Washington DC
Dear Friends;
On September 12 – 14th, 2011 the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Office of Disability Integration and Coordination hosted a successful conference “Getting Real II: Promising Practices in Inclusive Emergency Management for the Whole Community” focusing on disability inclusive promising practices in emergency management. Over 400 people came from across the country to hear from disability and emergency management leaders about how the whole community can be better prepared and more involved in emergency planning, response, recovery and mitigation efforts.
The conference’s simultaneous webcast was sponsored by the National Council on Disability and Web based attendance was extraordinary! We had 2,826 people participating from all over the world. Interestingly, nearly 20% of the visitors to the webcast came through FEMA’s social media efforts on Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, over 760 messages on Twitter discussed various practices and concepts introduced during the conference.
In the weeks since our conference, we’ve had so many people tell us they wanted to share the presentations with their colleagues in the community and we’re happy to tell you that those presentations are now available on-line! Please visit http://GettingReal-II.WebCastOn.TV to view the entire conference. Here, you’ll see FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate talking about the importance of planning for the whole community, Deputy Administrator Richard Serino stressing the importance of actually including people with disabilities in exercises and drills, and Kareem Dale, Special Assistant to the President for Disability Policy, reaffirming President Barack Obama’s support for FEMA and our efforts to include the whole community. In addition to those plenary sessions, we had 67 presentations covering promising practices from Hawaii to Florida. The presentations also covered a range of topics from empowering children to become emergency preparedness ambassadors to developing Smartphone apps for emergency responders to sign language interpreter strike teams. We’re happy to report that all of the products related to this conference are fully accessible. The videos are captioned. Most videos include the ASL interpreter in their own window and text transcripts are provided as well. Additionally, the PowerPoint presentations are accessible and available for download.
We would appreciate hearing from you about your conference experience. Please visit the following link and complete the Getting Real II Conference survey https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GettingReal2
The survey will give you an opportunity to let us know what promising practices are being implemented in your community and what your experience is as you begin to adapt and use the promising practices shared during the Conference.
Should you have questions or need additional information, please do not hesitate to contact us at mailto:FEMA-Disability-Integration-Coordination@fema.dhs.gov or (202)646-4100.
Sincerely,
Marcie Roth
Director
Office of Disability Integration and Coordination
FEMA’s mission is to support our citizens and first responders to ensure that as a nation we work together to build, sustain, and improve our capacity to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate all hazards.
