Welcome back. Is there anyone up the back there looking for a seat and they can't find one? Put your hand up if you've got a spare seat next to you. I think they're just lurking at it. Come on everyone, give them a friend. Okay, so we've seen on the screens just before there was a time-lapse setup of everything that's happened sort of yesterday. So a big thanks to Diane Lawson for putting that together. I can put your hands together. She's up the back. She's signing. There she is up the back. Everybody, welcome to day two of what's going to be another amazing day. There's a couple of you that have joined us for the first time today. So welcome to you and if you don't know us, I'm April and this is Jackie and we're going to be your host for today and let's hope that it's another inspired field morning. And you know what it's pretty early. I've been up since the crack of dawn and I reckon we need a little bit of energizing to happen. I'm not going to tell you a joke, but I am going to bring out my fairy friends over here. Captain Kuala and Patty, a little bit of music if we could please Mr. Music Man. And how about we give these guys a bit of a clap. Come on. It's very low-key music. We needed a little bit of pumping action. You know what, there's some good wiggly.  How's these crazy critters? You know what guys, these are our mascots and these are another engagement tool. So remember these are your resources. You can hire them for free from your regional offices. Make sure you guys make the most of these. Use creativity to engage. And I reckon that this just shows the testament. Who feels like we've joined forces this weekend? Who feels like we've got something out of each other? Yeah! You two should give each other a high five. Yeah, give each other a high five. Yeah! I think we should say goodbye now. Say thank you to CK and Patty. Come on.  You're distracting everyone. Go on. So we've got our Q&A this morning. We've got a fabulous panel that's joining us up the front. Oh my gosh, we're just going to wait a moment. Anyone can get in that suit. Anyone. Anybody can do it. So we're going to have a wonderful panel this morning. So from here to field your questions from the CFA, so I'll get them to come up as we sort of scroll them out. We've got the Chief from CFA here today. Please welcome Chief Officer Ewan Ferguson. Also Executive Manager of Community Capability, Andrew Andreo. Community Development, Gwen Brennan. Well, Gwen makes her way up the front. We've also got a panel from the SES. So please welcome the CEO of the SES, Stephen Griffin. We'd also like to welcome the Director of Emergency Management Planning and Communications Ben McFadgen. And we'd also welcome the Manager of Emergency Management Planning, Kate White. Alright, so clearly we won't be able to get to all 500 of you in the next 55 minutes.   Apparently the machine doesn't like it. Computer says no. So try and keep it relevant as well. So there's going to be a couple of roaming microphones. So if you've got a question make sure you pick up your hand and grab a roaming microphone person, which is Gabby standing at the back and Tracy over here. Make sure your text messages and questions are relevant. We're here to get answers to vent. So we've convented another occasion. This is a good time to get answers that are relevant to community safety. Alright, so what do you reckon? You and I, Stephen, do you have anything you'd like to say first before we kick off? Don't have to share your microphones. Look, I might just stand up because I've got the lectern in the way over here just so that I can be seen. But I guess a couple of starting up comments. The first is it is absolutely fantastic to have SES as our partners in what started off as a CFA Community Engagement Forum, I think five years ago. I remember tracking over to Masseter in early one morning. And to see this evolve as a joint agency activity, I think speaks volumes about where the sector is going, but also speaks volumes for this craft of community engagement and community safety within our communities. I'd like to at the outset just thank all of you and your brigades and units for what you do. The work you do has very real outcomes. We measure and we see reported people who lose their lives in fires and other emergencies. We see damaged bills. But what we don't see, probably what we don't report properly enough is a reduction in these incidents as a result of your good work. So I was just saying to a group this morning that often when I'm driving around I'll be listening to the CFA radio and Vic Fire will come on. There'll be a brigade turned out to maybe a kitchen fire. And a lot of the time, a lot of the time the caller will say and we're assembled at the letterbox. And that's a real credit because that's saying that community safety works. On the 9th of February 2014, a significant anniversary of Black Saturday, it was a really, really nasty day. I think we had some areas of the state which were in catastrophic fire danger. And I just want to highlight another real example of how this function is working. There was a fire in the South Warrandyte area. I think it burned three houses and there was another house seriously damaged under some of the most severe conditions that we'd had since Black Saturday. And the fire was put out. But when I sort of had the review of that particular fire it was certainly a success on the day because we had fire and emergency services working together. We had MFB they would have been deputy at the time and CFA working together. We had integrated aircraft response so we'd learn to hold all those things from Black Saturday. But the really, really significant thing was that the community reacted in the right way. The community were there defending their house in the right way. The community had learned a whole lot of lessons from where they had been in the previous four or five years. And in that same community we've seen the community has actually taken control of the bushfire messaging from CFA. And there was a YouTube video that showed the community and it was the voice of the community who was inspiring other members of the community to be fire safe. I just think that was just such a great example of under a severe day the community engagement, the community safety, the fire prevention working and all the agencies working together. So I just think how good is that? I'm going to stop at a moment but I just also want to make a comment that for CFA and I know within the sector we are going down the path of increasing the inclusiveness of the diversity of our organisations. And it's a pleasure as I look out in front of us now to see the number of women and men who are on this journey. And the little steering group from CFA who I had breakfast with this morning. It wasn't constructed this way but half of them were men and half of them were women. And we need to continue to go down the path of diversity of SES and CFA and all of the emergency services. Increasing the diversity means that we will be a better reflection of the community. We will be able to engage more effectively and with greater confidence with the community and they will have greater confidence in us. And I know one of the discussions around the table is how do we get into some of these communities, particularly communities who are refugees, who perceive emergency services and people who wear uniforms and drive flash cars and so on. They perceive us in a different way. So I challenge you when you go back to your brigades and your communities to continue to seek out new members to continue to value the diversity and gender in race, sexuality, skin colour, religion. It might be quite challenging to our current memberships but it's through that diversity that we will become stronger, better and more connected with the community. You do a great job. Thank you very much. Thanks Ewan. I'm owning you to emergency services. I've been with the organisers for just over 12 months. But where I was last night when we were celebrating our 40th anniversary of the SES unit in Rochester, you start to get a bit of a feel for the history and the culture of emergency organisations but also volunteerism. And when I drove over this morning and seeing the numbers of people and obviously the vehicles that get you here you can't be more than proud of the volunteerism and the strength and unity that's in this room. Coming into it new, I saw the emergency management Victoria trying to drive at our level, the new ones level and my level and right across the organisation, that unity and trying to tap into what is a great resource that we have across Victoria. But when you sit practically in the room here and the work that's being done that's where the strength will be for the future. Last night we were talking about what the future brings for the SES in that particular case but imagine what it's going to be like in the next five to ten years. Where you can see what it's going to be like it's going to be actually harnessing the great skill, the talent right across emergency services and not that silo effect which historically has been the way we've been brought up. We've done those particular things in our silos but imagine the energy and the passion that if you put that energy together what you can achieve. So this weekend I want to thank very much the CFA and the SES and the staff and the volunteers that have been involved in organising this. You can see the future is very bright and you can see that if we work together the community of Victoria is in safe hands. So I commend you for your time, your effort and I think this weekend has obviously