Sunday, September 25, 2011

Black Male Initiative. Whole Community Approach.

·        HBCU Conference.  19-20 September 2011. 
o       Breakout session:   ‘Black Male Initiative’.  Interesting note of number\percentage of black males currently incarcerated or considered ex-offenders. 
Noted positive (college, military, employment), and negative (death, prison, unemployment) options presented by Dr. Ronald Williams (Pres. Southern Univ. System).  
§         Question(s) 
·        Can we as African-American emergency managers and members of BEMA contribute to each of the positive options, and reduce the negative options available to black males?
·        Can we as African-American emergency managers and members of BEMA contribute to providing a platform whereby we promote a ‘whole community’ approach to emergency management in the African-American & all communities by advocating FEMA EMI, CERT, and SERT (Student Emergency Response Team) training to ex-offenders on reentry programs? 
·        Can we provide a method where ex-offenders reenter\return to their communities with a skill that would contribute to community embracing them?
·        Can ex-offenders contribute to the planning, preparedness, short & long term recovery of the community following a disaster event (man-made, natural)?

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Community Participation. Mitigation Grant Funding

http://www.nyalert.gov/Public/News/AllHazPRView.aspx?notID=3495484&refer=HOME&source=RSS&messageID=AghxO4T6A&
Those Concerned About Hazard Mitigation in their Community Encouraged to Contact Local Government

Issued By: NYS - Division of Homeland Security & Emergency Services
Issued On: 09/09/11 12:08 PM
Affected Jurisdictions: New York
Category / Publication: Press Release - General
 
The New York State Office of Emergency Management encourages property owners who have questions about hazard mitigation measures in their community to contact their local government officials.
The State Office of Emergency Management administers five FEMA hazard mitigation programs in New York State.  Hazard mitigation involves long-term actions taken to protect lives and reduce the impact of disasters on the built environment (i.e., roads, bridges, buildings).
Mitigation measures must be technically feasible, cost-effective and environmentally sound, and each of FEMA’s mitigation programs requires that:
  • Applications must be sponsored by a unit of local government, or a private non-profit (PNP) agency that provides a government-like service.  Individuals and businesses are not eligible applicants, although eligible applicants may apply on their behalf.
  • With few exceptions, eligible applicants must have prepared and adopted a FEMA-approved hazard mitigation plan (or have participated in a multi-jurisdictional planning effort and adopted the resulting FEMA-approved mitigation plan) to access FEMA hazard mitigation funds.
Interested homeowners and businesses are encouraged to discuss these programs and the status of local mitigation planning efforts with their local government officials.  More information about the programs and their specific requirements is available in FEMA’s Grant Program Comparison Guide: http://www.dhses.ny.gov/oem/mitigation/documents/FY2009-Comparison-Guide.pdf.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Free college credits: http://training.fema.gov/IS/crslist.asp

http://training.fema.gov/IS/crslist.asp

Free college level credit!
Get a Homeland Security & Emergency Management Curricula, Community or Student Emergency Response Team (CERT\SERT) on your Campus.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Open Meetings and the FOI

So now you really want to get involved in how emergency management practices are being conducted in your jurisdiction using your subject matter expertise, and concern for your community.

            What public meetings am I able to attend?


             Can I be restricted from attending?


             What if I have question to put before the meeting, if 
              the meeting is open for question or comments?

The first two question will be answered by the information provided below hopefully.
The third question shall have to be answered in an upcoming blog.


    

If an informed citizenry is to meaningfully participate in government or at least understand why government acts affecting their daily lives are taken, the process of decision making as well as the end results must be conducted in full view of the governed.
Oklahoma Ass’n of Municipal Attorneys v. State, 577 P.2d 1310, 1313-14 (Okla. 1978)

The Open Meeting Law Reference for all 50 States
Open Meeting Laws 2d
by  Ann Taylor Schwing


The publication of Open Meetings Laws 2d is sponsored by
International Municipal Lawyers Association (IMLA)


Open meeting laws apply principally to public, collegial, deliberative bodies, that is, bodies that meet as a group for deliberation and decision making. A key consideration in determining whether an entity is subject to the law is the public nature of the work it does.

