2012 AT&T Aspire Local High School Impact Initiative request for proposal is now open
3/8/2012
AT&T’s
Local Impact RFP will provide funding for currently operating high
school retention programs consisting of elements aligned to the What
Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Dropout Prevention Practice Guide. AT&T is
looking to support organizations that are ready to expand to serve
additional students or locations, or to add components to strengthen
successful programs. Payments ranging from $100,000 to $300,000 for 24
months (2012-14) are available for local programs that emphasize:
Service to high school students at-risk of dropping out of
school, particularly 9th graders or students in transition from 8th to
9th grade
Intervening quickly with targeted services to help these students re-engage
Increasing students’ chances of earning a high school diploma
Preparing students for college and/or career
Providing substantial data to demonstrate positive outcomes
The RFP deadline is April 27, 2012. Visit www.att.com/eduation-news
for more information on the 2012 Local High School Impact Initiative
and check back often for updates on AT&T Aspire. The AT&T Aspire
Local High School Impact Initiative team will review and evaluate all
those who respond to the RFP and make determinations as to eligibility
after that time.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 7, 2012 (IPS/The Nouvelliste) - The drawdown of hundreds of non-governmental organisations
which have been in Haiti since the disastrous 2010 earthquake
was inevitable. But with their departure, so too goes their
purse and the millions earmarked for cleaning latrines.
What does that mean for the half a million displaced still living in
camps?
Some 11,000 mobile toilets were installed by a rainbow of
international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) following the
earthquake. Supplied largely by the Clinton Foundation, the U.S.
Agency for International Development and UNICEF, and then
redistributed by the NGO community to hundreds of camps, these
latrines improved the living conditions and staved off pending health
problems for some of the 1.5 million who were displaced.
Now, donor dollars are drying up even as toilets overflow. It's one
thing for the funders to cinch their belt; it's another for those in
the camps.
Because of the sheer number of people and organisations involved in
human waste disposal, it's nearly impossible to calculate how much
has been spent over the last two years. Dozens of NGOs signed
contracts with local companies to empty the latrines; eight dollars a
day per toilet, or 125 dollars to empty a 125-gallon drum of sewage.
Each agency or organisation has its own tab. UNICEF spent 1.4 million
dollars cleaning portable toilets over the last two years; the French
Action Against Hunger (ACF) invested 2.675 million dollars in
sanitation, most of which went for cleaning latrines. The Federation
of Red Cross and Islamic Red Cross spent 55 million dollars for water
and sewage treatment through September 2011.
"It's important not to focus on the money but on the sanitary
catastrophe that was avoided," said Moustapha Niang, UNICEF's
hygiene, water and sanitation consultant.
"In an emergency situation, you have to respond quickly to save
victims. This is always costly, but not sustainable. Everyone knows
that," said Anne Charlotte Schneider, head of Haiti's ACF's mission.
If sustainability were the name of the game, however, everyone would
also know this approach was all wrong. Temporary latrines are just
that - temporary. But because many of the camps were on private land,
a temporary solution was the only one considered.
"When it's impossible to build a sustainable infrastructure, we went
with mobile toilets even though they were most costly," said Peleg
Charles, communications director for OXFAM, which worked on waste
disposal in 123 camps.
Sanitary engineer Frantz Benoît, of the Haitian Association of
Sanitary Engineering and Environmental Sciences, said that if there
had been a sewer system, the task of managing the human waste would
have been easier.
Prior to the quake, only 17 percent of the capital's population had
access to a standard flush toilet, so it was foolish to think that
suddenly 1.5 million newly homeless could be connected to what was at
best an antiquated sewage system. The Haitian authorities had neither
the means, nor the technical competence, to do so.
"Since there wasn't (a sewer system), that meant that the NGO
community, which came to help us, had to use what was available,"
Benoit said. "The only criticism one can make of them is how the
toilets were distributed among the camp dwellers."
Distribution was as erratic as the earthquake's aftershocks.
