Disaster Planning. When a disaster strikes. Plan now for how you shall store your vital documents. Febuary 2019

When a disaster strikes.
Plan now for how you shall store your vital documents.

https://www.usa.gov/replace-vital-documents?utm_campaign=%2B%20Benefits%2C%20Grants%20and%20Loans&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=69700118&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--ynXHgGett_TkQxVVW8WZPlmOzbUXO3yADlxKibL-u6q9Ew1Vx4XGUsgICukR9Cgrz67UfTkfSMrzNvfy6l3GF29aMjl0JCQcqcnRXtYucE6XOWXI&_hsmi=69794298#item-213436

Replace Your Vital Records

Find out how to replace vital documents, such as birth certificates, Social Security cards, and more.

On This Page

• Replace Lost or Stolen Identification (ID) Cards
• Vital Records Documents Issued in the United States
• How to Replace Your Lost or Destroyed Vital Records
• Get a Copy of Your Birth Certificate
• Request a Replacement Marriage Certificate
• Request a Certified Copy of a Death Certificate
• Divorce Decrees and Certificates

Replace Lost or Stolen Identification (ID) Cards

State-issued Identification

If your driver's license or state-issued identification (ID) card was recently lost or stolen, contact your state motor vehicle agency.

When requesting a state ID, you may need to provide other forms of ID that contain your photo, full name, and date of birth. Contact your state motor vehicle agency to find out what you need to bring with you to prove your identity.

Social Security Cards

If your Social Security card was lost or stolen, contact the Social Security Administration (SSA) to request a replacement card.

Medicare ID Cards

The SSA can also help you replace a lost or stolen Medicare card.

Medicaid ID Cards

To replace a lost or stolen Medicaid card, please contact your state Medicaid office.

U.S. Passports

If your passport was lost or stolen, you must report the loss or theft immediately. Find out how to report a lost or stolen passport and get a replacement.

Permanent Resident (Green) Cards

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) can help you replace a lost or stolen Permanent Resident Card (Green Card).

Federal Employee ID Cards (Smart Cards)

The government agency that you work for can help you replace your Smart Card.

U.S. Military ID Cards

Learn how to report a lost or stolen military ID card and how to get a replacement.

Vital Records Documents Issued in the United States

Vital records documents consist of birth, death, marriage, and divorce certificates. State government vital records offices issue these documents. To get a copy of a vital record document, contact the vital records office in the state where the event occurred.

How to Replace Your Lost or Destroyed Vital Records

Replacing all important documents that were lost or destroyed in a flood, fire, or other disaster can be overwhelming. Although the process varies from state to state, these general steps can help you get started.

1. Replace your birth certificate. Find the vital records office in the state where you were born. Check to find out if you can obtain a certified copy of your birth certificate without any identification and follow the instructions. A few states don’t require a government-issued photo ID, or accept other solutions like a sworn statement of your identity. Some states allow your mother or father whose name is on the birth certificate to submit a notarized letter with a copy of their photo ID. If you do need your own government-issued photo ID to get a copy of your birth certificate, start with step 2.
2. Replace your driver’s license. Get this first if you cannot get your birth certificate. This task varies from state to state. In some states, you can do it online.
3. Replace your marriage certificate. You’ll need a certified copy as proof if you changed your name when you got married. Contact the vital records office in the state where you were married.
4. Replace your Social Security card. It's free but you'll need a government-issued photo ID. 
5. Replace your passport. Report your lost or destroyed passport to the Department of State. To apply for a new passport, you’ll need to fill out a form DS-11 and go to a passport acceptance facility or agency. You’ll need your birth certificate or a certified copy, and a government-issued photo ID.
6. Replace other important documents. Your state or local election office can tell you how to replace your voter registration card. Contact the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to find out how to replace naturalization or citizenship documents. Learn how to replace other documents including Medicare and Medicaid cards and military and federal employee IDs.

Government agencies usually mail replacement vital documents. But if your home was destroyed in a disaster, you might not be able to get your mail. Contact your local post office and ask if you can pick up your mail there or request to have your mail forwarded to a temporary location.

Get a Copy of Your Birth Certificate

Your birth certificate is the most important document you'll need to prove your legal identity and age. You'll need it to apply for a passport or government benefits, enroll in school, join the military, or claim pension or insurance benefits. If you need a copy, where you were born will determine how to get it.

If You Were Born in the U.S.

For a certified copy of your birth certificate, contact the vital records office in the state where you were born for instructions on how to request a copy and get information on any fees.