Additional considerations include the extent to which the entity is supported by public funds and the extent to which the entity has the power to bind the State or a political subdivision of the State. As a general rule, a public body cannot escape open meeting requirements by delegating duties or powers to other entities or persons.

Open meeting laws may be applied to private entities when necessary to further the public policies of the open meeting laws.

Examples include:


FYI: Emergency Plans from Jurisdictions. Freedom of Information Act

Have a homeland security or emergency management question for your community that requires public documents or records that are not readily available?
Need to review the emergency or contingency plans for your community? 
Need to know how much funding has been provided to other communities within your jurisdication for emergency management planning, training, exercises, and long-term recovery?
Need to know what that funding is being spent on?
Key research may lay in obtaining and reviewing public documents that may be open to the public, or requested based on the Freedom of Information Act for federal, state, city, and local jurisdictions.

WHAT IS FOI?

Enacted in 1966, The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a federal law that establishes the public's right to obtain information from federal government agencies. The FOIA is codified at 5 U.S.C. Section 552.

"Any person" can file a FOIA request, including U.S. citizens, foreign nationals, organizations, associations, and universities. In 1974, after the Watergate scandal, the Act was amended to force greater agency compliance. It was also amended in 1996 to allow for greater access to electronic information.
Freedom of information legislation comprises laws that guarantee access to data held by the state. They establish a "right-to-know" legal process by which requests may be made for government-held information, to be received freely or at minimal cost, barring standard exceptions.


Also variously referred to as open records or (especially in the United States) sunshine laws, governments are also typically bound by a duty to publish and promote openness. In many countries there are constitutional guarantees for the right of access to information, but usually these are unused if specific support legislation does not exist.

FEDERAL & STATE FOI Requests

The Act applies only to federal agencies. However, all of the states, as well as the District of Columbia and some territories, have enacted similar statutes to require disclosures by agencies of the state and of local governments, though some are significantly broader than others.

Some state and local government agencies attempt to get around state open records laws by claiming copyright for their works and then demanding high fees to license the public information. 

The ruling in Santa Clara v. CFAC will likely curtail the abuse of copyright to avoid public disclosure in California, but agencies in other states like Texas and New York continue to hide behind copyright.  Some states expand government transparency through open meeting laws, which require government meetings to be announced in advance and held publicly.

WHO DO I MAKE MAY REQUESTS TO?

The FOIA applies to Executive Branch departments, agencies, and offices; federal regulatory agencies; and federal corporations. Congress, the federal courts, and parts of the Executive Office of the President that function solely to advise and assist the President, are NOT subject to the FOIA.

Records obtainable under the FOIA include all "agency records" - such as print documents, photographs, videos, maps, e-mail and electronic records - that were created or obtained by a Federal agency and are, at the time the request is filed, in that agency's possession and control.

Agencies are required by FOIA to maintain information about how to make a FOIA request, including a handbook, reference guide, indexes, and descriptions of information locator systems. The best place to get this information is on the agencies' websites.

Doing research to determine the right office to send the FOIA request to within the right component of the right agency will make your FOIA efforts more productive.

Resources

For information on obtaining federal and state FOI contact,
     National Freedom of Information Center: 
http://www.nfoic.org/

For information on obtaining local city FOI information your local news agency, or publication would have a mulititude of information on procedures for obtaining this information

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Cultural_Competency

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Competency

Cultural competence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (Redirected from Cultural Competency)
Cultural competence refers to an ability to interact effectively with people of different cultures, particularly in the context of human resources, non-profit organizations, and government agencies whose employees work with persons from different cultural/ethnic backgrounds.