been something that we can grow into the future. Thank you very much. Right we're going to start, so start your text messages start your hands raised if you've got something that you're burning to start a question with over here, start her off. If you'd like to direct the question to a certain panellist please do otherwise just ask and I'm sure someone will pick it up. Okay, this is a question from the SES team yesterday one of the breakout sessions we heard of the success of the cadet program in New South Wales. Can you see a situation in Victoria where the cadet program is embraceable strongly and driven harder by the organisation? I think I can have a go at that one. I went to a meeting up in New South Wales a few months ago where they sort of did brief us on the program up there and what I found quite interesting was that the New South Wales cadet program wasn't so much about getting kids into a volunteer role and part of the SES was more about sort of educating them about how to prepare for an emergency, what to do when one hits and it's sort of more in that readiness space which, and that's quite a different approach to a cadet ship and the one thing that they sort of were saying okay well that was phase one we're going to start moving into phase two, we're going to look at that recruitment side and it did make me wonder is that something that we can sort of move into I think at the moment and Steve can I guess verify this we want to get our organisation positioned for the future at the moment and then we can look at it sort of later on but at the moment we're sort of more focusing on our current cadre of volunteers and ensuring that we've got the people in place to work in readiness and we're in a response so there's certainly something that's on the cards but not immediately doing that Steve? Yeah I think that we're very open to, we're doing a service review as you know so I think that we're open to all suggestions and I think it's a way you tap into the suggestions that are made around cadets but it's also around making sure that it actually works for our units or our volunteers because I found as if you start to impose those things across the organisation it doesn't work in every case, we're finding that our service has to be tailored for obviously certain communities, it's not one size fits all which is coming out more and more and I'm sure that on that style of cadets thought that it will be tailored and work in certain communities and others might take it up but we're certainly open to the suggestion and then we've just got to make sure that it has been so it doesn't divert us from actually some of the immediate things that we need to do but the question is I suppose how do we tap into new people, youth and diverse communities across Victoria to be part of our SES? Just in adding to that there was a great Sarah Ford from the NALA SES unit presented a really great pilot of a project that she's been doing around kids so it's something very much that we'll be taking, they're kind of getting a briefing from Sarah on that and that might be the way to how do we actually engage children and get their interest in actually joining as a volunteer in the future. I've got a question down the back there Our SES unit has got a cadet program through the local school and we often get one or two cadets out of the end of the VCE year 12 join the unit. I think that's obviously an example where certain communities and it'll work quite well and people drive those sorts of things and we need to support that and others will be going into other spaces so I commend you for the great work that you're doing there. I'm Tony Reid from Conway, sorry about bending your ear last night Ewan but we still want to try. My question is it's with integration. On the fire ground there's many tasks that the SES would be able to undertake, drafting, that sort of thing truck filling. Is there going to be a recommendation come out of training requirements for that to take place and what recognition would have to be put on to maybe the SES uniform or CFA logo to say that they've done min skills and can assist on the fire ground and is there going to be some sort of formal package come out of how we can at brigade level integrate with SES, in my case I've got Invalok and Wontagie and do training together and develop what assistance they can be actually on the fire ground. Thanks Tony and it was Conway for a new heavy tanker. Look, I guess higher level guidance and we've got senior people from the organisations here, I know Craig was here yesterday, John Haines was here yesterday, Steve Warrington is going to be here later on today and our guidance to you is through the words work as one. So those are some words that came up a couple of years ago. Sorry Tony, I'm still trying to answer your question. I'll just ignore that for a moment. What I do want to reinforce is that the majority of the good things that have occurred, the step changes in organisations like SES and CFA have arisen because they're done at the local level first. So with that high level guidance we work as one is your licence if you're in the SES unit and you think you can help CFA or you're in CFA you can think that SES can be of some assistance or it might even be CFA helping life saving Victoria or Red Cross. The example that we're trying to demonstrate with the agencies being on the stage together today as you see the agencies on the stage together when there are emergencies and all those meetings beforehand that it's okay to work together and to go beyond the traditional role because whilst we have our agency mission statements, actually we're here for two things. We're here to serve the community and we're here to do good things and bad things happen to the community. So there's the mission statement and I would say if you think there are a couple of SES units that Comac Brigade or your group of brigades can convene a discussion and come up with an arrangement then that's great. Now the second part of the question is are we going to provide some guidance in how we do that? Can I take that on board? Yeah, we can provide some principles and maybe we need to have a meeting with Steven and his executive team to see how we might better define how CFA units, CFA brigades and SES units work more closer together but it's great that you recognise the need to do it and I would say don't feel constrained just go out and do it and then tell us how successful it is and bring it back to a forum like this Tony. Heavy tanker Conway. I have a question for you and I think Ian Shelton, Eagle Hawk Brigade and Eagle Hawk of course is on the northern fringe of Bendigo and it's got a I guess an at-risk community urban forest interface. So how important do you see it's a question about paths. The property advice visit services are traditionally engaging at-risk residents in those rural urban interfaces and what can we do to reassure our brigades that the knowledge base of our volunteers will be good enough for the task? A great question and I guess when we talk about the prediction of the community there are a range of things we do and I know in that Eagle Hawk area one of the key partners there for your bushfire risk is DELP and Parks Victoria and I know that because I have regular discussions and see the work on the ground, plan burning is a really important part of the response to bushfire there and if I can sort of launch that off, in the last two years there has been a commitment by the government of the day to fund the development of greater understanding about plan burning and involved burning. So that's I suppose one thing. In regards to the property advice service, we've probably come through a bit of a we've had some experiences and we had that initially where we had largely paid staff would go along, people would bring up and it was a very, very expensive service and I know I'm going to get a question about budget later on but I just want to reinforce that as an example where we were very conscious of how much that paid service was costing but we had to balance that against the fact that in a lot of cases the property advice visiting service was able to target the highest risk properties. So part of the evolution of this program in CFA has been to say well actually our volunteers are in many cases just as well equipped and just as experienced and we can give them that bridging training so that volunteers can knock on the doors and it's a you know we're very fortunate, we're one of the few organisations that can develop that relationship with our community by knocking on their door. So I guess the first thing I want to say here is that knocking on doors, the property visiting and advice service is absolutely a great program what we need to do is make sure that it is resourced not only effectively but it's sufficiently resourced and we think the best way of doing that is making sure that volunteers, local people are trained to do it. Now there will be some brigades who will say but we don't have members who can do that work. Our response to that is go out and recruit them because they are in the community and I know as I look around the room here there are people who whose primary role is around community engagement and community education not in responding. I think that's one of the really important messages we need to send about CFA is we're not just about red trucks in responding, we do that when we've had an organisational failure at an incident. We actually see it has been really important to prevent, prepare but that critical role with the community knocking on the door, walking into someone