If you need to get a copy of your birth certificate quickly, ask the vital records office at the time you place your order about getting expedited service or shipping.

If You Were Born Abroad, or on a Military Base Abroad

If you were born to American parents abroad, they should have registered your birth with the U.S. Embassy or consulate in that country, and received a Consular Report of Birth Abroad. You can get a copy of this report from the U.S. Department of State. Depending on the country, a vital records office in the nation may also list the birth.

If you were born on a military base abroad, and your parents did not register your birth with the U.S. Embassy, you may have to contact the hospital where the birth took place. You may also try contacting the base operator or public affairs office for the appropriate military branch.

If You Were Born Abroad and Adopted by a U.S. Citizen

The country in which you were born issued your birth certificate. If you need a replacement, you must contact the nearest foreign embassy or consulate for that country. A child born in a foreign country and adopted by a U.S. citizen will not receive a U.S. birth certificate. If the document is in a language other than English, you should also seek the embassy's help in getting the document translated if you require authenticated documents.

If you need to replace naturalization/citizenship documents for a child who was adopted from a foreign country by a U.S. citizen, you will need to fill out an application for replacement of naturalization/citizenship form or contact U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for further help.

Request a Replacement Marriage Certificate

Marriage Licenses and Marriage Certificates

A marriage license is the piece of paper that authorizes you to get married. A marriage certificate is the document that proves you are married. Typically, the person who performs your wedding ceremony submits the license to the county office within a few days of the ceremony. Your marriage certificate is then issued and sent to you, usually within a month.

Obtaining a New or Duplicate Marriage License

Most marriage licenses expire within 30 days to a year, depending on the issuing state. If your license expires before you get married, you can apply for a new one. If your license is lost or destroyed after the wedding, before being submitted to the county, the person who officiated should contact the office that issued your license to obtain a duplicate.

Obtaining a Copy of Your Marriage Certificate

For a certified copy of your marriage certificate, contact the vital records office in the state where you were married for instructions on how to request a copy and information on any fees.

Even though the guidelines vary by state, all requests should include:

• Full names of both spouses at time of marriage
• Month, day, and year of the marriage
• Place of marriage (city or town, county, and state)
• Purpose for which copy of marriage certificate is needed
• Relationship to persons whose marriage certificate is being requested
• Daytime telephone number (include area code)

Request a Certified Copy of a Death Certificate

You may need to provide a copy of the death certificate of a spouse or other family member for a variety of legal reasons. These can include claiming life insurance, applying for a spouse’s pension and/or Social Security benefits; applying for Medicaid benefits; changing joint bank and credit card accounts, utilities, mortgages, vehicle titles, and leases; and remarrying. Check to see which require a certified copy of the death certificate and which require just a photocopy.

If the Death Occurred in the U.S.

You can request a certified copy of a death certificate from the vital records office of the state or territory in which the death occurred. See the instructions for that state or territory for details such as fees, address to write to, and the requestor’s required identification.

In addition to your state’s requirements, all requests should contain:

1. Full name of the person whose death certificate is being requested
2. Their sex
3. Their parents' names, including maiden name of their mother
4. Month, day, and year of their death
5. Place of death (city or town, county, and state; and name of hospital, if known/applicable)
6. Purpose for which the copy is needed
7. Your relationship to the person whose record is being requested
8. Your daytime telephone number with area code

If the Death Occurred Outside the U.S.

You will need to obtain a copy of the U.S. embassy or consulate's report of the  death abroad for U.S. legal proceedings. See Death of an American Abroad for details on obtaining a copy of this report.

Divorce Decrees and Certificates

A divorce decree is an official document from the court that grants the termination of a marriage. It includes specific details of the divorce.

A divorce certificate is issued by a state vital records office. It shows that a divorce occurred but does not state all of the same information as a divorce decree. You can save time and money by determining which document you need before making your request.

U.S. Divorces

Get a Copy of a Divorce Decree

Contact the "county clerk's office" or "clerk of the court" for the county or city in which the divorce was granted.

Get a Copy of a Divorce Certificate

Contact the state vital records office in which the divorce was granted.

Overseas Divorces

If the divorce occurred outside the U.S. and you are in the U.S., contact the appropriate country's embassy or nearest consulate to find out how to get a copy of the divorce decree.

United States law does not require U.S. citizens to register a foreign divorce decree at an embassy. But if the foreign country in which your divorce took place is a signatory to the Hague Convention on the Authentication of Documents, you may bring your divorce decree to a U.S. Embassy or consulate to have it certified.