Cultural competence comprises four components: (a) Awareness of one's own cultural worldview, (b) Attitude towards cultural differences, (c) Knowledge of different cultural practices and worldviews, and (d) cross-cultural skills. Developing cultural competence results in an ability to understand, communicate with, and effectively interact with people across cultures.[1]

Contents

Background

To understand cultural competence, it is important to grasp the full meaning of the word "culture" first. According to Chamberlain (2005), culture represents "the values, norms, and traditions that affect how individuals of a particular group perceive, think, interact, behave, and make judgments about their world" (p. 197). Taylor (1996) defined culture as, "an integrated pattern of human behavior including thought, communication, ways of interacting, roles and relationships, and expected behaviors, beliefs, values,practices and customs." Nine-Curt (1984) qualified culture as, "The bearer of human wisdom that includes a wealth of human behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, values and experiences of immense worth. It also carries things that are offensive to a person's dignity and well being, and certainly to others whose cultural framework is different."

Cultural competence may also be associated with diversity and from an organizational communication perspective, a diverse culture. Diversity must be prevalent and valued before one may be considered culturally competent or diversity competent organization. The term diversity has evolved to include concepts focusing on organizational culture and the intersections of power, structure, and communication[2] all of which may contribute to diversity initiatives or potentially impede them. Diversity initiatives are typically part of a more human resources management approach which not only seeks employee input but also values it; differences are recognized as a uniting component rather than a separating one.[3] Since diversity is an ambiguous term grounded in context, it does not necessarily mean the same thing to all the people all the time. Diversity encourages the process of including the perspectives of under-represented, non-dominant groups in organizations to ensure they have a voice (Orbe & Spellers, 2005); however, Von Bergen, Soper, & Foster(2002)[4] argue that the dominant group must also be part of the diversity initiative or an “us versus them” mentality becomes entrenched in the organization impeding the effectiveness of any diversity initiative, thereby delegitimizing it.

While a few individuals seem to be born with cultural competence (reference needed), the rest of us have had to put considerable effort into developing it. This means examining our biases and prejudices, developing cross-cultural skills, searching for role models, and spending as much time as possible with other people who share a passion for cultural competence. The term multicultural competence surfaced in a mental health publication by psychologist Paul Pedersen (1988) at least a decade before the term cultural competence became popular. Most of the definitions of cultural competence shared among diversity professionals come from the healthcare industry. Their perspective is useful in the broader context of diversity work.
Consider the following definitions:
  • A set of congruent behaviors, attitudes and policies that come together as a system, agency or among professionals and enable that system, agency or those professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations.
  • Cultural competence requires that organizations have a defined set of values and principles, and demonstrate behaviors, attitudes, policies, and structures that enable them to work effectively cross-culturally.
  • Cultural competence is defined simply as the level of knowledge-based skills required to provide effective clinical care to patients from a particular ethnic or racial group.
  • Cultural competence is a developmental process that evolves over an extended period. Both individuals and organizations are at various levels of awareness, knowledge and skills along the cultural competence continuum.
It is not surprising that the healthcare profession was the first to promote cultural competence. A poor diagnosis due to lack of cultural understanding, for example, can have fatal consequences, especially in medical service delivery. Cultural incompetence in the business community can damage an individual’s self esteem and career, but the unobservable psychological impact on the victims can go largely unnoticed until the threat of a class action suit brings them to light.