else's property or walking around that property, providing them with the advice is just one of the linchpins. Now the other comment I'd make is that through the help me Andrew, the risk mapping that we do the hazard mapping process, we now have mapped on townships all around Victoria where our highest risk properties are. So what we're saying in terms of value for money is rather than just door knocking the whole of Eaglehawk, let's look at what our risk mapping is doing and let's target our efforts in those areas which are first of all at greatest risk, secondly most vulnerable. So our decision making on where we target our activities will be based on risk and it will be based on vulnerability. I hope that somehow answers your question. I just wanted to add something, yesterday I ran a little session on a disaster and disadvantage and the recent dropping off the edge report from the Jesuit social services Eaglehawks listed as one of the most disadvantaged communities in the state and so we're also looking at the situation where people that have an interaction with us are unable to do the preparedness or the maintenance of their properties and things like that that are required to reduce their risk and we're looking at the partnering with other community sector organisations, caregivers and those about how they can support those people to plan to leave effectively efficiently on high risk days and so on because we may come across people through our PAVS program that we are concerned about and we need to have some sort of referral networks in place to ensure that they get some follow up support with their consent of course and being conscious of privacy issues but so this whole area of working with people who are experiencing disadvantage and may have special needs or a whole range of things is another area that we're tackling at the moment and that's just going to sort of complement those mainstream programs. Thank you. And I'm just going to jump in here because there's a fellow called Chris Eccles who's the Secretary of the Department of Primary Cabinet and one of Chris's broader themes is about co-production. So an example of co-production is rubbish removal. So it used to be you put everything into a rubbish bin and put it out on the nature strip or the service would come along and collect it. Now what happens under this co-production theme we as householders separate out our vegetable waste from our recyclables from our real rubbish. So that's an example where we do that, we're not paid to do it but it's in our interest to do it and then it's a much more efficient way of dealing with rubbish. That's an example of co-production. So wind has just highlighted and we're seeing today with co-production between SES and CFA. But when we go into a property and we notice something wrong we need to be connected up with the council welfare people with the Department of Health and Human Services and with all those other agencies. So that increasingly our role in the community is one not only at providing advice if it's SES about maybe flood and storm or CFA it might be around fire but it might be also saying that we'll provide some advice but we've noticed something else is wrong and we want to put you in contact with someone else who can help you because as Gwynn said a lot of the time those vulnerable people aren't empowered to us to help themselves. So again we need to think of our role our emerging role in developing the capability of the community as being connecting up all these co- organisations who share this responsibility in our community. Thank you. So we'll just go to some of our text questions now. They're flying in thick and fast. I think Andrew you've got a couple you've been keeping note of. Thank you. Look if I can just answer a couple of questions not in any particular order but emergency management planning Ewan the Chief spoke about the agencies working collaboratively we're working with SES and MFB and we've got some joint badge emergency management planning tools you might say. The MFB on behalf of the sector of developing online emergency management manual and caravan parts big SES have taken the lead in relation to that. So instead of the bad old days or whatever you want to call them we're CFA had its and the MFB had its and SES and so on and so forth. We're looking at efficiencies so just to answer that one there was a question about what's the pledge and Jamie will correct me if I'm wrong but you know the pledge is an opportunity for us to work with our community so the community so we can increase the community's understanding of fire risk and no so that but also the community can pledge a fire safety activity for instance check its smoke alarm or manages vegetation or develop a plan or whatever but also can nominate a brigade and it's a bit of a competition because what the team's trying to work on with our region and district folk is looking at different ways of engaging with the community and I know some people have said to us the pledge that's too Americanised people will you know think pledge that actually means something rather than an O for whatever it might be. And then last but not least those maps there was a question about when will those maps be made available or something like that. We're working with our regions and our districts to say that you know we're putting we're putting those maps on brigades online and we're asking our regions and districts to talk with their brigades on how to best grab that information and utilise that information so thanks. And Ben did you have something you want to say about them? I just wanted to sort of a few questions that have come up so the first one about planning which we've got to be talking about but EMB have been doing a lot of really good work over the last year and sort of developing a coordinated, solid approach to planning within the state and it's the same with sort of the community with something that's framed as well so both Luccio and Joe Buffoni, whoops, Sunday morning have been doing, you know, they're leading this project for the moment so we've been engaging with them at the state level and then we're going to start working down for a regional and municipal and down to sort of a community level but we need to get a really coherent approach to it because we're able to sort of go off with our own sort of siloed approach. All it ends up doing is confusing people. I guess the other thing I wanted to refer to as well is going into schools and you know, there's no argument that kids are a really, really good way to get messaging out to a community and that sort of preparedness sort of stuff that are perfectly little ambassadors to do it but if we will sort of go in and so you know, the police go in with their ones and we go in with ours and CFA go in with theirs and me and Bea go in with theirs, they just aren't going to have time to teach the kids how to read and write because that's a lot of work. So we need to have a really, really coordinated approach to doing it and I think that's something that possibly EMB could start sort of working on so we can get this really, really strong coordinated approach to going into schools and do it as you know, we're working as one rather than the sort of siloed approach because the messages that we are trying to get out to communities are essentially the same as you know, it's that sort of getting ready so you know, how to prepare for an emergency and then what to do and I guess one of the other things and I saw the one about triple zero versus one, three, two, five hundred and I've always been quite interested being as you can tell I'm not from around here but the whole concept of fire and other emergencies and it's like well hang on we refer to fire as an emergency and then we refer to, you know, SES does flood storm earthquake tsunami and those are emergencies as well as it's all one thing we should be talking about and emergency regardless of what it is so that's why it's interesting probably when, if you want to jump in because this is your baby as well so CFA and SES put some money in through the National Disaster Resilient Grants scheme and just about to embark on a project around putting the team messages within the curriculum and getting teachers to actually deliver it through the schools which is a really good way to get through to the kids. Would you want to say some more on that? Yeah, it's aimed at sort of the safety of the students presently as they are as students but also this notion of generational change and we're creating the next generation that is more risk aware has a range of resilience, resiliency that will carry them forward so we don't have to, the people coming up behind us don't have to beat their heads quite as hard against the brick wall as we do to get people to accept the risk and do something about the risk so it's sort of multifaceted so we're working to produce fantastic resources for the teachers to use and provide professional learning for the teachers to give them the confidence to deliver it and our aim is that every young person in the State of Victoria will participate in disaster resilience education at some point in their lives so big aspirational goals but I reckon we'll get there. We've heard a lot about short term risks I was just wondering when the SES and CFA are going to put out a definitive statement on the science of climate change it's got to be the greatest long term risk and short term risk that we're facing I'm glad you brought that up the 14th of July we had a forum that was collaboration with the emergency management of Victoria and the emergency services where