DEMA Whole Community Resilience Summit

Start Date: 05/23/2019

Description:

This was the seventh statewide DEMA Whole Community Resilience Summit. DEMA coordinates Arizona’s disaster emergency preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation efforts among federal, tribal, state and local governments; non-governmental private and volunteer organizations. We arrived early & mingled with people at tables during registration. They had us seated at different tables for the presentations. Lt. Colonel Ron Strickland, Divisional Secretary for Business, the Salvation Army did the welcome since we used the Salvation Army building for the meeting. Whitney Hensiak, Volunteer Agency & Private Sector Liaison, AZ DEMA than welcomed everyone too. Wendy Smith-Reeve, Director, AZ DEMA-Emergency Mgmt. Division spoke about the role she plays & how DEMA handles emergencies. Maria Pina, Admin Asst.-Human Services Division, Maricopa Association of Governments spoke about how they are gearing up for summer with giving homeless people water, water relief stations & looking for partners to have relief stations and help with efforts during heat. She showed us how to use their website to see relief stations & talked about current need to get information to everyone. Vicki Bond, Public Info. Office-Community Outreach Coordinator, AZ DEMA spoke about her program with sign language & the importance during crisis of helping those with disabilities. She showed a clip of a crisis when they used someone not able to do the sign language correctly to relay pertinent information. It showed how important it is to have qualified & trained sign language teams for emergencies. They had 2 sign language team members at the front table taking turns signing to someone at their table with hearing impairment. We then had a break where we mingled some more with people who were familiar with HOPE & some new friends. Dave Roby, Web EOC administrator, AZ DEMA & Eric Shreve, Senior GIS Analyst, AZ DEMA then showed us how to use their websites to locate fires, potential fires & up to date information pertinent to keep everyone informed.As everyone was released to lunch we found our way out of the building where we visited for awhile before heading home. We estimated there were somewhere in the range of 100 attendees and most being key players in the organizations they represented so it was a great networking opportunity for HOPE.

Agency: AZ Department of Emergency & Military Affairs (DEMA)
Teams:

Stephanie & Parker


Region: