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Speaker 1:But I want to empower into encourage pastors that you are a part of our success. We we can't be successful from emergency management community, whether it's state, local, or Federal Emergency Management Agency. We can't be successful without themSpeaker 2:looking back to the 2017 hurricane season or this year is hurricane responses in Florida, North Carolina or even the current wildfire response in California while Fema was and certainly is part of the overall response and recovery effort. It was the nonprofits and faith based organizations that often provided the most direct and ongoing relief to surprise surprise, to know that when these massive emergencies occur in community, often it is the faith based and voluntary organizations that are there before, during and well after the event, providing shelter, food and helping the community get back on its feet. On this episode, Kevin Smith, director of the DHS Center for faith and opportunity initiatives joins the FEMA podcast for a conversation on how fema partners with faith based and community groups. Before, during and after disasters. We talk about how fema is looking to it's nongovernmental partners to help shape a national culture preparedness, but also to help make America more resilient in the face of disasters. So Kevin, when I look at the kind of mission that the center has, it seems like it's really are revolving around informing, consulting, collaborating and empowering faith groups and other community organization. Is there a fair assessment of what your office is tasked with? You know,Speaker 1:our mission of what our department does. That's exactly what the center does. I mean, but, but there's also another part of that in and that's really why the center was created across all the agencies were just one of 12 agencies or centers within government. And really, although we're there to empower, we're also there to find ways that government can do more to champion the efforts that faith based organizations do every day. Disasters are a critical time of need and there's no doubt about the power that those faith based organizations have during times of disaster, but they're serving everyday in communities. So there are many organizations that aren't in the loop of how to serve during times of disaster, but many of those are because they don't know how to integrate. So we want to look at ways that we can help champion the efforts that they're doing locally and empower them to do more and look at any rules that may be in the way because government may or may not be able to work with faith based organizations and whether that's perceived or actually real, we want to overcome those challenges because we know that faith communities empower local recovery.Speaker 1:We know that they empower every everyday service of everyday survivors. Volunteers to actually champion the long process of recovery communities. That's what our department is there for now. There's a lot of things we do missions tying into the strategic plan for Fema and all the things that we have, but ultimately down to that is to champion the work locally that's been done and find ways we can help empower them because there are force multipliers.Speaker 3:So That's interesting. I've never heard that, uh, that conversation about championing the faith based organizations. Those people that are close to the disaster survivors in their community that may have a resources to help those survivors, but maybe they don't really know how to plug into the larger operation or maybe is it a fair to say that sometimes they think a larger organization is coming in to help these people. So maybe we don't necessarily need to stand up.Speaker 1:That's exactly right. So let me, let me just give you a great example of this. And, and, and I learned this this year. Um, and I've always known the power of the faith community and I've also known the organization's because many of them run soup kitchens every day. They already see in serve in communities every day. So I was recently in new Bern, North Carolina and I got to go by where one of these big baptist kitchens was assigned at a local church. Uh, and while I was standing there working with the local Pat, uh, working with the feeding kitchen and talking to their guy that was organizing the blue hat that runs the southern Baptist disaster relief, I was talking to him and this guy comes up to me and he says to me, you know, who are you, what are you here for? And I said, well, I explained a little bit about what my role is.Speaker 1:I'm the center director with the faith and opportunity initiatives. Uh, and he kind of looked at me. He said, you know, I'm, I'm really glad I came here. You know, this is my church. And I said, Oh man, well thank you for all you're doing here. I said, kind of explained how you got this go and you've got a lot of cars coming in here. I usually don't see this many cars. I usually see like Red Cross or salvation army feeding units. Who are all these people that are coming here and picking up food. And he said, we learned in Hurricane Matthew, the people don't want to wait on the street for those Red Cross herbs that are coming around because you're not really sure where they're going to be or they don't really know where all the need is, but churches do and people come to churches for help.Speaker 1:So what he did is try to change the model. He opened it up not only to the salvation army, the Red Cross, it will go and hit pockets, but he also invited other churches to come to his church, received the food and take it back to places where he knows people are going to come and gather rather than trying to chase the need. They take it to places where people go for need everyday and look for council. And that happens in houses of worship. So that's how we can leverage and take them power, uh, or to empower the tools that are already there and maximize that reach into communities.Speaker 3:So talk a little bit about, from a female perspective, plugging that smaller operation into the larger operation about, uh, helping the community, helping the state. How, uh, how does that play a part in the, the larger recovery? Well,Speaker 1:center really should