Hal Newman

Hal Newman is the Executive Director of the National Emergency Management Resource Center. NEMRC is the hub for an online community of practice that believes in a fully-inclusive approach to emergency management taking into account all population segments and helping to empower individuals and communities. Newman is also part of the team at EAD & Associates LLC. Newman’s three decades of emergency services experience has served him well as a team leader, policy advisor and catalyst. Newman is also the Managing Editor of Big Medicine which is an online cooperative community sharing news, views and resources related to emergency management and public health. Newman works as part of the team at TEMS on social media strategy and network acceleration. Newman started his career as a firefighter/street medic in Montreal West which led to an emergency services visionquest with stops and opportunities to learn in West Virginia, Maryland and finally back home in Montreal where he led a small highly innovative EMS department. With that EMS organization, Newman developed a number of special needs advocacy projects including expanded scope of practice for community geriatric care; primary medical support for homeless outreach care; and highrise evacuation protocols for people with disabilities, the medically fragile, and the vulnerable-at-the-moment. Newman led a team on behalf of the National Organization on Disability into Mississippi immediately post-Hurricane Katrina to assess the catastrophic impacts on people with special needs. That experience led to a series of profound opportunities to provide assistance which eventually resulted in his being presented the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy Award for Humanitarian Service and the great privilege of meeting Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice. Newman blames his insatiable curiosity about complex systems and network visualization on being introduced to the works of Buckminster Fuller by the late futurist Herman Kahn while Newman was still in his teens. Newman’s undergrad studies were in Communications at Bethany College. His graduate studies were in Emergency Health Services System Administration at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. Hal Newman lives near Montreal with his wife Dianne and their twin ten-year-old daughters.