we put climate change on the agenda and we worked with leaders from the organisations and a number of people up here attending that day and we looked at developing some principles for the sector to consider as well as short, medium and long term actions it's still in its formative phase so you're absolutely right it's something that we need to grapple with and I know Craig in his strategic action plan I think that's what the S stands for he's put the teaser in there to say we need to start thinking about the future and climate change because one part is the emergency events but we've got to start the journey sometime and I suppose at least we've started it but part of it is the emergency events but also part of it is the sustainability of our communities and we have a lot of people that work on the land so what does it mean for Victoria's food bowl but also emergency events in the future so yes I think we've been a bit slow but we've started our journey now Thanks my name is Tim McNeely from the Golden Square Brigade just recently we've had to I guess is the right term to elect a community safety officer in our brigade which we traditionally didn't have and traditionally we've always left the community safety role up to our regional community safety team so that it was a consistent message coming from the state where we think we've got our finger on the pulse with community engagement but we're struggling to really define what the community safety officer's role is the position description that comes with it is hugely broad and a lot of it's not relevant to us so we're really after some guidance about what's the expectation of this person in our brigade are they expected to be taking on some of the role of the regional community safety team or is it more just about community engagement but it's termed community safety. Hi very good question there part of it is local needs for addressing local needs with local solutions we wanted it to be broad so that you can choose what's most appropriate in your situation we have brigades that are taking baby steps and brigades that are cable of running the Olympic 100 metres so we've got brigades across the whole gamut so rather than being prescriptive and alienating a whole load of people but we thought it would be a bit more performance based as such and enabling the partnership between our districts and the brigades to say in your situation your community needs your level of development this is what we recommend that you do there's no right or wrong. We don't do community engagement well if you talk to your neighbour you're doing community engagement and then you've got other brigades that might do fire safe kids and so on and so forth so rather than being prescriptive and again we welcome your feedback if you want more guidance and more prescription because I know in our organisation SOPs and so we like that sort of stuff so if we want a bit more prescription then the message will be fed up and then we'll work fed up I don't mean fed up but fed up and we'll work with our regions and our districts and help provide guidance. Does that answer your question? Tim I might just say 5 years ago there were 40 brigades represented this forum I think we got 205 brigades so in 5 years we've actually multiplied by 5 number of brigades. The introduction of a role of community safety officer at brigade level is a way of CFA corporately saying traditionally we've had a captain of tenants and apparatus and all that sort of stuff of saying this is a really important role and we want every brigade to consider putting someone into that role that's how important we see it but it is a bit of an evolution and it's really good feedback and perhaps we do need to give a bit more guidance particularly when you're in an environment like golden square. Thank you. Kate do you have anything you'd like to say about the KEF role similar to expect a similar kind of story for us? Thanks Jackie. So SES now has a competency based course ability so the community education facilitator course is a PUA we currently have 100 and many of you in the room today around that but it's really giving a really good grounding for you to actually go out and have the tools and the sources of building capacity and capability and actually engaging with the communities and on the back of that we're actually then building what from pick off the shelf or tools for your toolbox some really useful resources for you to go out and actually engage with the community so it's about what's the carrot against what's the best thing for your buck and actually going through that but it's really exciting for us at the moment to build this side of the agency and very working closely with CFA in making sure that we don't want to be going in on a Monday to a community and talking about fire and then turning up on a Tuesday and talking about flood and then on Wednesday going in and talking about something completely different again. So there's a whole range of behaviour change that's coming in and it's a phased approach about how we do that until we can get more mature in the way that we conduct this business but really exciting for us. I'll take one on the floor Gabby. Yes, hi Dave Botherway from Writerless ECS. You mentioned before there were some joint publications being prepared with ECS, CFA and MFP. Whatever it appears to me should be a lot better integration particularly for us metro units with the MFP particularly now they've got heavy rescue functionality. Could you like to update us on any further integration that's happening with MFP because otherwise they appear to be left out of this particular loop. So we are doing some projects under the auspice of emergency management Victoria so the community based emergency management project so that's been running for the past 12 months. We looked at going into what we could turn a vertical community so high rises and culture. It's a really interesting concept because unlike most community communities you're walking the front door to a lift well and that's a concrete wall and then you're going up the lift and you really don't have that general sense of community. So some of the co-paging around that is around that specific pilot project. We are always calling up when to say where can we actually join up and do some work together. We've got some really great buy-in around our cold program so very much with MFP, Victoria police and CFA on that and we're getting some really great traction as well from Department of Health and Human Services and some of our other key partner agencies. So we are actually doing this more and more often. We're getting a great buy-in. There is great buy-in at this stage I have heard from yesterday there are still some challenges on the ground to actually work together around that and we'll support you in every way that we can to make sure that the messages are going up down and across to make sure that everybody is actually that we are all integrated and this is the way of the future and it's a really great mission to get on board with. Let's take one on the floor Tracy. Hi Nick Waldron, Emerald. I just want to agree with one of the texts that came through, you're the man, okay? Anyway, I'm the bloke who's going to bring up budgets. Sorry Ewan. I had a discussion with DCO Haynes who was on the stage yesterday regarding budgets and I'll ask, and this is directed at the SES as well is that we need tools and the equipment to do the comm heads stuff we do and I am just getting a little bit, I won't swear, annoyed, thank you, annoyed that all I hear is there's no budget, there's no budget, there's no budget and I think I'm just getting fed up with it and I get dispirited, I get you know, I just want to ask both of you is to reconsider how the budgets are put together regarding CommMead CHOI and I'm going to give you an example of veritable message boards. They are absolutely vital up in the downhill on ranges to get the messages out to the communities not only in Emerald but the whole of the downhill on ranges and I'm appealing to you Ewan is to look at the budget and see if the downhill range is one of the third highest risk areas in the world so we need to get those messages out and we can't do it, we're just handing out leaflets at events and delivering stuff and all that we need stuff to be put firmly in people's faces, there's fire restrictions coming total fire band aid today etc etc and this goes to SES as well, I'm sure they have the same problem as well so that's my question and So we'll do this shared between Stephen and I so that I'll make all the platitudes and no promises and then Stephen can pick up the rest I actually did get some warning Adam Barnettis in the audience somewhere, I saw him out in the car park and he said there's going to be a question about budgets and I said that's easy because you know I'll just tell him we work within the budget and he said don't try that line because it's not going to work but look I could go into a safety forum, I could walk onto any fire station last night I had a passionate group who are asking for heavy tanker at Kongma everywhere across our organisation there are passionate people who are wanting money to follow through with their particular project and I guess it's not an easy job sifting and sorting that and government are high on the list, government come along and they'll fund certain projects and often they are big projects which take a lot of money which sometimes distract us so I suppose my challenge back to you is to say yes we'll certainly take on board every year we try and win extra resources I see the role of people like