Notice that some definitions emphasize the knowledge and skills needed to interact with people of different cultures, while others focus on attitudes. A few definitions attribute cultural competence or a lack thereof to policies and organizations. It’s easy to see how working with terms that vary in definition can be tricky.
Can you even measure something like cultural competence? In an attempt to offer solutions for developing cultural competence, Diversity Training University International (DTUI) isolated four cognitive components: (a) Awareness, (b) Attitude, (c) Knowledge, and (d) Skills.
  • Awareness. Awareness is consciousness of one's personal reactions to people who are different. A police officer who recognizes that he profiles people who look like they are from Mexico as "illegal aliens" has cultural awareness of his reactions to this group of people.
  • Attitude. Paul Pedersen’s multicultural competence model emphasized three components: awareness, knowledge and skills. DTUI added the attitude component in order to emphasize the difference between training that increases awareness of cultural bias and beliefs in general and training that has participants carefully examine their own beliefs and values about cultural differences.
  • Knowledge. Social science research indicates that our values and beliefs about equality may be inconsistent with our behaviors, and we ironically may be unaware of it. Social psychologist Patricia Devine and her colleagues, for example, showed in their research that many people who score low on a prejudice test tend to do things in cross cultural encounters that exemplify prejudice (e.g., using out-dated labels such as "illegal aliens" or "colored".). This makes the Knowledge component an important part of cultural competence development.
Regardless of whether our attitude towards cultural differences matches our behaviors, we can all benefit by improving our cross-cultural effectiveness. One common goal of diversity professionals is to create inclusive systems that allow members to work at maximum productivity levels.
  • Skills. The Skills component focuses on practicing cultural competence to perfection. Communication is the fundamental tool by which people interact in organizations. This includes gestures and other non-verbal communication that tend to vary from culture to culture.
Notice that the set of four components of our cultural competence definition—awareness, attitude, knowledge, and skills— represents the key features of each of the popular definitions. The utility of the definition goes beyond the simple integration of previous definitions, however. It is the diagnostic and intervention development benefits that make the approach most appealing.

Cultural competence is becoming increasingly necessary for work, home, community social lives.
Reprint by permission. Reference: Mercedes Martin & Billy E. Vaughn (2007). Strategic Diversity & Inclusion Management magazine, pp. 31–36. DTUI Publications Division: San Francisco, CA.
Nine-Curt, Carmen Judith. (1984) Non-verbal Communication in Puerto Rico. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

History in American Ethnic Studies

The United States in its earliest history had a culture influenced heavily by its Northern European population, primarily from the British Isles, who originally settled in the original British Colonies. While the indigenous peoples, known as Indians, were the largest population of North America, they were slowly pushed away from the Eastern Seaboard into the interior of North America during the 17th century, 18th century, and 19th century (see Indian Removal Act describing specific actions during early 19th century). During this period, people from the British Isles (England and Scotland primarily) brought the culture and religion of the British Isles with them to the United States and became the dominant political and cultural group along the Eastern Seaboard of North America.

Both voluntary immigration from other regions as well as the results of the Atlantic slave trade, brought a mix of people to the Americas, including Europeans, Africans, and, to a lesser extent until the 20th century, Asians. Thus began the process of diversifying the population of the Western Hemisphere. While the majority of the U.S. population were white immigrants from northern and western Europe and their descendants, they maintained most of the power, social and economic, of the nation.

In the U.S. context, immigration from the 1840s onward diversified the ethnic composition of the nation. During the early part of the 20th century, southern and eastern European immigrants and their descendants became a larger percentage of the population, but as recent immigrants concentrated in urban areas were also very often poor and lacking in basic healthy living and working conditions. Descendants of African slaves and immigrants faced a much more difficult challenge due to their skin color and discrimination enforced by legal systems, such as the Jim Crow laws in the United States. Since the 1960s, African Americans as well as other minority groups such as Mexican Americans have gained greater social and economic status and power.

Nonetheless, the dominant models of education and social services retained models developed by northern and western European intellectuals, even such well-meaning and important reformers as Jane Addams and Jacob Riis. After the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, though, social workers, activists, and even some healthcare providers began to examine their practices to see if they were as effective in African American, Latino, and even Asian American communities in the U.S. The arrival of more than half a million Southeast Asian refugees, from 1975 to 1992, for example, tested the ability of medical and social workers to continue effective practice among speakers of other languages and among those coming from very different understandings of everything from mental health to charity.

Cultural competence in US Education

With the larger population of minorities and racial integration during the 1960s and 1970s, the public school system of the United States had to grapple with issues of cultural sensitivity as most teachers in public school system came from white, middle class backgrounds. Most of these teachers were educated, primarily English speaking, and primarily from the Western European cultures. They often had trouble trying to communicate with speakers of limited English proficiency, let alone people of vastly different value systems and normative behaviors from that of Anglo-European culture. The purpose of training educators and others in the area of cultural competence is to provide new teachers the background and skills to work effectively with children of all backgrounds and social classes.