RACE AND HEALTH. The New Food Movement Has a Problem with Race. From: MUNCHIES in May, 2015.

 https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/53jkq3/the-new-food-movement-has-a-problem-with-race

RACE AND HEALTH.   The New Food Movement Has a Problem with Race By Lauren Rothman Sep 13 2015, 11:00am The New Food Movement Has a Problem with Race Natasha Bowens—farmer, activist, and author of The Color of Food —sees something missing in our new local, farm-to-table food culture: people of color. When you think about the rapidly growing food movement, what comes to mind? Backyard chicken enthusiasts in Portland? Farm-to-table chefs plucking tender bunches of chervil from their Berkeley restaurant gardens? Or maybe you consider a farmer out in the Midwest, plunging her hands into the soil to harvest the potatoes growing there. In your mind's eye, what color are those hands? If they're white (albeit streaked with soil), then your thought process is likely a reflection of how agriculture—and to a larger extent—our entire food system, tends to be portrayed: as a field that's almost totally lacking in diversity, one that consistently pushes the country's countless African-American, Latino, and Asian farmers, chefs, and entrepreneurs to the margins. That's the thesis, at least, laid out by Natasha Bowens, a farmer and food justice advocate based outside Washington, D.C. A former grassroots organizer whose work focused on environmental issues, health care, and social justice, Bowens eventually made food systems central to her work and settled in western Maryland, where she began to grow her own food. As she crossed paths with more and more farmers and activists, Bowens says, she realized that a huge demographic was absent from the conversation: people of color. "From seed to table, the corporate-controlled food industry in this country is rife with discrimination, oppression, and the denial of rights," she writes on her website, The Color of Food. "Rights to healthy food, rights to land, rights to a clean environment, and rights to an equal opportunity for success and livelihood for farmers are not fairly attainable." In response to the color-washing she repeatedly saw in her chosen field, Bowens developed a multimedia project in 2010—the centerpiece of which is her new book The Color of Food—that seeks to show the food movement in all its diversity. Traveling around the country and meeting with groups such as the Black Farmers and Agriculturists Association and the Traditional Native American Farmers Association, Bowens located the farmers that she features—in full-page, color portraits with accompanying essays—in her new book. MUNCHIES spoke with Bowens about the misrepresentation of the food movement. MUNCHIES: Hi, Natasha. So how did this become your life's work? Natasha Bowens: I was organizing in communities, I was organizing on college campuses, I was courting student organizations, and just really getting a broad perspective of all of these issues that folks around the country were concerned with. I just felt like there was one issue in particular that was tied with our health, social justice issues, and the environment, and that was food. I started immersing myself in the food movement, working in urban farms and community gardens. I started working at the local farmers' market. I started growing my own food, attending conferences, reading tons of books. And it was then when I was really immersing myself in the agriculture movement that I started to really notice the inequities. I realized that it was such an exclusive movement: this whole foods, organic, fresh food, local food thing. And I thought, Where are the people of color being represented? I started to connect the dots of the inequities in what people call the food justice movement as far as having access to fresh food, and the high rates of diabetes and other illnesses that impact communities of color at such higher rates. I started to see that these inequities in the representation of the food movement were really rooted in inequities and discrimination within the system. And yet in all of the books, at all of the conferences that I was attending, people of color weren't being represented. Their voices weren't being heard, even though they were being impacted the most by the broken food system. On a very personal level, I started to feel a little bit out of place as a woman of color, farming, when the typical image of a farmer is a white man. I really wanted to find solidarity, and to claim that we belong here, too. That was the impetus for getting on the road with The Color of Food. Can you expand a little bit on how you think the food movement is currently portrayed? The few times that people of color are represented when we're talking about food or agriculture, it's about farm workers, migrant labor, food access, food insecurity—showing communities of color lined up at the farmers market with their food stamps. I felt like it was really doing us an injustice because our food narrative is so much richer than that. While raising awareness about issues of inequities and injustice, I also wanted to celebrate and honor farmers that are out there, right alongside the mainstream exclusive farmer, and there are communities all over the country: Native American communities, Asian communities, Hispanic, black communities that are out there farming, and that have been farming. I interviewed so many farmers that have been on their land for hundreds of years, who have growing organically well before the word existed. Their farms have been passed down within their families, just like our typical American family farm. One farmer, Mr. Gary Grant in Tillery, North Carolina, said, "We're family farmers, too—why aren't we called family farmers? We're black farmers. That's our label. But we're family farmers, too." You say that your work is political in nature. Being a person of color, farming and having sovereignty over my food and where it comes from is a political act. A revolutionary act—being out here farming, serving the land in a way that's environmentally friendly, running our own businesses, having our own independence, having sovereignty over our own seeds, over our foods. You say that our food system is broken. How so? Farmers are losing their land and getting put out of business because of corporations that are patenting seeds. And then we have new farmers that can't attain land, and we have existing and veteran farmers that are losing their land because of discrimination, and because of barriers in the USDA system. We have injustice with folks who are harvesting food—farm workers as well as farmers are not getting paid a fair, living wage. And then we have things being sprayed on our food, food being distributed being unfairly, unjustly: We have great, healthy food going to high-income communities, and not to communities of color. From seed to table, we have so many issues with our system. It's beyond broken. I think if you dig deep enough, you can find the injustice. You don't even need to dig that deep. With your book, you're hoping to show that our food system is much more diverse than is commonly acknowledged. How else do you think some of these injustices can be corrected? I think the first step is to start having these really tough conversations. There are intentional gatherings that are happening all around the country, called "Dismantling Racism in the Food System," and that's where a lot of food movement activists and farmers are gathering. It really helps everyone to get in the room and start putting together plans for how to address these issues on a system-wide level. And we need to start putting folks in positions of power. There's a farmer that I interviewed, Renard Turner, from Virginia. He was complaining about just how long it's taken to gain leadership as a black farmer in the state of Virginia, and now, this year, he was just elected the president of the Virginia Biological Farming Association. Examples like that are steps in the right direction. What do you hope readers will gain from the book? There's a lot that I hope that comes out of this book, and it's going to depend on the person. Someone who maybe wasn't aware of farmers of color, or of what farmers of color contribute to agriculture—I would love them to pick it up and kind of have the light go on for them. I'd love to have a young person of color who might be thinking about farming, or might be thinking about joining the food movement in some regard, to pick up the book and really feel like, Oh, this is a place for me. I haven't seen my face here, I haven't felt like this is a space for me, and now I know it is. And I hope that other farmers of color that are out there looking for solidarity and looking for power in numbers can find it here, because often it's really hard to step up and step forward when you have so many hoops to jump over, just to stand next to the white male farmer. I hope the book really pushes all of these conversations in forward. Thanks for speaking to me, Natasha. This post previously appeared on MUNCHIES in May, 2015.