Steven and mine pretty simple we create a bit of direction and a lot of the time that comes from you people we win resources so that you can do what you've got to do and then we take the blame when it goes wrong but I guess a reflection and I've probably been a little bit unfair to my community safety people I don't know that we've said what's the number one priority of community education, community engagement activity that we absolutely have to fund and if we've got this amount of money you know let's rank them and order them to make sure that whatever funding we've got is going into the most effective ways now I know there are conversations and we do evaluation of our community safety program but I'm just not sure where it's held in is that I can't promise additional funding for the community education, community safety function but what I can say yesterday you would have seen Michael Wooden here, you would have seen Mark Thomas, we had Mark Solomon, I don't know whether he's still here, he banged the drums yesterday we had John Haynes here yesterday, Steve Warrington is winding up with a where to from here you've got me here today so you've got a lot of and obviously Andrew is here with Quinn, you've got a lot of senior people who by their very presence and commitment are saying we support you if you're saying you need more money that message is received and received loud and clear and maybe we've got to do better we'll try and do that, Steven from our point of view obviously our budget is quite a lot smaller than others in the emergency management field but what we're doing is working very hard with the current government about the terms of reference to look at our funding we're looking at the moment about our service review so what services we'll be in and obviously this education resilience and working with our community is high on the agenda for us to move into and do more of and we're doing that within obviously budgets that are pretty restricted at the moment but the terms of reference that we've put up to the government to look at a parliamentary review is all the sounds are very good for government about saying we really need to look at how we resource the SES in the future and we need to do that in a bipartisan way because what tends to happen to us is probably happens to a number of organisations including the CFA is you go into an election cycle and you get promises from one side and it doesn't get reflected if there's a change of government so we need to get much better bipartisan support about what we need as a sector so we're doing that at the moment so I think that's a very positive for us and hopefully we'll see some announcements around that but the other thing I think is exactly what we're doing in this room today is the state government and federal governments are really struggling as they'll tell us to find revenue sources for all the things we want to do and we see that debate around taxation etc. we've got to come back with well how do we work much more efficiently with the resources that we've got in a combined way and that's exactly what we're doing in these sorts of forums is saying well the resource scarce resources that we've got on our plate how can we actually work together so that governments can see that they're getting great value from the money that they're putting out. I'm not saying that we don't need more but at least I think we can put up our heads and saying well of the resources that are out there we're actually working very efficiently and we've got some work to do I know and that but I think that we can put up our heads high and say in the emergency services sector we're turning our mind to how can we look at those scarce resources and use them better. So there's a couple of I think positive things that are happening already both in the SES but the sector wide. One from the floor. Chief, Don Gallick from Wendery. There's been a couple of text messages and I just want to talk a little bit about the fire services review that's just kind of come out of nowhere. I've got some deep concerns about integration and amalgamation which everybody we are as one except that I think that different groups have different ideas about what that means. My concerns are around the loss of integrated brigades the loss of the title firefighter, things that are mentioned in the terms of reference. It's a great opportunity you've talked to a large group of especially that I apologize to SES colleagues to the CFA volunteers about some of the implications of the fire service review. Thanks Don and for those who might not be aware the government announced the review of the fire services so it was interesting that it wasn't about the sector as such and without having the terms of reference in front of me there are some important common words there. One of the terms of reference dealt with the resourcing of the fire services so you might go to the previous question that maybe this is an opportunity to say in some areas we're not properly resourced. It also very much went to the question about interoperability. I guess I'd put it in the context that we are on a journey and if one looks at a lot of ministerial statements it talks about reform within the emergency management sector and there's been some huge changes even in the last five years since 2009 not only about how the emergency services work but also how we work with the broader emergency management sector. In terms of one fire service or one fire emergency service I think one doesn't need to go any further than the statement by emergency services minister Jane Garrett on Thursday when the review was announced and on Friday I think she spoke on John Fane and she was very firm in saying that this is not about one fire service. However we need to recognise that these reviews often will be a bit dispassionate, independent and they may point to things that we can do to make us more effective and more efficient with MFB. So my view with the fire services review is to welcome it and if it points to ways in which we can become more efficient, more effective then that's a good thing. I also back to the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission where the topic of a single fire service was debated long and hard and the evidence is still on the Victorian Bushfire Commission Royal Commission report and there was some very strong evidence given by a number of emergency management consultants and experts in change that said just because you've got fire, common as the middle word in your organisational name doesn't mean you should be one organisation that you need to consider the culture and the people within the organisation I think this goes to the hard what you were saying Don. So you know the if Craig Lapsley was here, you know this terminology we've got about working as one you know that it's working as one, not working as one team so I think there's a bit subtle here and I think we recognise that each agency, be it Red Cross or SES or Victoria Police or CFA has developed with a long history and a culture which each agency is really proud of its culture and you can't change that overnight and you need to respect that because if you don't you'll end up losing the people and particularly the volunteers so I'd suggest that the journey we're going down Don is one where we continue to work more closely with each other example in front of us today with SES and CFA but we need to challenge ourselves to do that even better will we be changing the one fires don't know it won't be a political decision but the minister signalled quite strongly on Friday that that's not what's on the agenda it's about the efficiency, effectiveness and the funding of the fire services now I probably haven't spent as much time analysing the terms of reference as I should have but I hope that somehow gives my position on it and reflects what I've heard the minister saying about it Don. You've got time for one more question can you talk about SES? It's not on it, it is on it. Where is Julder on West Fire Brigade? You talked about budgets and I was just wondering whether there's an opportunity in terms of economies of scale to build community safety training programs that are across the sector so rather than the CFA building a training program to train its volunteers on how to deliver community safety and the SES doing the same thing with the community facilitation we could save some money by actually working together to deliver one community safety training package that could be then trained across both sectors and that just not just works for community safety also and I think I picked up before also extends through to primary schools as well like I picked up I think if I heard correctly it was Ben was saying that there is going to be some work done around building a training program to deliver to primary schools across agencies, is that correct? In terms of can we get economies of scale by working together to deliver one training program to train our volunteers to deliver community safety messaging? Yeah I mean I think on the first instance it's I think in the first instance we have to agree on messaging and that's part of what we're doing with EMV as well as again it's Craig actually said EMV is not an organisation it's the way we're going to do emergency management and it's emergency management for Victoria and I think in the end space that EMV has only been around for a year they're doing some really good work it's going to take a little bit longer for what they're working on to really they're rubber to hit the road so it's certainly on the radar and it's the pin is getting faster