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Homeland Security Focus Areas Citizen and Volunteer Activities NYTimes.com October 26, 2007 In New Orleans, Rebuilding With FaithNEW ORLEANS — Two months after the Rev. Lance Eden arrived as pastor of First Street United Methodist Church, Hurricane Katrina struck. Mr. Eden, newly ordained, quickly picked up skills few in the pulpit typically need. He learned how to restore a church whose roof had been peeled off and whose bell tower had been knocked askew. He played host to hundreds of volunteers who came to gut and rebuild. And most recently — and reluctantly — he took on the role of developer. “I’d rather be doing something else,” Mr. Eden said. “But when you hear stories like the Good Samaritan or about how Jesus walks into the temple and overturns the tables of the money-changers, it charges us as a church to make sure justice is done for all people.” First Street’s community development corporation owns 28 properties in Central City, a neighborhood of candy-colored bungalows, and Mr. Eden said he would like to acquire 20 more for moderate- to low-income housing. New Orleans’s patchy recovery has largely bypassed places where the working class and the poor lived, like Central City and the Lower Ninth Ward. Many former residents lack the means to return. Instead, churches and groups with religious affiliations, citing Scripture’s call to help the stranger and the neighbor, have taken on building affordable housing. Beginning in the first weeks after the storm, religious groups have played a critical role in the recovery: those outside New Orleans sent volunteers to help, and those in the city sometimes housed, supplied and fed workers and returning residents. The emerging projects range from a plan by Providence Community Housing to build 7,000 units of affordable housing, to one by Stronger Hope Baptist Church, which is still rebuilding its own flooded sanctuary, to acquire and restore perhaps a half-dozen properties in Central City. “The only thing that has worked in the recovery has been the church,” said Joe Givens, consultant for the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, a national ecumenical group of black churches. “Their volunteers did the gutting, and then the salvage work, and the next step in the progression is that churches have to be part of the rebuilding.” About 105,000 dwellings, 71 percent of the housing stock, were damaged or destroyed in Orleans Parish by Hurricane Katrina, said Gregory C. Rigamer, a New Orleans demographics expert. About 56 percent of the city’s population has returned, Mr. Rigamer said, but resettlement has been erratic. In the Lower Ninth Ward, for instance, just 7 percent of residents have come back. Many low-income people would return if they could, said Jim Kelly, co-president of Catholic Charities and president of Providence Community Housing. Religious groups want to give low-income people the same choice to return that wealthier people have. Providence, for example, hopes to build affordable housing for 20,000 people by 2012. It is unclear exactly how much housing religiously affiliated groups and churches have built since last year, when most began their efforts. But interviews with five of the groups — Providence Community Housing, Habitat for Humanity, Volunteers of America, the Episcopal Diocese of New Orleans Jericho Road Project and First Evangelist Baptist Church — showed that since 2006, about 350 housing units have come onto the market, a pace officers at the groups said should accelerate as they acquire more property and line up financing. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Eden rode through the neighborhood around his church, pointing to houses its community development corporation had acquired and others it was considering. Some were being rebuilt. A few people had moved in. Mr. Eden said he hoped to offer the housing to low-income people under a lease-to-buy program. Before Hurricane Katrina, churches like First Street United Methodist were the only civic institutions that functioned in poorer neighborhoods, Mr. Givens said. But only a handful had community development corporations. More are incorporating now, but pastors of small black churches in poor neighborhoods concede that they face considerable barriers. Many pastors are hampered by their own inexperience and the complex bureaucracies — public and private — that are financing recovery efforts. First Street United Methodist, which set up its community development corporation just before the storm, has raised $600,000, largely from donations to feed, house and equip volunteers during their stays and now, to buy and develop housing. Mr. Eden said he only recently became aware of the availability of Department of Housing and Urban Development money, and he admitted to feeling his way through a financing process he found murky and in constant flux. “Our projects have about six funding sources, which means patching and patching and patching,” said Ghebre Selassie Mehreteab, chief executive of the NHP Foundation, a national nonprofit group that is building affordable housing in New Orleans. He said it was “mind-boggling” for a church or a small community development corporation “to answer the needs of so many diverse funders.” The federal government, in the meantime, is exploring what role religious groups can play in rebuilding. The government-sponsored Freddie Mac, for instance, hopes to begin a pilot program in New Orleans to help churches acquire and develop property. Charlette Minor, a Freddie Mac official, walked along a silent Central City block recently with the Rev. Tom Watson and the Rev. Joseph C. Profit in front of Mr. Profit’s church, Stronger Hope Baptist. They passed houses thigh-deep in weeds, and Ms. Minor asked the ministers to survey the neighborhood to see which houses still had owners, whether the owners would return and which were abandoned. She also asked them to find out if people in the neighborhood had the budgeting skills and the income to be homeowners. She assumed there were neighbors to talk to, like in those neighborhoods that were fitfully reviving. “Are people coming back?” Ms. Minor asked. “What’s the occupancy rate, 60 percent?” Mr. Watson said, “Oh, no, more like 25 to 30 percent.” Ms. Minor asked, “What’s it like here at 8 o’clock at night?” Mr. Profit, 72, leaned on his cane and looked down the broad, empty avenue. “Dismal,” he said.