National Latino Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association 

1029 Vermont Avenue, NW, Suite 601

Washington, DC 20005

Office: (202) 628-8833

Fax No.: (202) 393-1816

Email: latinofarmers@live.com 

Twitter: @NLFRTA

Website: www.NLFRTA.org 

DisasterReady. Preventing Corruption in Humanitarian Aid February 2019

Preventing Corruption in Humanitarian Aid Humanitarian Essentials

Corruption, the abuse of entrusted power for private gain, disproportionately affects the world’s most vulnerable people. Even with their noble intentions, humanitarian organizations responding to a crisis are not immune from corruption. This course will help you recognize potential signs of corruption and apply appropriate measures to minimize it. Learn how to reduce the risk of corruption in your organization and contribute to a more transparent and accountable environment.

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Voting Holiday. 1st Tuesday in November enacted before 2020.

VOTING HOLIDAY.

1st Tuesday of November.
A federal holiday that focuses on the values and nature of our 'great experiment' government. Voting rights for all.

Stay focused.

A voting holiday enacted before the 2020 elections. PERIOD.

BEMA International

Effective Advocating & Lobbying Your Elected Officials. Webinar: 2/14/2019

• February 14, 1 - 2 PM ET: Effective Advocating & Lobbying Your Elected Officials: In this training, we will educate and prepare business leaders to be effective advocates for your issues. Here's what you will learn:
• Plan an in-person meeting with policy makers
• How to prepare and research for in-person meeting
• Execute a successful meeting with policy makers
• Post-meeting outreach
• Get your message to policy makers when you can't meet in person (outside-in approach)

Register Here:

     https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5S6HeDgoTpuvqD0YdvKJVA

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·      February 21, 1 - 2 PM ET: Hone Your Message and Work with the Media to Get It Out: If the new political reality has you itching to speak out in the media, this session is for you. Learn best practices from the front lines. Here's what you will learn:

o  How to make the strongest arguments for your policy agenda

o  How to use your company as proof for how policies affect business

o  How to locate journalists interested in what you have to say

o  Tips to enhance your credibility and confidence