and faster if you like so but I think that's the way to go you know I was thinking about it earlier that I mean there's all sorts of questions that have come up on the screen and I sit there thinking of an answer and by that stage it's just moved on but there's a lot of great work that's being done and a lot of work in that consolidated space you know I mean I said there was one thing about emergency management throughout Australia and I mean at ECS we've been working on this revision of our strategic communications approach you know messaging and going out to communities we've actually talked to the other ECS's around the country and then we'll go on yeah we're in and so if we actually get this through it could be the first example of a nationwide campaign for ECS which should just be a magic one and absolutely but just to build on that at the national level at AFAC we've got a community safety group and all the agencies work together to look at because 80% of what we do is the same it's just the context has changed whether it's fire, whether it's flood, whether it's earthquake, whether it's whatever it might be so at a national level AFAC's been providing a lot of leadership and I know that you know SCS or the SCFA they're someone and so forth so that we get consistency and we also look at economies of scale it'll take time 20 years ago it was no you can only talk about one message now it's you have one opportunity to talk to the community so talk to them about safety and I suppose the next step for us is it might not be us talking to the community it might be another group so how do we empower that other group so they can pass their message when they're talking about food or when they're talking about whatever it might be sorry guys we will have to wrap it up we have gone a bit over time yeah I'm sorry we will have to move on someone has asked a question can we get a copy of all the comments that have come up so we've said yes that's going to happen so Haright I think we should come across and I think that's what these guys have displayed so well done alright so now we've got a longer breakout before morning tea so start thinking about where you're going to head please be mindful the mobile education unit is outside on the bus to my left in 30 people only so first


Hi, everyone, Joe for jaspeyscasebreaks.com, coming at you with 2020 Panini National Treasures Football 2 box, random team break number 30. The second half of the case that we popped open last night. Remember, we marked those random team 30, so we know they're from the same case. Very big thanks to everyone here who got their spots straight up and congrats again to the winners of those spots and those filler breaks. And all 32 teams are in. Let's roll it. Let's randomize names and teams four to six ten times. Got Tre Mancini and Pete Alonzo in the home run derby finals. Mancini at what, 21-22 home runs? Might not be enough. Pete's been hitting the ball really well. All right, four to six ten times for names and teams. One, two, three, four, and tenth and final time. Matthew down to Matthew. Four to six ten times for the teams. One, two, three, four, nine, and tenth and final time. It was four to six ten times. There's ten times right there. Bills down to Browns. All right, Matthew with the Bills. Ryan with the Packers. Matthew with the Chargers and the Niners. PJ with the Bangles. William with the Eagles and Ravens. Matthew with the Falcons. PJ with the Raiders and the Texans. Matthew with the Giants and the Lions. PJ with the Cardinals. Matthew with the Jags. PJ with the Titans. Scott with the Panthers. Sean with the Cowboys. Scott with the Bears. PJ with the Patriots. Scott with the Vikings. PJ with the Colts. Chad with the Jets. Sean with the Chiefs. PJ with the Steelers. Washington football team and Denver. Matthew with the Buccaneers and the Dolphins. Sean O with the Seahawks. PJ with the Rams and Matthew Shear with the Saints and the Cleveland Browns. It's alphabetized by team. And we're going to pause the video and allow for a little bit of a trading window when we come back. We'll see if there's any trades and then we'll have the break. Stick around. All right, welcome back everyone. Home on Derby's back. I'm back. No trades were made. So that list just remains the same. Thanks everyone for getting in on it. Much appreciated. There's random team 30. Good luck. I did not see any more NT football in the back. So for now, I think this is it. So we can scour the earth for more. All right, so Peter Lanzo just needs to beat. Well, I've got a little financial investment in Tre Mancini. But Peter Lanzo, I don't know. I think he's going to hit over 22 home runs. Yeah, he's feeling it. Peter Lanzo is going to win. He's going to have 30 home runs, maybe. All right, here's a blank card, a slow play of the hits a little bit. Card. This one's a nice clean blank card here. We're going to lead off with 4 out of 25. Stefan digs. Matthew Shearer with the Buffalo Bills. 95 out of 99. Kenny G. That's going to be for Matthew and the Lions. You've got Marquez Valdez scantling to 99. Tremendous Treasures Relic. Ryan with Green Bay. Peter Lanzo is cruising right now. We've got a Dual Relic, rookie NFL gear combo. That's Zach Moss on top. Gabriel Davis on the bottom. 19 out of 99. Another one for Matthew and the Bills. Century Materials. 1 out of 25. Robert Woods. A little bit of a rough edge right there, but nice three color patch for PJ and the Rams. Another Dual Relic. 5 out of 50. Deandre Swift. Matthew Shearer and the Lions. We've got a Kenneth Murray. 35 out of 56. For the Bolts, that's going to go to Matthew and the Chargers. Darnell Mooney. 70 out of 99. Scott with the Bears. There's the book. It's rookie Jumbo Prime signatures. 57 out of 99. Gabriel Davis. Buffalo. Nice patch. Nice auto. Matthew Shearer with the Buffalo Bills. We'll set that aside. We'll put that in a nice slider box when I get one after this break. And the last one here is Jonathan Taylor for the Blue Horseshoe. 79 out of 99. Two color patch and autograph. PJ with the Colts with a spot that he won. Oh, nice, Eric. Are you talking about the Trinity break? I don't think there's anything sold out after this. That might be our very next one. All right, last box. We've got another book on the bottom right there. All right, final box. Good luck. Saquon Barkley to 50. Matthew with the Giants. Treasured Moments. Vaughn Miller to 99. That is for PJ and Denver. You know, Tremendous Treasures. O.J. Howard. 8 out of 99. Matthew Shearer with the Buccaneers. A minute, he's going to hit more than five home runs in a minute, right? There's Teddy Brusky. 33 out of 99 for the Pats. PJ and the Patriots. There's C.D. Lamb. Tremendous Treasures. Oh, yeah, he's got the C.D. Lamb Relic. Petalanzo wins the 2021 Home Run Derby. C.D. Lamb goes to Sean and the Cowboys. We got Joe Namath, Sentry Materials to 49. That's pretty cool. Chad with the Jets. Cam Acres. Jersey and autograph for the Rams. 96 out of 99. That's PJ with the Rams. Cole Comet. 28 out of 85. Three-color Patch and Autograph for Scott and the Bears. One more than the book. We've got a Drew Lock. 22 out of 25. Jersey and Autograph. Denver. It's going to be for PJ. And the last one is going to be Jalen Hertz. 59 out of 99. Rookie Jumbo Prime Signatures. Nice Patch. Nice Auto. And that is for William S. and the Philadelphia Eagles. The Fly Eagles Fly. Nice. And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Another great two box break of 2020 Panini National Treasures football in the book. That was Ram Team Number 30. Keep your eye out for more on jaspyscasebreaks.com. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.


Plas Wichesh Fouclaw Milila.   叛                                                                                ok so why is ah of floral dress my dress national wear ڡ passion ڡ ڡ ڡ ڡ ڡ ڡ ڡ ġ ڡ ڡ ġ ġ ġ ڡ ڡ ڡ araoh ڡ ڡ ڡ ġ ڡ ڡ ữa ڡ ڡ ġ ڡ ڡ ڡ n āx p title ڡ m' PKIĒĀ ز當然νε carriers ڡ lā ڡ eomte ako já t 1992 n?? ڡ lâ jia tÁ scup the Yeah Back, you make you they didn't play with you or what we have plan to do is to have community So, from September to October would be the community services. At CDF Café by Nukai, me komsi nukai a festival school drive where the Lamagrit groups will go to schools and educate the students about the dance, the song, the meaning of Lamagrit and the difference between the two flowers. Uhasav, there is a difference. And we're also going to do training programs for the groups in terms of, you know, their organization. So, we have a plan but instead of me telling you, let's see what that is. Viv Lamagrit Royal, the Lamagrit Societies and the Cultural Development Foundation presents Lamagrit Celebrations 2023 a royal affair that celebrations start with the Lamagrit Grand Ball on October 14 featuring world-renowned inclusion chefs and appearances by Lamagrit groups from around the island. To top it off, the war felt October 16 starting with the church service at St. Joseph's, the work of church in Rosalie and then on to climax on the streets of Rodney Bay, Viv Lamagrit Royal. Shonji. C'est commune l'an qui j'a choisi pour chain jeunais qui y'all planer ça la. C'est Kanawi, Soufoyais et puis Valais Mabouya. Bon, y'all j'a commencé. C'est pas sel m'a pour jeunais qui y'all mais pour moi et Wittage qui y'all y'all n'ai plusieurs, plusieurs diffons à activité. M'a voulut participer à ces activités, activités ça la paswitches folk la aussi n'y gwan activité à diffon à commune. Alors m'a kama d'aupo participer pis qui c'est Sanui, il le participe fereo gum, m'a kama d'a serve sa fereo gum ek anu gadek m'anyan n'kain fe kui o la.