work ourselves out of a job because, um, we really aren't intended to supersede or, uh, or overstep in the local or even in the state rolls of coordinating disaster relief. So what we find ourselves doing is actually working within the mass care structure that already exists at local levels, so people that are already serving and maybe looking, using some data points of saying where are you actually serving and where are your deltas, where are your gaps in service? And then when we identify those are say, okay, what faith organizations may already be doing work that aren't tied into the system and how can we go and try and leverage those? And we just got through this, uh, this hurricane season when we were working with Hurricane Michael in the panhandle of Florida and I was able to sit down with the Salvation Army, the Red Cross and look at their mass care plan and we through our data points of where they were serving and what their need was.Speaker 1:And the truth is they would get tied to the major cities like in Panama City and up towards Tallahassee because there was so much need. And as you overlay that map, if you can visualize these big centers are clusters of service, you saw all these gaps of the rural communities that had just as many people in need. And what we did is use that mapping to say, how about we now take food and resources to those churches and see if they can fill in these gaps where we don't have to have another, uh, feeding unit come from Iowa to take care of a church that's already able to serve in their local community. And just a simple twist of looking at where those gaps were and taken advantage of existing resources in houses of worship. It changed everything for us. The state was then able to mobilize resources for them to distribute at those houses of worship that we're already serving in their community. Now we're able to get them more resources, not just give them to the big hitters, you know, like the Salvation Army, the methodist, the baptist, and convoy of hope. We're actually able to target some of the smaller churches that were unaffiliated, that's the power of the faith community and in we stand to work with local communities to help to find those and identify him and if we do pull them into the picture so that they know that they can be helped and not be limited to the resources that they have within their own, uh, restraints.Speaker 3:You talked a lot about championing the faith based efforts and then you also talk about the value that faith based organizations can bring to their community. What do you mean by the valueSpeaker 1:man? This is what's the one most exciting things about talking about what faith organizations and community based organizations do to help a community after recovery. And when you think of it, there's a lot of service going on, but there's actually a financial benefit to their community for the service that they do. And just for example, a volunteer, our, the work that a volunteer does on average is somewhere between 23 and $26 an hour. The case of water that you hand out or distribute during a time of disaster that is donated to you that has value and the policy was changed a couple of years ago to say we should be encouraging those relationships with those organizations and those donated resources, those who build that capacity for times of disaster that we championed those relationships, so the policy was changed that local governments can use the work that is being done by the voluntary organizations, by the faith based organizations to offset how much they pay back after a time of disaster and it's not, it's not small amounts of money. It can be as much as $30,000,000 that a community doesn't have to pay back. We have some great stories of previously a disaster where the total cost share of how much our community had to pay back after the disaster. They're 25 percent that had to pay back for the disaster costs.Speaker 3:So and and in federally declared disaster. There's a, there's always a cost share that's associated with the state and sometimes it's passed down to the community, right? So 75 percent of it is typically covered by the federal government, but then they're on the hook for 25 percent. So you're saying that those hours can go towards that 25 percent?Speaker 1:Absolutely, and those hours offset and one example in tornadoes in Joplin, Missouri offset the total cost share that 25 percent was offset by volunteer hours and donated resources. When you want to go into a community and talk about the value of integrating the faith based community, that's the story. You have power beyond what you even know by the work that you do. Now there's some paperwork that has to be done to help document that stuff, but quite frankly, I know our houses of worship already do that every day. They use it for grants for other little programs that they do for everyday service when they're serving the community. Resist a force multiplier for government across all programs specifically in times of disaster. Just capturing that information and sharing it with your local emergency manager can lead to a tremendous recovery benefit for your entire community and that's a story we need to tell them more often. And that's why it's one of the reasons we talk about the value of integrating the faith community and the value of faith partners engaged in the emergency management because you are a critical part of our recovery.Speaker 3:So like, let's take a step out of the disaster scenario and say, um, you know, I would suspect that there are just so many houses of worship in the United States. It's really difficult to outreach to every single one of them. So how, what kind of key partners do you work with to sort of conduct that outreach and start to prepare houses of worship for the eventuality of a disaster in their community? Uh, and think about how they can work to help survivors.Speaker 1:It's a great point because there are 344,000 houses of worship across the country. A lot of those are affiliated and we work with. Our major partners are denominations to reach out from the methodists. The baptists, you know, we have the seek the Muslim population, the Jewish population in all of their synagogues around the country. And we