ACF identified one hundred families for only two latrines in a
southern suburb; in the capital centre the latrines, stamped with the
donor's logo, surrounded camp perimetres like sentinels, but rarely
was the international SPHERE standard of one toilet per 20 people –
by gender – respected. Most residents use plastic bags.
In the case of Camp Acra, in the residential neighbourhood of Delmas,
the ravine behind the camp is the resident "plastic bag" dumping
ground.
"Besides the Haitian Red Cross and Samaritan's purse (who gave us
some things), we did not receive any support," said 27-year old James
Pierre, a Camp Acra resident. "And for the last year, they are gone
along with their resources. Since then, we've been forgotten
entirely."
The most recent NGO to jump ship is the International Rescue
Committee (IRC), which, as of Jan. 30, 2012, stopped all water and
sanitation related activities in 31 camps in the metropolitan Port-au
Prince region. IRC says it transferred its responsibility to either
camp management committees, or the state agency: the National
Directorate Agency of Water and Sanitation (DINEPA).
ACF will soon follow suit. At the end of the month it will stop
emptying the portable toilet units at Champs Mars, across from the
crumpled national palace.
To date, ACF has installed some 682 units in about 40 camps.
According to its two-year financial sheet, the agency claims 800,000
people benefited from its services. In addition to Champ Mars,
Schneider said ACF has also transferred latrine cleaning in all its
other sites to DINEPA.
But DINEPA said it is not aware that it's responsible for the
formerly ACF-serviced latrines.
"The only officially registered transfer to date has been that of the
Federation of Red Crosses," said the DINEPA's director of sanitation,
engineer Edwige Petit, when questioned about the number of NGOs still
present in the camps.
According to the International Organisation for Migration (OIM),
there are still 490,545 people living in over 650 camps in the
earthquake zones. Latrine cleaning was down 18.1 percent from the
month before. And a bulletin recently published by the U.N.'s
Organisation for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA)
states that "356 latrines are going to be removed."
"We are working with earthquake victims to return home," said ACF's
Schneider. "We are now working on a multi latrine project (five
families per latrine) for a total of 600,000 dollars."
With the absence of data, it's hard to compare sanitation before and
after Haiti's earthquake, but with an extensive outreach campaign it
appears that there is better sanitation awareness among the
population. And more tangibly, there is an excreta treatment center
in Morne-à-Cabri north of the capital.
UNICEF, the European Union's humanitarian branch, OCHA and the
American Red Cross have earmarked 2.6 million dollars for the centre,
which receives between 30-50 barrels of excreta every day. A soon-to-
be released report by the U.N.-led group of non-governmental and
governmental agencies working in water and sanitation (the WASH
Cluster) says that 17,000 cubic metres of excreta have already been
treated since the launch of operations three months ago.
Morne-à-Cabri's sewage treatment plant is the first of its kind in
the country. A second one is under construction in Titanyen, funded
by the Spanish cooperation.
Ironically, the new plant does not receive excreta from the camps in
the surrounding areas. Like much of the population, residents in
nearby camps have no access to functioning latrines. And because
public washrooms are not yet part of any national programme, they are
also missing from public markets, bus stations, schools and churches.
With bilateral funding and financing from the Inter-American
Development Bank, UNICEF and the American Red Cross, DINEPA is
executing its 2012-2014 action plan to increase its sanitation work
across the country.
This will include the construction of 12 wastewater treatment
stations; the establishment of management/maintenance (including the
reconstruction/rehabilitation) sanitary blocks in public places which
include reconstruction and/or rehabilitation and a training and
communication campaign to encourage the construction of toilets,
according to the agency, which declined to reveal to cost of the
plan.
But as necessary and ambitious as this plan is, it doesn't address
the challenges facing the 490,545 people living in squalid camps.
Where will they go when the need to go?
Senators Lieberman and McCain authored the legislation
that created the 9/11 Commission to investigate why America's defenses
failed leading up to September 11, 2001, and how to prevent a
catastrophic attack from happening again. Senators Lieberman and Collins
subsequently crafted legislation to implement the Commission's
recommendations and have worked ever since to ensure those laws are
working to protect the American people to the greatest extent possible.
