Student Volunteer Opportunities: 15th Annual Emergency Management Higher Education Conference Update

15^th Annual Emergency Management Higher Education Conference is scheduled June 4-7, 2012. 

v  STUDENT VOLUNTEER POSITIONS FOR THE HI ED CONFERENCE: 

Students currently enrolled in a college/university emergency management program are needed as student volunteers for the 15^th Annual Emergency Management Higher Education Conference.  Students will be given reporting assignments and general conference duties.  The reports will be incorporated into the post-conference proceedings posted to the FEMA Emergency Management Higher Education Program website -- Conferences section. 

Generally graduate students will be assigned primarily to take detailed notes during the concurrent breakout sessions and to write summaries of those breakout sessions for incorporating into the post-conference “proceedings”.  Reports will be 3-4 pages per session and will highlight the most significant aspects of the session.  Graduate students will be assigned at least one breakout session to report but may be assigned up to three reports during the conference. 

Generally undergraduate students are assigned various aspects of the conference i.e., passing microphones during plenary sessions, assisting with conference registration, passing out conference notebooks, taking hard copies of presentation materials to classrooms, posting breakout session classroom assignments and various other duties. 

In addition one or more students will be assigned to assist the Higher Education Program Manager and as well as the Hi Ed Program Assistant through out the week.   

Student volunteers are required to attend 100% of the conference beginning with Monday workshops and ending on Thursday afternoon with the last breakout sessions.  The typical volunteer obligations comprise about 20% of the conference.  When not acting in a volunteer capacity students are free to attend breakout sessions at their leisure. 

Student volunteers are encouraged to participate in all conference activities. 

Student Volunteer Criteria:  

Student must be enrolled in a collegiate Emergency Management program listed in the Emergency Management section of "The College List" on the FEMA EM Hi Ed Program website --    http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu/collegelist/.   

·         Student should have the recommendation of a faculty member or department chair 

·         Students must be at least 18 years of age. 

·         Student volunteers must pay own transportation to and from the conference.   

·         Student volunteers must be able to participate in the entire four day conference. 

·         Student volunteers will receive from the Higher Education Program reimbursement of the NETC meal ticket for the week and a no-cost, on-campus dorm room (International students can not be reimbursed for the meal ticket and will be required to pay $40.00 per night for the dorm room and must go through a 8-12 week security clearance.)  

·         Students currently employed in any capacity by FEMA, receiving funding of any sort from DHS or another federal agency are not eligible for reimbursement of the meal ticket.

·         Student should be capable of taking good detailed notes.

·         Student will need to prepare a comprehensive report based on notes from the assigned breakout session.  These reports will be incorporated into the Higher Education Program website conference proceedings. 

·         In the event we do not have enough graduate volunteers students may be asked to participate in additional breakout sessions.   

·         Student will be contacted by the Student Volunteer Coordinator for their respective assigned break out session and to collect the final reports.  

·         Students must submit a conference application form and must return all requested information to the Mitigation secretary in a timely manner in order to be reimbursed for the meal ticket.

·         If you have questions about the Higher Education Conference Student Volunteer positions please contact the Higher Education Program Assistant Barbara Johnson at Barbara.Johnson3@fema.dhs.gov or (301) 447-1452.  More information will be available on the Hi Ed website conference section at http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu/educonference12.asp. 

v  STUDENT RESEARCH BREAKOUT SESSION: 

Each year during the Annual Emergency Management Higher Education Conference a breakout session is reserved for graduate and doctoral students currently enrolled in an emergency management program. The reserved breakout session is an opportunity for students to present thesis or dissertation research.  In past years this has proven to be a very popular session with conference attendees.  Students wishing to present their research must be graduate or doctoral students currently enrolled in an emergency management program and have the recommendation of a faculty advisor.  Presentation is “one student only” delivery.  We do not allow group presentations for this session.  Presentation should be 10 minutes or less in length. For more information contact Barbara Johnson, Barbara.Johnson3@fema.dhs.gov or Shannon Cool, Shannon.Cool@associates.fema.dhs.gov. 