to have you all here. So thank you all for coming. I'm Matilda McQuaid, I'm acting director of Curatorial and I'd like to welcome you to our fifth program of the series Behind the Design. This is a lunchtime discussion for our curators, conservators, educators and other specialists to come together for conversation around our collection and exhibition. So, and it's an opportunity for you, the audience to ask questions. So I encourage you to put your questions in the Q&A part of this presentation. So you can see it down at the bottom, not the chat, but the Q&A. Also just wanted to let you know that our next program, we have two programs this September, for this September, will be on September 28th and we'll focus on the exhibition that we just opened a few days ago, Underground Modernist, E. McKnight-Calfer. And it's a must see. So please come into the Cooper Hewitt. If you are local or nearby, it's free to the public through October. So, first a big shout out to Phoebe Moore and Robin Carter are helping with this program today. And so on to the program, we're going to hear from Susan Brown, who's acting head of textiles. Alexa Griffith-Witton, who is manager of content and curriculum at Cooper Hewitt. And they're curating the 2023 exhibition on Dorothy Leibis. And they are joined by Liza Curran, who's the interim director at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. And Erin Kenhart, who's the head of collections processing at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. And they recently digitized the Dorothy Leibis papers at the archive. So welcome to you all and let's talk Leibis. Thank you, Matilda. And thank you all so much for joining us. As Matilda mentioned, we're here to celebrate the recently completed digitization of the Dorothy Leibis papers at the Archives of American Art, generously funded by the Kobi Foundation. For the first time, the complete papers are available to the public online and no one is more thrilled than Alexa and me as we prepare for the first monographic exhibition on Dorothy Leibis in over 50 years. The papers help us to understand the breadth and scope of her career, which was huge, but also to look more holistically at mid-century design because Dorothy Leibis was truly woven through every aspect of the design field from domestic and commercial interiors to industrial design to fashion and film. So we're gonna start with a brief five minute overview of her career for those of you who may be less familiar with her life and work. And then I'll have some questions for our panel and at the end we'll have time for questions from the audience. So please put those in the Q&A box. We would also love to hear from you if you knew Dorothy Leibis or anyone who worked in her studio. So we'll drop an email in the chat where you can reach us. Dorothy Leibis was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She studied art at UC Berkeley and art education at Columbia. But it was after studying weaving that she developed a vision and an ambition for the prominent role that textiles could play in the modern interior. Over a period of 40 years from when she opened her first studio in the early 1930s until her death in 1972, her approach to textiles was instrumental in defining the look and feel of American modernism.  Sorry, please be patient. My internet is saying it's a little bit unstable which is unusual for me. So I'm hoping it's momentary but that's the lag in getting the presentation up. Give me just one sec please. I'll keep going in case because we have such a short amount of time here. The architecture was one of Dorothy's great passions and she aligned herself early on with some of the most important architects and interior designers of her time including Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Dreyfus, Donald Deskey, William Paulman, Francis Elkins, Samuel Marx. Leibis felt that modern architecture with its vast expanses of glass required a completely new textile vocabulary with her woven blinds and screening fabrics. She offered solutions to practical issues of privacy and light mitigation. Although we associate her with the indoor outdoor California modern look by the 1940s, her textiles were synonymous with sophistication and glamour from Honolulu to New York. As you see in these examples from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and Raymond Lowe's apartment. There we go. Thanks Alexa. She also contributed to the spatial arrangement of rooms with freestanding screens, movable space dividers and rigid translucent panels formed from textiles and acrylic like this wall in the Arthur Keating apartment designed by Samuel Marx. Go ahead. And these retractable screens for the United Nations Delegates Dining Room. Thanks. Although Leibis is known for her love of color she did design for several clients with important art collections where she used texture and metallic sparkle to convey luxury. As far as we know, Doris Dukes Honolulu Home Shangri-La is the only interior where the Leibis fabrics remain in place as they were originally installed. Next. She was a close friend of Frank Lloyd Wright and worked with him on his home and studio, Taliesin, the Estonian Exhibition House, the Price Tower in Oklahoma and other interiors.  Most of the time Leibis's work was reproduced in half-tone prints like the image in the center. It's only in the interior designers rendering on the left that you see the critical role of color in that space which is carried entirely by the textiles and by encountering the textiles themselves that you understand the tactile experience of being in that space. The images also fail to convey the seductive glimmer of metallic fibers, one of Leibis's signature materials as they were activated by natural and artificial light. By using archives in conjunction with museum collections we can begin to piece together different types of documents that together illuminate just how central textiles were to the design of these spaces. Next. In addition to interior fabrics, Leibis created textiles for fashion designers, Paulien Triget, Claire Potter and Bonnie Cashin, women designers associated with the American style of functional clothes for active women. And for those who love the look but not the price, Leibis fabrics were also used by a variety of hat, bag and shoe manufacturers and distributed at department stores nationwide, including the Stoles on the right by Carol Stanley. The model you see there is photographed in Dorothy Leibis's studio, posed in front of her Ramshead loom, which today is in Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Next. The Leibis look was also disseminated through Hollywood films. Her fabrics and woven blinds were used for the sets of the Hepburn Tracy romantic comedy, Adam's Rib and the Barbara Stanwick nightclub, Noir Eastside, Westside. Next. She designed custom woven fabrics for costumes created by Hollywood designers like Adrienne Edith Head and Travis Banton and worn by stars like Lucille Ball, seen here in promotional photos for the film, Love or Come Back. Next. Leibis was deeply committed to making good design accessible to all. And eventually she gave up her lucrative custom fabrics business to create hand woven samples for interpretation on industrial looms at affordable prices. She became a color and design consultant to a dozen U.S. firms, including DuPont, Dobeckman and Dow Chemical, who sought her expertise and leveraged her reputation as a taste maker to help them build markets for new materials like Orlon, Dacron and Lurex. Leibis's reach extended to industrial and transportation design, including passengers ships, automobiles and airplanes. She worked with her friend, Henry Dreyfus, on a range of projects, including the American Airlines flagship 747 and the luxury passenger ships, SS independence and constitution. This letter from the archives captures the personal side of their relationship, reading, did you ever get a million carnations we sent you for your birthday with a hand-drawn sketch of a red carnation? Next. Leibis designed nearly all the fabrics, both hand and power loomed for the SS United States, the lightning fast luxury passenger ship that in many ways embodied the American economic, industrial and cultural dominance after World War II. This piece in Kirk Hewitt's collection will be the subject of today's behind the design discussion. So, Liza, can you tell us how the Dorothy Leibis archive came to be at the Archives of American Art and how did Leibis come to the top of your list for digitization? Sure. First, I wanna thank Susan and Alexa and Cooper Hewitt for shining such a bright light on Dorothy Leibis. And Erin and I are so pleased to participate in this celebration. As Susan mentioned, it's really surprising that she isn't better known, but she is known to us very well, the Archives of American Art, because her collection is one of the most heavily used of personal business papers. And the story of how they came to the archives is really one of our effort to document the history of the visual arts through collecting primary sources. In the 1960s, our director, Van Bill Wolffenden, knew her as a distinguished textile designer. There was also a personal connection because the president of our Board of Trustees, Russell Lyons was the managing editor of Harper's Magazine, and he knew both Dorothy Leibis and her husband, Raulman Moran, who was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press Correspondents. And following Russell Lyons' lead, we reached out to Leibis in October 1968 to ask her about her papers and the possibility of us microfilming them. And she was on board with the project, but before I could come to fruition, she died. And we took up the conversation with her husband in November, 1972, and we visited the Leibis studio on Lexington Avenue and met with him and also Ralph Higbee, who was the director of her studio. And the papers came to the archives New York office between 1972 of December, 1972 and March, 74. And they've been available to researchers in our DC office ever since. But Kathy Gaines, an archivist on our staff, produced the first finding aid. And then last year, their arrangement was refined by Stephanie Ashley with funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art. And this year, we digitized the entire collection with funding from the Kobe Foundation. And this is a foundation that specifically funds projects in the field of textile and needle arts. So we're particularly grateful to have this funding because the collection is one of our most frequently consulted. And so it makes perfect sense for us to make it available online and what perfect timing with your retrospective exhibition. So we're doubly pleased that this has come to fruition now. I think it's amazing that her papers are so frequently requested. And I think it really speaks to what a key place she plays in the mid-century design story. So after Dorothy Liebes died, Ralph Higbee dispersed the textiles remaining in the studio to universities and museums across the country, including Cooper Hewitt. But I can say from experience that they mostly came with very little information about the specific projects that they were created for. So a lot of textile collections like Cooper Hewitt's will really come to life and be given new layers of meaning by the information in this archive. Alexa, you have spent a lot of time in the archive visiting in person as a design historian. Can you tell us how you first fell down the Liebes rabbit hole? Yeah, it's a very specific moment that I will never forget in my life and in my career. I was doing some research at the Metropolitan Museum. I was doing some writing for their timeline of art