Article published Jul 6, 2007
GovernmentExecutive.com
By Elizabeth Newell enewell@govexec.com June 29, 2007
A federal volunteer service program implemented in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was effective, but future efforts could benefit from better communication and training, according to a new report from the Homeland Security Department's inspector general.
The report, released Thursday by DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner, congratulated the Federal Emergency Management Agency on implementing the program "efficiently and effectively," with limited prior experience.
According to FEMA, the government deployed more than 1,000 federal employees to help with Katrina relief efforts on a voluntary basis. These volunteers supplemented the large number of employees assigned to the area as part of their regular position.
Skinner's review of the program identified areas that should be improved in advance of another incident requiring the use of federal volunteers.
Planning, organization and communication between FEMA and participating agencies must be enhanced, the review stated. Since only a limited plan for the program's implementation existed before Katrina, volunteers and agency points of contact said there was a good deal of logistical confusion. For example, volunteers were unclear as to what expenses were reimbursable and how to report and get paid for overtime.
The IG recommended that FEMA communicate with agency points of contact in addition to volunteers. By contacting volunteers directly during the Katrina deployment, FEMA neglected to keep agencies fully informed, the report stated.
Not only were agencies unable to keep track of volunteers' departure and return dates and locations, some supervisors were not even aware their employees had been deployed.
Volunteers interviewed for the report described their experience with the program as extremely rewarding and productive and indicated they would volunteer for future assignments if given the opportunity.
But to improve volunteers' productivity, DHS recommended that FEMA shorten the period between training and deployment. Volunteers identified this as a time that was "awkward and unproductive." Volunteers also said they struggled to find places to stay near their assigned locations due to the influx of displaced people and response personnel.
The review also found that FEMA often did not take volunteers' individual skill sets into consideration during assignment.
While some agency points of contact identified the talents of their volunteers prior to deployment, abilities generally weren't taken into account during placement.
Many federal volunteers received training quickly, but the IG noted some of this training was redundant. All volunteers participating in the federal program underwent standardized training, but some had received similar instruction through their agencies. The report recommended that FEMA provide specialized training based on the tasks volunteers are assigned, instead of blanket training that may be unnecessary.
Finally, while volunteers described their experience as overwhelmingly positive, Skinner said they "were often unprepared for the psychological demands they encountered working in a disaster environment."
FEMA made pre- and post-deployment psychological support available, but many volunteers did not know about it.
Counseling needs to be provided before and after volunteer deployment consistently so volunteers can recognize the signs of psychological distress, the report said.
FEMA's director of human resources agreed with the findings and recommendations in a draft copy of the report, the IG said. In follow-up discussions, the IG again urged the agency to create an informational tool kit for disaster volunteers and agency points of contact to help eliminate any logistical confusion. Auditors originally recommended FEMA create this packet in April 2006.
Group urges funding of civilian units to back up GuardBy Megan Scully CongressDaily May 22, 2007
With National Guard units continuing to deploy overseas in large numbers, a Washington-based think tank Monday urged the federal government to provide funding for a civilian corps in every state to serve as a backup to the Guard during natural disasters and other domestic crises.
In its report "Caught off Guard: The Link Between our National Security and Our National Guard," the Center for American Progress recommended increasing the Homeland Security budget by $1 billion to establish a corps of doctors, firefighters, city planners and other emergency officials in each state.
Over the last several years, 23 states and Puerto Rico have set up -- and funded -- civilian corps, which typically report to the top National Guard official in each state and fill in any gaps left when Guard units deploy, said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Pentagon's personnel chief during the Reagan administration.
In Virginia alone, the volunteers logged roughly 1.3 million working hours last year.