Scholarship Opportunity: 2012 Governor's Hurricane Conference

v  2012 Governor's Hurricane Conference Scholarship

Any student interested in receiving a scholarship to attend the 2012 Governor’s Hurricane Conference^® must complete their application by 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 15th in order to be considered.  You will have no further access to your application after that time.  No late applications will be accepted under any circumstances.  Competition is fierce this year, so we encourage you to put forth your best effort in creating your application. 

P.S. Did you know that the Governor's Hurricane Conference - Student Scholarship Program has a page on Facebook?  Join now to get reminders, tips, and updates during the application process.  If you are selected to receive a scholarship, this will also be a good place to meet your peers before the conference, get logistical questions answered, and more tips for making your conference trip a success. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Governors-Hurricane-Conference-Student-Scholarship-Program/253780511324650

Rene' Daines

Governor's Hurricane Conference^®

P.O. Box 279

Tarpon Springs, FL 34688-0279

(727) 944-2724   (727) 944-2687 Fax

(800) 544-5678

ghcrene@verizon.net

www.flghc.org

Scholarship Opportunity: 2012 Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop

v  Apply Now for the Mary Fran Myers Scholarship

The Mary Fran Myers Scholarship Committee is now accepting applications. Recipients will receive financial support allowing them to attend the 2011 Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop in Broomfield, Colorado, July 14-17. Recipients may also stay through July 18 to attend either the International Research Committee on Disasters or the Natural Hazard Mitigation Association add-on events for researchers and practitioners, respectively. Scholarships can cover part or all of transportation, meals, and registration costs.

The Mary Fran Myers Scholarship is awarded annually to at least one potential Workshop participant. Recipients are recognized at the Workshop and may be asked to serve as panelists, where they can highlight their research or practical experiences with hazards and disasters.

As the longtime co-director of the Natural Hazards Center, Myers recognized that many of the people and organizations that could benefit from and contribute to the Workshop—including local practitioners, students, and international professionals—were among those least likely to afford it. The scholarship was established in 2003 to fulfill Myers’ request that qualified and talented individuals receive support to attend.

Hazards practitioners, students, and researchers with a strong commitment to disaster management and mitigation and who reside in North America or the Caribbean are eligible to enter. Eligibility is based on current place of residence, not citizenship.

Applicants from outside North America and the Caribbean will be eligible for the scholarship in 2013. Previous attendees of the Natural Hazards Workshop are not eligible for the 2012 Mary Fran Myers Scholarship. Preference is given to those who can demonstrate financial need.

For more information on past scholarship winners and how to apply, visit the Mary Fran Myers Scholarship page at the Natural Hazards Center Web site. Applications must be received by March 26.

Don't get distracted by our unity from the top of North America, the Caribbean Basin, to the Botton of South America

 

Article:  

Some blacks insist: 'I'm not African-American'

'We respect our African heritage, but that term is not really us,' says one

By JESSE WASHINGTON

 

 

updated 2/5/2012 10:44:12 AM ET

The labels used to describe Americans of African descent mark the movement of a people from the slave house to the White House. Today, many are resisting this progression by holding on to a name from the past: "black." 

For this group — some descended from U.S. slaves, some immigrants with a separate history — "African-American" is not the sign of progress hailed when the term was popularized in the late 1980s. Instead, it's a misleading connection to a distant culture.

The debate has waxed and waned since African-American went mainstream, and gained new significance after the son of a black Kenyan and a white American moved into the White House. President Barack Obama's identity has been contested from all sides, renewing questions that have followed millions of darker Americans:  What are you? Where are you from? And how do you fit into this country?

"I prefer to be called black," said Shawn Smith, an accountant from Houston. "How I really feel is, I'm American."

"I don't like African-American. It denotes something else to me than who I am," said Smith, whose parents are from Mississippi and North Carolina. "I can't recall any of them telling me anything about Africa. They told me a whole lot about where they grew up in Macomb County and Shelby, N.C."

Gibré George, an entrepreneur from Miami, started a Facebook page called "Don't Call Me African-American" on a whim. It now has about 300 "likes."

"We respect our African heritage, but that term is not really us," George said. "We're several generations down the line. If anyone were to ship us back to Africa, we'd be like fish out of water."

"It just doesn't sit well with a younger generation of black people," continued George, who is 38. "Africa was a long time ago. Are we always going to be tethered to Africa? Spiritually I'm American. When the war starts, I'm fighting for America."

Joan Morgan, a writer born in Jamaica who moved to New York City as a girl, remembers the first time she publicly corrected someone about the term: at a book signing, when she was introduced as African-American and her family members in the front rows were appalled and hurt.

"That act of calling me African-American completely erased their history and the sacrifice and contributions it took to make me an author," said Morgan, a longtime U.S. citizen who calls herself Black-Caribbean American. (Some insist Black should be capitalized.) She said people struggle with the fact that black people have multiple ethnicities because it challenges America's original black-white classifications. In her view, forcing everyone into a name meant for descendants of American slaves distorts the nature of the contributions of immigrants like her black countrymen Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay.

Morgan acknowledges that her homeland of Jamaica is populated by the descendants of African slaves. "But I am not African, and Africans are not African-American," she said.

In Latin, a forerunner of the English language, the color black is "niger." In 1619, the first African captives in America were described as "negars," which became the epithet still used by some today.

The Spanish word "negro" means black. That was the label applied by white Americans for centuries.

The word black also was given many pejorative connotations — a black mood, a blackened reputation, a black heart. "Colored" seemed better, until the civil rights movement insisted on Negro, with a capital N.
Then, in the 1960s, "black" came back — as an expression of pride, a strategy to defy oppression.

"Every time black had been mentioned since slavery, it was bad," says Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania history professor and former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Reclaiming the word "was a grass-roots move, and it was oppositional. It was like, 'In your face.'"

Afro-American was briefly in vogue in the 1970s, and lingers today in the names of some newspapers and university departments. But it was soon overshadowed by African-American, which first sprouted among the black intelligentsia.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is widely credited with taking African-American mainstream in 1988, before his second presidential run.

Berry remembers being at a 1988 gathering of civil rights groups organized by Jackson in Chicago when Ramona Edelin, then president of the National Urban Coalition, urged those assembled to declare that black people should be called African-American.

Edelin says today that there was no intent to exclude people born in other countries, or to eliminate the use of black: "It was an attempt to start a cultural offensive, because we were clearly at that time always on the defensive."

"We said, this is kind of a compromise term," she continued. "There are those among us who don't want to be referred to as African. And there also those among us who don't want to be referred to as American. This was a way of bridging divisions among us or in our ideologies so we can move forward as a group."
Jackson, who at the time may have been the most-quoted black man in America, followed through with the plan.

"Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical, cultural base," Jackson told reporters at the time. "African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity."

The effect was immediate. "Back in those days we didn't talk about things going viral, but that's what you would say today. It was quite remarkable," said the columnist Clarence Page, then a reporter. "It was kind of like when Black Power first came in the '60s, there was all kinds of buzz among black folks and white folks about whether or not I like this."

Page liked it — he still uses it interchangeably with black — and sees an advantage to changing names.

"If we couldn't control anything else, at least we could control what people call us," Page said. "That's the most fundamental right any human being has, over what other people call you. (African-American) had a lot of psychic value from that point of view."

It also has historical value, said Irv Randolph, managing editor of the Philadelphia Tribune, a black newspaper that uses both terms: "It's a historical fact that we are people of African descent."

"African-American embraces where we came from and where we are now," he said. "We are Americans, no doubt about that. But to deny where we came from doesn't make any sense to me."

Jackson agrees about such denial. "It shows a willful ignorance of our roots, our heritage and our lineage," he said Tuesday. "A fruit without a root is dying."

He observed that the history of how captives were brought here from Africa is unchangeable, and that Senegal is almost as close to New York as Los Angeles.