leverage those large partnerships. But we also count on, you know, state associations of ministerial councils and other groups that we can reach out to, but we also work at maybe your non traditional, not within the faith sector, but are tied to those faith sector. We have a Moa, a memorandum of agreement with the Naacp who is one of our lead partners in ensuring that service and we have voices out there in the community that can tell us where there's gaps in service and we hope to use those associations to identify additional houses of worship that may feel that they're not being included into our response or our outreach.Speaker 1:We also work with the Arp who is a great partner and identifying where there are vulnerable populations in the community that we may need to address or maybe we're not getting the resources that we need to in those areas. So we use those during times of disaster. But we also use it in times of a blue sky days. Uh, and we leverage as many of those partnerships as we can to identify as many of those 344,000 houses of worship. And let them know that we can support their efforts. That's on some level, it seems like such an overwhelming task. So what does a typical day look like for you? You know, there's a lot of business in DC and there's a lot of business in this, uh, in, in the office within DC. A lot of our time is built with conversations, convenings, webinars, outreach, outreach mechanisms, just the conference calls and engaging as many people as we can, um, and using those national partners that are here within the office to, to outreach.Speaker 1:But we also empower our regions through the 10 regions of fema across the country to continue to reach out in their communities. You know, one of those things of reaching these communities. I have a in my history of my, kind of my background, you'll know that I worked for three years with the national food bank network, which is feeding America now. And I'm really looking at how many houses of worship our member agencies have a feeding America food bank and leveraging that and reaching out to those partners to find ways to have voice into those communities. That's what we do on a daily basis. So an example would be, if I know I want to go to California, I'm not just going to roll the, pull up the phone book and look for houses of worship. What I'm going to do is look at our partners who see engagement with houses of worship every day serving in those communities because they're affiliated with others already.Speaker 1:They're already affiliated with a food bank. They're already affiliated with some ministerial association. So we maximize and leverage those relationships and that's what a day looks like for us, is identifying where we want to get the word to where we may see deficits in our outreach and we start to target those and, and go to either have a convening traveled to one of those locations to have a convening of faith leaders in the community, um, or just, uh, to make a conference call, pull them together so we have an opportunity to talk to them. Uh, and, and our, our job is not to go in and be the contact of emergency management for those houses of worship. Our job is to help facilitate the relationship locally and to their state and local emergency management community in blue skies so that when we turn that trigger in, a disaster does occur. We already have those relationships in place. That's where we want to work ourselves out of a job.Speaker 3:Is there also an aspect in there of sharing best practices? I mean, do you, do you operate as sort of a, you know, where you would think about a center of excellence where you're gathering information about how some faith based organizations are doing things well and then share them with others who want to get into the, uh, the approach to recovery.Speaker 1:You know, there's a reason I drop that story in a minute ago about the, uh, the, the Baptist church in new Bern, North Carolina because it is a best practice and we wouldn't know that if we weren't hearing from those disasters and hearing from, you know, what was successful, what was a model. So every opportunity I get to replicate that to talk about how that was successful. Um, you know, we look at stories of not just in best practice, but also we use examples of where there were points of failure in other tragedies as folks have tried to recover, we used their lessons learned so people don't have to go through those again. So you're absolutely right. We focus best practices, but we also look at learning from others that have gone through hardship so that maybe other houses of worship don't do that when there might be an active shooter situation or any of these natural disasters, man made disasters, however they fit all of the hazards. How do we look at learning from each other rather than all of us going through the same pain and struggles every time. And if we can be of counsel, that's why we want to be here.Speaker 3:So with that in mind, and thinking about sharing best practices and knowing that you don't necessarily work directly with a local pastor. Um, what, what advice do you have for a pastor who's thinking about their congregation? Who wants to help and who wants to start preparing them for severe storms or for maybe an active shooter situation? You know, what advice do you have a for that pastor?Speaker 1:I grew up as a pastor's kid, you know, I grew up in a with my father being a minister and um, there's a lot of stuff on their plate and they, whether they're working on the business of running a church or whether they're actually going out in a van and picking up people that are coming to their church, uh, it's an overwhelming job and I'm a huge champion of the work they do everyday and how hard that is. But sometimes they have the pastors will have this role of being kind of a peripheral if you will, a piece to emergency management or they see themselves as an outlier that may not be able to fit in with the emergency management community. And what I want to tell them is when I go to emergency managers and talk, how are you engaging the houses of worship?Speaker 1:They actually feel like we don't know how to get them in the door. We want them to be a part of this, but they, I can't