in terms of What's important to you, but this is kind of our our operating framework moving forward in trying to figure out How we can be most helpful to each other both to prepare and in responding in terms of any potential Activities or disasters natural or man-made that will come up so That's kind of how we got to today I think we have time for maybe one question because it's 943 one or two questions If not, we will move in to hearing from Jen new come We're gonna yes here Wait, yeah We have a microphone And please if you could say your name and if you're affiliated with an organization let us know all right my name's Richard Doolin I'm with the Randolph school district I'm also the emc for the town of Randolph and Excuse me logistics for a brain tree the EOC's So the question is the information that you have up here. How can we obtain it and also? Do you have like a listing of before storms? What should we do as a community to safeguard our town halls our museums and etc? Do you want to respond to that sure? I think we don't yet have a place where this information will live But one of the priorities that came out of our discussions was having inevitably kind of an online presence where resources would be available supplemented with a lot of hands-on training and and on-site walk-throughs assessments and Identification of how to how to work together is it how to build a team and how to work together as a team within your community So that's I'm glad that's what you want and that's one of the things we're hoping to provide And I and I do think can we make sure that the people who are attending today get the slides from presentations? We'll check with the speakers to make sure that's okay, but certainly you know we can distribute this