With the growing diversity of the student body in U.S. public school, it is increasingly imperative that teachers have and continually develop a cultural competence that enables them to connect with, respond to, and interact effectively with their pupils. The achievement gap between cultural minority and majority students suggests that some sort of communication disconnect often occurs in minority classrooms because cultural mismatch between teachers and students is common and should not prevent positive, productive for both parties, provided the educator is a culturally competent communicator. Over the last few decades, scholars have increasingly shown interest in the relationship between learning, reading, schema, and culture. People’s schema depends on their social location, which, as Anderson (1984) explains, includes a reader’s age, sex, race, religion, nationality, and occupation, amongst other factors. Considering schemata determine how people understand, interpret, and analyze everything in their world, it is clear that background and experience really do affect the learning and teaching processes, and how each should be approached in context. "In short," Anderson (1984) says, "the schema that will be brought to bear on a text depends upon the reader’s culture" (p. 374-375). More simply, Anderson (1984) describes a person’s schema as their "organized knowledge about the world" (p. 372). In considering the role of schema, one of the educator’s principal functions in teaching, particularly with literacy, is to "‘bridge the gap between what the learner already knows and what he needs to know before he can successfully learn the task at hand’" (Anderson, 1984, p. 382). This is important because Staton (1989) explains that student learning—i.e. successful communication between instructor and pupil—occurs when teachers and students come to "shared understandings" (p. 364). Thus, teachers must remember that they are "cultural workers, not neutral professionals using skills on a culturally-detached playing field" (Blanchett, Mumford & Beachum, 2005, p. 306).

Teachers and administrators in the public school systems of the United States come in contact with a wide variety of sub-cultures and are at the forefront of the challenge of bringing diverse groups together within a larger American society. Issues confronting teachers and administrators on a daily basis include student learning disabilities, student behavioral problems, child abuse, drug addiction, mental health, and poverty, most of which are handled differently within different cultures and communities.
Examples of cultural conflicts often seen by teachers in the public school system include
  • role of women in the family and the decisions they can make
  • practices among cultural groups (e.g. fire cupping)
  • symbol systems among cultural groups (see semiotics)

Monday, September 12, 2011

FYI: Managing Extreme Events in our Rivers and Coastal Areas:

http://www.rff.org/Events/Pages/Managing-Extreme-Events-in-our-Rivers-and-Coastal-Areas.aspx

Netherlands Embassy Logo
Managing Extreme Events in our Rivers and Coastal Areas:
Reflections on the Dutch ApproachPresented by Resources for the Future and the Royal Netherlands Embassy

September 14, 2011
8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Pastries and coffee will be provided.

Resources for the Future

First Floor Conference Center
1616 P Street NW
Washington, D.C.

Please sign up to attend using our event registration system.
About the Event
In the Netherlands, water management is a daily activity.

Without dikes and coastal dunes, close to two-thirds of the country would be under water. Building on centuries of water management, the Netherlands has recently adopted a policy of "Room for the Rivers" as part of a new Delta Programme to improve flood risk management in the face of a changing climate.

What have the Dutch learned from their long history in managing water and their new flood policies?

Can their experience offer any lessons for the United States?

During this breakfast seminar, the Netherlands' Delta Commissioner will offer remarks on what his country has learned about floodplain and flood risk management and discuss new policies his country is adopting. Other panelists will provide commentary on the context of the issues in the United States, U.S. experiences with flood risk management, and emerging policy options going forward.

Speaker:   Wim Kuijken, Delta Commissioner of the Netherlands

Panelists: 
    Sandra Knight, Deputy Federal Insurance Mitigation Administrator, FEMA
    Len Shabman, Resident Scholar, Resources for the Future
    David Conrad, Representative of the Water Protection Network and Independent Consultant

Moderator:  Carolyn Kousky, Fellow, Resources for the Future

RECOMMENDED READING LIST

Search This Blog

ARCHIVE List 2011 - Present