Training Opportunity: Washington, D.C. Metro Area. Public Safety Chaplains Training Day. November 18, 2013

PUBLIC SAFETY CHAPLAINS TRAINING DAY - 2013

The COG Public Safety Chaplains Subcommittee

in collaboration with the

Joint Force Headquarters Military District of Washington

and the

Fairfax Community Chaplains

PRESENTS

“Death Notification – Suicide Awareness and Prevention”

… which will be held on Monday, November 18, 2013 here at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG), 777 North Capitol Street, NE, Washington, DC  20002 in the COG 3^rd Floor Boardroom, beginning at 8:00 AM with the Meet And Greet and 9:00 AM Opening Prayer.  The training will close at approximately 4:00 PM.  Suicide Awareness and Prevention is a very important topic and the regional Public Safety and Military Chaplaincy participation is sought here at all levels. 

Additional Participation

                COG appreciates the gravity of this important work and the roles of all of our regional partners.  Due to the significance and magnitude of this subject matter, additional regional public safety partners will this year be invited to attend.  That being said, the seating capacity of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments Board Room is 120.  Historically, we’ve had almost 100 chaplains at each of the events that we have held over the past seven (7) years.  As such, the public safety and military chaplains have been given priority for registration and you (chaplains) have until October 19^th (approximately one week) to register before the registration is made available to all other regional public safety responder partners.  After this window, all other regional public safety first responder partners will be invited to register, which may very well create the desired intent of having the COG Boardroom reach its full capacity.  Again, the topic is important! 

Public safety and military chaplains, get your registrations in soonest!  Suicide has gone up by huge proportions in the last two to three years and has been deemed one the nation’s growing epidemics.  Your knowledge base in this area is urgent indeed. 

SPECIAL GUEST SPEAKERS

            Special Guest Speakers for this event are:

1.      Dr. Robert E. Douglas, National P.O.L.I.C.E. Suicide Foundation, Inc.

Robert Douglas is a leading expert in the area of police suicide according to Dateline, CNN, Time Magazine, and USA Today.  He is also the author of four books:  Death with No Valor, Hope Beyond the Badge, Healing for a Hero’s Heart and soon to be published, The Art of Being You.  Bob served as US Marine, 25 years veteran of two police departments, 24 years as a pastor, and served several law enforcement agencies as a Chaplain.

2.      Commander Paul Anderson, Deputy Chaplain for Joint Plans and Operations, JFHQ, Fort McNair

Chaplain Anderson is an experienced Navy Chaplain and has served in myriad and diverse roles in the Navy and Marine Corps.  All military Chaplains are trained and many have participated in Casualty and Assistance Officer (CACO) calls.  In the course of his career, he has made 17 CACO calls.  Among them were victims of the attack on the USS Cole; victims of the attack on the Pentagon on 9-11 and the first Marine Corps casualty of the Global War on Terror in Afghanistan.  He helped to rewrite the curriculum for training CACO officers and wrote the script for several video vignettes.  Most recently Chaplain Anderson assisted in the Death Notification Process for a casualty of the massacre at the Navy Yard.

Chaplain Anderson began his training in Suicide Awareness and Prevention at the Meninger Clinic in Topeka Kansas.  He was certified by Meninger as a Master Trainer in 1998.  He has stayed current by attending annual training sponsored by the Army and the Navy.  He has augmented his training by adding Critical Incident Stress Management, Combat Operational Stress Control, and Hope Theory to his interventional quiver.”

These experts will provide you with the understanding of the subject, what you need to know, and how you as a chaplain or first responder clergy may offset or mitigate this ever growing suicide epidemic.

GUEST PANELISTS

            We will have a cadre of guest panelists who will be able to speak to this subject matter from different and varied perspectives.  You won’t want to miss this!

Thanks for all that you do to support the Public Safety Chaplaincy and Military Chaplaincy roles as well as the wonderful support you provide to the first responders, police, fire, emergency managers, health agencies and families, locally, regionally and nationally. 

UNDERWRITING

There is still an opportunity for you to participate in the underwriting of this event.  We could use your support.  If you would like to support the underwriting of this important event, you may contact me - Dennis Bailey directly at dbailey@mwcog.org.  

