Minutes from November 18th meeting

Morrisville CERT general meeting minutes
November 18th, 2009

6:40 pm
Sharon Vrooman, Secretary of Morrisville CERT called the meeting to order. Gave a quick update to last meetings open items. We had received a few donations towards the funds needed for turning in the application for the 501C3 application. (By end of meeting we had collected enough to be able to send it in – THANKS SO MUCH FOR ALL OF YOUR SUPPORT ON THIS!)

Advised that we wouldn’t be able to pull the “Train the trainer” class together quick enough for the first weekend in December. We are going to try to get it scheduled for January….working with Patty Moore (NC CERT Program Manager) on this…more info to come to those that had signed up.

6:50 pm
Ron Klus, Morrisville Fire Marshal and our CERT liaison with the MFD announced the dates of our next CERT training. We will be doing Wednesday February 17th, Sat / Sun February 20th & 21st then the following Wednesday February 24th and finish up Sat/Sun February 27th and 28th…final exercise on the 28th. A more detailed schedule of times / schedule will be available on the CERT website. Ron also advised he had the sign up form updated on the Town of Morrisville website. Sharon will get with Juan, our website guru, and make sure we have it linked correctly to the new form and to the background check form from the Morrisville CERT website.

7:00 pm
Lillian Whitson, who had volunteered to take on the task of applying for grant monies, gave an update on the new one that we were advised of by Patty Moore. It was a last minute pull together with a lot of help from Ron and Shannon, the Fire Chiefs assistant due to the secretary (yep me) holding it up in my emails. It was a pretty detailed document where we were applying for almost $9k, which had to be broken down into categories of expenditures. Then lots of explanation as to what everything would be used for. Much appreciation goes out to the 3 of them for getting it put together. One of the requirements however is that it has to be approved by the town council before filing it and due to a conflict of interest for Lillian she had to resign from being the Grant chairperson. She is going to continue to be our liaison however with local businesses that offer different grants programs. She will meet with them, find out what is available and then pass that off to Stefanie Reed who has volunteered to be the Grant chairperson.

Lillian also advised that she had talked to the Morrisville Chamber of Commerce who suggested we could possibly collect funds from local businesses (once we have our tax exempt status) in exchange for advertising their business name in print on our CERT shirts or on our brochures. For example…. “Sponsored by Morrisville Deli”

7:10 pm
Introduced Patty Moore, NC CERT Program Manager and guest speaker of the night. She started in this position 8 months ago. Talked of her background of going on a mission trip with a group of teens and worrying that if something happened to one of them while they were fixing a roof how she wouldn’t know what to do. Her husband being a fireman then helped her with some basic first aid training and then she got involved with CERT and then the opportunity with NC Emergency Management came up as the CERT Program Mngr. She spoke of how she is really trying to revamp the “Train the Trainer” curriculum. She is incorporating more hands on training and also including an “adult education” section, which will help the trainees actually learn how to teach others.

She talked about how they had held their first Teen CERT training at a public school in Chatham county and also one had just been held at a private school in Cary. There are also several colleges that are wanting to hold this training on their campus so that there will be trained individuals in the dorms. A few were UNCG, Peace, one in Asheville, etc.

Questions were asked as to whether there is a training offered in Spanish or one that would be able to be accessible to a handicapped individual. Patty said there is a Spanish curriculum available on the main CERT website and the program could be taught to handicapped individuals to be able to help them learn how to take care of themselves during an emergency. A program for the blind was brought up but she did not know of a Braille curriculum being available.

She is also trying to come up with a North Carolina CERT website where all of the 128 current teams could be listed and have links to their own sites on it. Could also have a master calendar of events so that maybe teams could see when other teams are having their trainings and be able to travel to different areas and participate in their final exercises. The more practice / experience the better we can be prepared.

We filled her in on what our current team has done for extended training such as visiting the 911 call center, participating in the Town’s disaster training and learning how to control traffic. She was glad to see that we were willing to help out volunteering in other ways. She mentioned PODS (points of distribution), which are set up when there are bad storms or evacuations. Volunteers are needed to pass out tarps, water, food, etc…. She said if we were interested she would add Morrisville CERT to her contact list and would let us know when we could help out.

She also mentioned that she is trying to put together a statewide exercise utilizing all the NC CERT teams. There is one that she thinks is scheduled for May of 2010 with a hurricane as the disaster…she’ll give an update later.

8:10 pm
Meeting ended and announced that with the Christmas holiday in December and people having lots to do that we would not hold a meeting next month. Next meeting will be January 20th, 2010.