"If a chicken is born in the oven," Jackson said, "that doesn't make it a biscuit."

Today, 24 years after Jackson popularized African-American, it's unclear what term is preferred by the community. A series of Gallup polls from 1991 to 2007 showed no strong consensus for either black or African-American. In a January 2011 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 42 percent of respondents said they preferred black, 35 percent said African-American, 13 percent said it doesn't make any difference, and 7 percent chose "some other term."

Meanwhile, a record number of black people in America — almost 1 in 10 — were born abroad, according to census figures.

Tomi Obaro is one of them. Her Nigerian-born parents brought her to America from England as a girl, and she became a citizen last year. Although she is literally African-American, the University of Chicago senior says the label implies she is descended from slaves. It also feels vague and liberal to her.

"It just sort of screams this political correctness," Obaro said. She and her black friends rarely use it to refer to themselves, only when they're speaking in "proper company."

"Or it's a word that people who aren't black use to describe black people," she said.

Or it's a political tool. In a Senate race against Obama in 2004, Alan Keyes implied that Obama could not claim to share Keyes' "African-American heritage" because Keyes' ancestors were slaves. During the Democratic presidential primary, some Hillary Clinton supporters made the same charge.

Last year, Herman Cain, then a Republican presidential candidate, sought to contrast his roots in the Jim Crow south with Obama's history, and he shunned the label African-American in favor of "American black conservative." Rush Limbaugh mocked Obama as a "halfrican-American."

Then there are some white Americans who were born in Africa.  Paulo Seriodo is a U.S. citizen born in Mozambique to parents from Portugal. In 2009 he filed a lawsuit against his medical school, which he said suspended him after a dispute with black classmates over whether Seriodo could call himself African-American.

"It doesn't matter if I'm from Africa, and they are not!" Seriodo wrote at the time. "They are not allowing me to be African-American!"

And so the saga of names continues.

"I think it's still evolving," said Edelin, the activist who helped popularize African-American. "I'm content, for now, with African and American."

"But," she added, "that's not to say that it won't change again."

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Haiti: Emergency Management.

Haitian Government Establishes Partnership with Louisiana National Guard

January 18, 2012

Deputy Chief of Mission Daniel Foote, Secretary of State for Local Communities Fritz Jean Louis and Brigadier General Glenn H. Curtis.

Haitian and American authorities announced the establishment of the State Partnership Program between the Government of Haiti and the Louisiana National Guard (LANG).

Haitian Secretary of State for Local Communities Fritz Jean Louis, and the Adjutant General of the LANG, Brigadier General Glenn H. Curtis, made the announcement at a ceremony in Tabarre. The agreement creates professional and institutional linkages between the LANG and Haitian authorities, focused on support to Haiti’s emergency management agency, the Direction de la Protection Civile, as well as the Haitian National Police and Coast Guard.

Brigadier General Curtis said “We are truly committed to Haiti, and we know that we will gain as much as we give from this relationship with our Haitian colleagues.”

Secretary of State Jean Louis said “Louisiana and Haiti have a common understanding of the challenges of our environment.  Haiti will bring to bear all of its assets and capabilities to this partnership.”

The State Partnership Program brings together National Guard units from 46 U.S. states and territories with 65 partner-nations from around the world to increase capacity in the areas of homeland security, disaster response and mitigation, crisis management, border, port, and aviation security, and emergency medical response.  Partner-nations include countries with large military forces, like Chile and Poland, to Costa Rica and Dominica, which do not have armies.

U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission Daniel Foote noted that strengthening Haiti’s capacity to protect its citizens from threats like crime, drug trafficking, and natural disasters was a priority for the U.S. government and said, “We believe that this partnership between Haiti and Louisiana and the relationships that will be formed between professionals will help make Haiti stronger and its people safer.”

In May 2010, then-Minister of Justice Paul Denis requested a partnership with the LANG for Haiti. 

The LANG deployed to Mandrin, Artibonite Department in 2010 and 2011 as part of the New Horizons mission, where it provided medical care to local residents and carried out school and water well construction.