get them to the table. And sometimes I feel like I'm a language translator to that local pastor to make sure they know they're not a peripheral part or something that's out there as an outlier. They are a significant part of our emergency management community because we can't reach the populations they can. So we want to champion their role in being the force multiplier in the community for whatever their mission is, as a house of worship that we give them the resources to do what they do because we can't reach everybody in a community. So I want to empower into encouraged pastors that you are a part of our success. We, we can't be successful from emergency management community, whether it's state, local or Federal Emergency Management Agency.Speaker 1:We can't be successful without them. So the integration is not, we're just asking you to come just to kind of, uh, pat you on the head. It's, we need you as an integral part of what we do. And that's preparing before the disaster, responding, deering and helping mitigate for the future. We hope they can help us bring messages to their community that helps their parishioners, their congregations become more resilient. They don't need to trust the guy that's an emergency management that they don't deal with every day. They want to hear it from their pastor on how they can be successful. So we talk about preparedness and we talk about things people can do to better prepare themselves for disaster by doing simple mitigation steps. Like maybe they're putting the right shingles on their house, maybe they're putting the windows in. We have resources to help guide them and we like to give those to pastor. So when people ask the question, they can get it from somebody they trust.Speaker 3:Kevin, you know the headlines. We've seen a number of acts of violence targeted towards faith based organizations. What kind of resources does your office provide to help those congregations prepare for what we hope will never be a reality but could be?Speaker 1:Yeah. Well first of all, our hearts continue to go out. We know that our houses of worship can be vulnerable targets. You know, houses of worship are meant to be open meant and inclusive that anyone can come and it doesn't matter what faith it is, it matters that they become vulnerable top targets because of our openness. So we, first of all, our website has some amazing tools on it and I want to share with you, it's a, you can go to faith-resources, uh, and you'll see some links on there, some training programs, but some of them is some self evaluation, some very easy steps that houses of worship can, can take to ensure that they're doing the things that are easy to ensure safety at their location. I mean, it doesn't mean that we're going to barricade doors. It doesn't mean that we have to put armed guards at the front of our building.Speaker 1:We don't have to these $50,000 security systems on the, on the building. There are some real easy steps that allow us to start talking to our congregations about what would you do in an, in a shooting situation? What would you do when you're after a shooting situation? Like, you know, some of the things that we want to prepare our congregations for us, if it does happen, it's a very small window of that, you know, five to seven minutes is what they say. Is that the time of a disaster like that occurring in a congregation, it's what happens afterwards. It's a most significant for how you recover from that, including when media shows up outside your door, when, how do you, how do you pull together your congregation and care for them while you have media trucks outside your front door and it looks complicated. It looks like it's this big arduous process that you're going to go have to go through, but really we just want you to engage in the process. We want you to start thinking about those things maybe a little bit differently and just try to take a few steps because in having those conversations, just having them alone will actually start to prepare your congregation for one of those scenarios. And we have some great resources. So I encourage you to go to that website and a to link it up. It's, it's faith-resources. It's got some great lakes on there. Some tools for you to help prepare your congregation.Speaker 3:Kevin know you have an incredible passion for this work. I mean, it is clear when I talk to you and hear some of the stories that you've experienced, that you, you really have a connection to these organizations and, and want to see them be successful in disaster recovery. Um, tell me a little bit about your background. How did you come to the emergency management? How did you find this as a, as a career path?Speaker 1:Well, that's a fine question. I was a failing. I'm failing meteorologists, amateur meteorologist who wanted a degree in meteorology. Um, but I don't know if you knew this, but back in the day when I was going to school, there was only a few opportunities to be immediate neurologist. So instead of doing that, I became a chemistry major, chemistry major. I'm a, that's a hard line of studies. And while going through that, I found myself in some, uh, in trying to work through college and become a chemistry major. And I kept finding myself in very committed work that took me away from my education and focused me more on the things that I fell into and those happen to be in the nonprofit world. And I love to tell the story that I'm a result of Hurricane Andrew and the state of Florida and the Salvation Army or army partnering together to better prepare for the next big hurricane like Hurricane Andrew.Speaker 1:And they put. They put together a grant that helped to build the capacity of nonprofit organizations. And uh, at a restaurant one night somebody came up and said, hey, you like whether you know the salvation army, why don't you come work for us and work in disaster work. That was in 1996. That's when I started into this job. And since that time have worked from a very local level in building capacity for nonprofit organizations, building the resilience of congregations, working with communities to build their capability, to respond to whatever that natural hazard. The next thing is. And while doing that, while I was preparing and