LUNCH

            Lunch will be on your own.  Union Station is close by and there are also several restaurants including Au Bon Pain and Subway immediately across the street.  Coffee and Donuts will be provided in the AM.

CERTIFICATES

            Certificates will be provided to all registrants who have registered at least one week in advance and who complete the training in its entirety.

REGISTRATION

            You may register by clicking HERE or going to the COG Website at www.mwcog.org and going to the Events Calendar.  Remember, Chaplains have approximately one week to register prior to an open registration to all first-responder partners.

This topic is very current and has large and significant implications.  Many of our local and regional public safety and military chaplains, first responders, (including public safety police and firemen, military soldiers, emergency medical technicians, and families and friends of those who commit suicide), find themselves having to deal with this kind of situation for which most often they are not prepared.  The national and regional suicide numbers are staggering. 

Please make every effort to be on hand for this important training.

World Bank Blog: Why Influencing Leaders Requires a Willingness to Hug a Porcupine

http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/why-influencing-leaders-requires-willingness-hug-porcupine

World Bank Blogs

Why Influencing Leaders Requires a Willingness to Hug a Porcupine

SUBMITTED BY SINA ODUGBEMI ON THU, 10/03/2013

Let’s be clear about this: to successfully influence leaders, that is, to have your views, your suggestions, your criticisms of their actions and so on, be taken seriously by them, you are not allowed to cheat. Cheat and leaders will ignore you. Worse, they will treat you with contempt. Above all, you will deserve their contempt.

The subject is important because a fundamental part of producing change is the ability to influence leaders…the leaders of the organizations you need help from, and the leaders of government at different levels without whose support very little can get done. I know this suggestion flies in the face of the current romance of the streets, of the current idealization of grass roots mobilization using cool new tools that magically launch revolutions, and produce wondrously effective pro-poor social and political change.

Now, I am a great believer in active citizens but I also know that real change is delivered by effective coalitions, and people in leadership positions are at the very heart of effective coalitions. It is the classic Inside-Outside strategy: leaders in government and leaders in civil society collaborate (sometimes quietly because of the exigencies of power play) to produce change.

In another life, when I was a newspaper pundit and editorial opinion writer, a number of leaders I interacted with taught me a simple truth. They were trying to describe to me which newspaper editorials or writers they took seriously and why. They laid out the tests they applied as follows:

• Are you informed? Do you know what you are talking about?
• Are you aware of the complexity of the decision-making context that the leaders in the arena are facing?
• Do you factor that complexity into what you are proposing, or are you ignoring the complexity in order to fire off cheap shots, or urge upon them asinine courses of action?

They said to me that these tests are the reason leaders take very few activists, pundits and editorial opinions seriously.  But, you know, I firmly believe that similar tests are applied by leaders in different spheres of life…including where you work. Leaders everywhere, I am convinced, take very few people seriously.

The key lesson that I was taught is this: if you are informed, if you take on the complexity of the decision making context leaders are facing and still come to a different, perfectly feasible course of action, you will earn the respect and admiration of the leaders you are trying to influence, even if they don’t say so to you...or change course.

The reason for all this is simple. Leaders wrestle with complexity all the time. They have to embrace porcupines daily…and porcupines have those nasty erectile spines mingled with their body hair. Yet, these sorely pressed leaders often find that most of the people seeking to influence them, or those who simply blast them, are not interested in embracing porcupines.  They cheat. They simplify complex problems and then say: ‘It is simply really, Madame Prime Minister. Why don’t you do this or that?’

And why do people cheat? Because embracing complexity is hard; thinking is hard; and trade-offs are tough customers. It is a lot easier to cheat.

But leaders cannot cheat. They cannot duck complexity. They cannot avoid difficult trade-offs, competing principles, quarrelling allies, vicious enemies and so on.

I want to end with an example from the world of politics. In October 2012, the best-selling author, Michael Lewis, published a remarkable essay in Vanity Fair, the resultant of spending six months quietly shadowing President Barack Obama of the United States. The piece is titled ‘Obama’s Way’ and it contains the following glimpses into the realities of political leaders. Lewis quotes Obama saying:

1. “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. Otherwise someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made that decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.”
2. “You’ll see that I wear only gray or blue suits. I am trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I am eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

Now, just think about what it would take to impress and influence someone only a small part of whose reality we have just espied.

Photo Credit: Mary Harrsch
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