The extra $1 billion for the Homeland Security Department would help set up these civilian teams in other states and also contribute needed money to train volunteers, Korb said.
With their exclusive focus on responding to local emergencies, such civilian teams are different from the "Civilian Reserve Corps" that President Bush proposed in his State of the Union address in January. Bush tried to jumpstart a moribund proposal to create a unit of civilian volunteers to augment U.S. reconstruction and stabilization efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The report released Monday is yet another in a string of sobering assessments on the state of the National Guard, which is struggling to meet the demands of both state and federal mission requirements.
More than 417,000 National Guard and Reserve troops have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan -- roughly 80 percent of the military's reservists. Of those, more than 84,200 troops have deployed more than once, according to the study.
Within the National Guard, all 16 of the force's enhanced brigades -- which have been set up to deploy rapidly -- have deployed overseas at least once in the last several years.
The constant deployments have contributed to a $40 billion equipment shortfall for the Army and Air Guard. On average, Army Guard units, which have borne the brunt of the overseas deployments, have only 40 percent of their equipment on hand.
"Ground troop levels in both [Iraq and Afghanistan] could not be sustained at the current rate without the numbers and skills provided by the men and women of the Army National Guard," according to the report. "Continued heavy use of Guard forces, however, has raised concerns about whether it can successfully perform both its domestic and international missions effectively."
To alleviate stress on the Guard forces, the report recommends increasing active Army and Marine Corps end-strength levels by at least 100,000 troops -- slightly higher than the 92,000 additional troops requested by the White House.
The report also suggests making the military's TRICARE healthcare system available to Guard troops once they join. That effort, Korb said, would cost roughly $5 billion over the next five years.
Civil Air Patrol revives role as eyes of skiesBy Audrey Hudson The Civil Air Patrol guarded the U.S. shoreline from Maine to Texas against German U-boats during World War II, and now the all-volunteer force is playing a vital role in the war against terrorism.
January 24, 2007 Details were scarce Wednesday on the volunteer "civilian reserve corps" proposed by President Bush during his State of the Union address as a way to relieve strains on the military. In his Tuesday night speech, Bush said he would work with Congress to build a civilian group analogous to the military's reserve forces that would "ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad." The proposal appeared to differ from an Iraq Study Group recommendation that the federal government, especially the Defense and State departments and the director of national intelligence, act more aggressively to place civilians in directed assignments overseas if positions cannot be filled through normal, voluntary means. Bush's proposal seems to resemble an initiative funded in the fiscal 2005 Intelligence Authorization Act that created a Civilian Linguistic Reserve Corps. That pilot project, which was authorized to run for three years, created a listing of civilians with critical language skills who could be called up to service by the director of national intelligence. The White House on Wednesday did not make available any further information on the new program, and a Defense spokesman said he was not familiar with the proposal. A State Department spokesman said he could not address the program, but said that, contrary to reports in the media, the agency is having no trouble filling posts in difficult and dangerous areas. "We've been able to fill all the positions with qualified people," he said. The Defense Department already hires thousands of civilians for its overseas missions through extensive contracting for support and services. But contractors are bound by agreements that define the terms of work to be performed, leaving field commanders with much less flexibility than if the individuals worked directly for the department. Bush is not the first to suggest the formation of a civilian reserve group. Kris Alexander, who writes a blog at DefenseTech.org, part of a membership-based organization for the military community, wrote Wednesday that he presented a similar idea last year at a symposium of the Army Combined Arms Center Combat Studies Institute. Alexander's presentation centered on the haphazard system that he said fills many of the military's nation-building stability and support slots with just 7,000 military reservists who are not recruited specifically for their skills. "In effect, we are relying on a crapshoot to determine if we have the skilled professionals we need in the military to rebuild war-shattered nations," he said, noting that the system relies on the hope that the veterans who joined the Army years before have acquired applicable skills like police work and firefighting. Alexander suggested that many Americans would be eager to serve their country through a broader civilian reserve program. "They would train like reservists and be available for deployment like reservists," he wrote. "They would join with the understanding that they could be put in harm's way." Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, in his 2004 presidential campaign, also proposed to create a civilian reserve force as part of his vision of a "new American patriotism." Representatives of federal employee unions on Wednesday declined to comment on Bush's proposal, saying they preferred to wait until they had more details. This document is located at http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0107/012407m1.htm
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Focus Area Current News Media and Communication Issues Medical Care Delivery
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