helping get ready and many that are in the community of disaster response from the voluntary organizations that are active in disaster will tell you there's a small network of people who deploy to almost every event being they become of national significance.Speaker 1:It's why our community seems so small sometimes. So I had the opportunity to serve in some very challenging situations. My first response was in the, uh, value jet crash in the Florida everglades. So I got to see families that were trying to recover from just such an awful tragedy and then build into floods. And the Red River floods of 1997, 1999, the hurricanes a into the carolinas that were so devastating. Uh, and in many disasters in between, culminating with really I probably my two largest things is working in leading the efforts in nine slash 11 with the Salvation Army, uh, in New York City, uh, and ultimately responding internationally into Haiti and serving after the earthquake. So my passion comes from serving people, seeing how much work goes in at the local level. And knowing that if we can just help them provide them resources, we don't have to do the work, we don't have to tell people how to do it, they know how to serve the people every day.Speaker 1:And I coming into this position with the administrator, administrator long had a passion for the faith based organizations and said, how can we help to operationalize, you know, use our volunteer organizations, are faith based organizations to be our army on the ground, you know, to be our force multiplier. How can we take advantage of that? And we have so many tools that we were late in this department, this center has some great training resources. We have some great stuff online and I encourage people to go to our website and see that. But really we're, we're going to take it more operationalized it to reach out to those communities. Now. Use those tools to empower those organizations to reach as many people as they can. And if that means helping them for the everyday, then we're building resilience, not just our response capability. And that's where I come from. That's why I have a passion is I've seen it firsthand when our faith based organizations become resilient and resilient congregations, they can do so much more in recovery and it means that we don't have to do so much in response.Speaker 3:So administrator long has set forth a simple but ambitious strategic plan which we are actively marching forward on. And so with that in mind, um, where do you see the center going in the futureSpeaker 1:time to those objectives? The first thing is when we talk building a culture of preparedness. I've used this over and over even before I came to this positionSpeaker 3:is I should say the three objectives are there, simple build a culture of preparedness ready the nation for catastrophic events and then reduced the complexity of Fema. And that's, and that's it. Uh, and then there are, of course, there are objectives beyond that and your office has got to plug into so many of those objectives.Speaker 1:W We do the objective number one, building a culture of preparedness. It's Pr. It's, it's pretty key that our congregations represent with 344,000 faith based congregations across the country. Imagine if we could build resilience through preparedness in just those houses of worship. Do you know how resilient that makes our nation and quite frankly, to pastors around the country, they have a responsibility to care for them not just after the disaster, but care for them. Give them the tools that helps them prepare their congregation because what we want those congregations, each one is to check on each other within that congregation and once they can see that their congregation is ready and okay, then they can use that power of their congregation to go help another congregation or another location in their community. So they were going to build resilience. Just out of that culture of preparedness.Speaker 1:You know, we've got some stuff to do on a building, a getting ready for a catastrophic disaster and one of those things is leveraging the power of the organizations that do great work and that is within the faith community. It's part of who we are. So as we build that culture of preparedness, as we ready ourselves for catastrophic events, it means that we need to build those relationships with those houses of worship who are going to do that response. We need to give them the tools that's necessary and that's part of the center's directive is to help maximize the number of responders, the number of people that will play in the field during that catastrophic event so that we continue to build force multipliers in serving the community. It means we don't have to build more fema. It means we have to help encourage the capacity of the organizations that are already doing that work on the ground.Speaker 1:And the last thing is we talk about reducing the complexity of Fema. There's a lot of things we can do and you're going to see a lot of things coming about how we are going to try to make the rules easier and more facilitated for fema to support state and locals and ultimately recovery. But there's another key to that is the process isn't as complicated sometimes as we complicate it by how we tell the message of how you apply for assistance, how you get support from Fema. So what we're working with the houses of worship is to help make it easy for them to explain and hold the hand of their congregations as they apply and go through the fema process. If they have questions, we want to give them a conduit to ask the questions on behalf of their congregations to be an advocate for survivors in the community and our pastors have that reach. They're going to be asked the question anyway, so we want to give them the tools that makes it easy to hold the hand of survivors through the process of not just the fema resources, but the actual, the whole federal resources that are out there to help communities recover. That's the critical role of how faith based organizations will continue to fit within our strategic plan and help us to achieve resiliency and ultimately help each other recover as a community. ................
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