The Committee has originated a series of bipartisan legislative
initiatives enacted by Congress and signed into law to organize and
coordinate the federal government’s vast resources more effectively to
prevent, prepare for, and, if necessary, respond to and recover from
terrorist attacks or natural disasters, while also strengthening the
capabilities of state and local governments, first responders, and the
private sector.
In 2001 and 2002, the Committee led the effort to consolidate the 22
disparate agencies and bureaus responsible for disaster preparedness,
prevention, and response into one Department of Homeland Security with
the unified purpose of protecting the homeland. The Homeland Security Act passed Congress in September 2002.
The 9/11 Commission produced its best-selling report in July 2004, and the Committee promptly drafted legislation to implement its main recommendations. Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention and Act of 2004,
which created a Director of National Intelligence to coordinate the
work of 15 federal intelligence agencies and established a National
Counter Terrorism Center to analyze intelligence information –
“connecting the dots” so the government could take effective action to
detect, prevent, and disrupt terrorist activity.
To ensure appropriate oversight from Congress, the Senate expanded the Committee’s jurisdiction in S. Res. 445 and changed the Committee’s name to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The new Department of Homeland Security was tested for the first
time when Hurricane Katrina, the largest natural disaster in recent
U.S. history, struck the Gulf Coast in August 2005. The inadequate
response by all levels of government to this disaster underscored the
need to better prepare for both natural disasters and terrorist attacks.
After a Committee investigation that included 24 hearings, review of
over 840,000 documents, and interviews of more than 320 people, the
Committee released the only Congressional bipartisan report on
Hurricane Katrina entitled, Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared.
Based on the findings of this investigation, the Committee drafted and Congress enacted the Post Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006, which strengthened the Department’s ability to protect the nation from “all hazards” – whether natural or man-made.
In 2006, the Committee also worked with others to draft the SAFE Port Act of 2006,
which was signed into law in October. This legislation strengthened
the security of the nation’s ports by, among other things, establishing
a dedicated port security grant program. Congress also adopted chemical security legislation
in October 2006 – building on the Committee’s work - to allow the
Department of Homeland Security to begin regulating the nation’s
highest risk chemical plants.
In 2007, Senators Lieberman and Collins led the Senate effort to
enact additional recommendations from the 9/11 Commission report and to
improve the Department of Homeland Security’s existing efforts to
protect the nation’s security. The Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007
established a fair and stable formula for distributing homeland
security grant programs, over 90 percent of which would be allocated
based on risk. The Act also required screening of all cargo carried on
passenger airplanes within three years; gave protection from lawsuits
to vigilant citizens who in good faith report suspected terrorist
activity targeting airplanes, trains, buses; created a dedicated
interoperability grant program to improve emergency communications for
state and local first responders; and authorized more than $4 billion
over four years for rail, transit, and bus security grants.
The Committee also worked on and approved legislation to strengthen
the federal government's ability to respond to an attack using weapons
of mass destruction, and legislation to improve the security of the
nation's laboratores using the most lethal biological pathogens.
In 2011, to mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist
attacks, the Committee launched a series of hearings to review the
efficacy of the laws it had passed over the past decade and to assess
additional needs for the future.
Illinois Deaf and Hard of Hearing Commission Releases Emergency
Preparedness Videos
The
Illinois Deaf and Hard of Hearing Commission (IDHHC) has collaborated with the
Illinois Emergency Management Agency to release a series of videos “Emergency
Preparedness: Together We Prepare.” The videos are intended to instruct
individuals and families on how to prepare for a natural disaster. All are
shown in American Sign Language and have captions.
The
video’s topics are:
Introduction
Make a
Plan
Get
Trained
Build a
Kit
Volunteer
Sheltering
in Place
Going to
a Shelter
Emergency
Preparedness for People with Disabilities