history and they let me kind of run loose in their files for my research. And I came across a tag for a Liebes panel that had been for the United Nations, a project that she had done for the United Nations. And my research is American design history primarily, especially interior design. I was really familiar with that United Nations project and of course I had never heard of her. We're all very familiar with that famous photo of all the male architects. That's sort of how the Corbusier and all the rest kind of fighting to get to design the UN and that's sort of how design history has represented that project. So I became really, really interested in finding out more and it was difficult to find out more, but it started this kind of cascade of research and the first line of approach was things like textbooks and design history and there's very little about Liebes there. So then New York Times archive and then there's more and I'm starting to see more and more, oh, she worked in fashion. Oh, she was often covered in terms of the home section of New York Times often had her. But almost immediately I could see that the history of design was not like what I was finding, even in those first sort of fishing expeditions was not at all reflected in the history of American design. So that made me even more curious. And so the first time I was able to get funding to go to the archives of the American art, that was really like, it was almost like these doors keep opening one after another, if you achievement unlocked, if you work hard and so there are many and that was really, at that time they were only minimally processed. So it is really truly such a thrill that they are digitized now and organized so beautifully. But even previous to their processing it was so incredible to just open a box and then you find this correspond and you start to see how central she was to the story of American design. And her network of contacts and friends are all well-known names to those of us who study design history. So it's Henry Dreyfus, or include Wright, also Francis Elkins in the interior design sector. But then you start to also see all of the ways she intersected with it. Through the hand weaving which is probably the best known but through the industrial design, through the studio that she called a laboratory through her work in fashion which she didn't talk about a lot but actually as you and I are discovering there's quite a lot left to learn and to study about that. And then of course the film which was a revelation. So almost the more I kind of dug in the more rewarding it was. But I also quickly realized that there was I was gonna have to be very creative as a researcher and that a lot of the periodicals and this has changed. I started this in 2007, 2008, something like that. And a lot has changed since then but when I first started this shelter magazines in general like House and Garden, House Beautiful, which are so important to design history were not index. Hand Weaver and Craftsman was a really important publication for her not indexed. So I had to be really creative and eBay was a little bit of an archive for me and I bought a lot of stuff on eBay. And then so I had to, because design history was not kind of reflecting her at all I had to be really creative about how I kind of tried to pull together that information. But I did and I continue as I spend time with you on this project and thinking about leave us feel so compelled to do my very best to share the work of this incredible designer. And so I worked really hard to do that through publications or whatever, it was never enough but I wanted to kind of get her story out there in the way that I could because I do feel that this is a story that is necessary to the history of modern design. And so it's really such a thrill and an honor to be here today to talk with all of you about leave us but also to be working on this retrospective after so many decades of her, really not having that opportunity to share her work with a broad public. Yes. And Alexa has published some excellent articles in the past on Dorothy Bevis and we will share those citations with you in our follow-up email after this program. For now, let's return to that drapery panel that we showed you from the SS United States. As an example of this hunting process. So Erin, can you tell us about the various places in the archive where documents about this project are hidden away? Yes. So most of the documents about the projects such as the SS United States panels are found within the collection's large series of subject files. They span over eight linear foot boxes of material and the file, the subject files are based on leave us original arrangement and contain correspondence, printed material, photographs, memoranda forms and other types of varying invariant combinations. They focus heavily on her consultation work for businesses in the textile industry including many files on her work with Dupont, Goodall, Dow and others. Documentation on the SS United States panels are somewhat hidden within the subject files. You do have to do a little bit of digging around and look at specific dates of course. There is a register of orders from 1949 to 1951 that includes panel orders in 1950 for this project but frustratingly it gives very minimal details on the materials that were part of the project. Later in the 1950s her documentation practices seemed to have changed and the files and in the files caught orders completed from 1958 to 1967. There are a sequence of memos, order confirmation forms and purchase orders that give many more details and bring to light the work she did in 1960 for an upholstery project for the same ship. There's another group of folders in the subject files called studio business that primarily contain letters and memos from studio employees to leave us when she was away. These letters are another good source of information on the decision-making processes for fabricating samples and selecting yarns and dyes for projects such as this one. Leva's also documented her work and professional achievements in a series of 33 scrapbooks which are very fragile and difficult to serve in the reading room. So I'm happy we can bring these to researchers digitally now but they provide a great visual timeline for her projects. Her 1952 scrapbook includes several clippings about the interiors and innovative fabrics used for the SS United States. And then one last hidden reference to the project is in her 450 page draft of her unpublished memoir. She mentions this project specifically, her work on the SS United States ballroom curtains and the blue and green color palette that she used for the project. I have to say the studio business folders are my favorite because Levis was traveling all of the time and for a period of years she had a studio both in New York and in San Francisco. So her employees were constantly writing letters to her detailing their progress on various projects. It's where they get into the nitty-gritty about our drapery, like what yarns they can use in the warp to minimize stretching over time, what dyes they need to use to prevent fading in this intensely sunny environment of a ship. But it also puts into writing the day-to-day concerns of the studio, the kind of thing that normally goes completely undocumented. So we know from the press clippings that Levis and Dreyfus collaborated on the SS independence, but we know from the studio business that they were worried about being able to do it at the price that Dreyfus needed and that they considered it to be such a prestigious commission that they thought they should do it anyway even if they could only break even. So as excited as we are about the things that are in the archive, of course, there are also things that are maddeningly missing. For example, we have these letters from the studio to Dorothy Levis, but not her responses, even though both parties seem to type everything up in duplicate for the purposes of record keeping. There's also no correspondence with Bonnie Cashin, who was one of her closest friends and collaborators. Liza, from your years of experience working with artist archives, do you have any theories about why some things, even things that are not terribly personal, are held back? Well, Susan, it's always to keep the archives that are incomplete and this is a very extensive collection, so it's always those veins of research that you're pursuing that somehow they've disappeared. We don't really know in this case if there's materials held back for personal reasons, but there is a note in our file from November, 1972, stating that Levis's husband, Raul Moran, he destroyed the correspondence that was in the home because he considered it to be irrelevant. So could it been some of the things you're looking for? We don't know. And we're considering her business, the studio, there are letters from Levis's studio staff beginning in 1952, as you probably know, but we can only speculate about what happened to the earlier responses. And some of the correspondence has been destroyed or lost. The collection still includes a great depth of personal business correspondence, thousands of letters, maybe not the one you need. From about 1922 to 1973, the studio the year after her death, but there's always missing pieces. And that's the real enterprise of art history and design history is to make those informed beliefs when the primary sources don't exist. Yes, and you are absolutely right. There are thousands and thousands of letters. And when I look at the sheer volume of her correspondence, I can't believe she had time to do anything else. So needless to say, Alexa and I are very excited about Dorothy Levis, but she is no doubt one of many women designers who have been rendered invisible in the design histories that have been written so far. So as a question for all of you, how do you think that the digitization of the Levis archive and others like it will impact design scholarship more broadly? Erin, do you wanna start? Sure, I can start. So digitization allows for global access to this archive and provides just a starting point for digital scholarship. These online documents can now be contributed to crowdsourcing projects such as the Smithsonian Transcription Center, which is what I'm very excited about as next steps. And this makes it even easier to find the connections between the people and the projects within the papers. Educators can use the digital images in their classrooms or share thematic content through the Smithsonian Learning Lab and curators can use the content for virtual exhibition purposes. So there's a great deal of potential for new online storytelling opportunities and collaborations that tell the design history directly from the documents. Thank you. Liza? Well, now that the collection's available online, as Erin mentioned, it's much more easy to make relationships and discover these relationships that were more difficult to find before. And for instance, we recently acquired the papers of Emma Amos and we know that she worked in Libas' studio and there is some material there, but we were having a hard time seeing Emma Amos in Dorothy Libas' papers, but within the desk diaries and calendars there, you can really see how involved Amos was in the day-to-day operations of the studio and beginning in the early 1960s, just frequently mentioned in these diaries. And the diaries were kept by her staff because Libas traveled so often that they kept a record of what was happening so that she could be informed of what was going on in the studio. And there's particularly information about Emma Amos' connection with new rug designs and also their very close personal relationship because Emma Amos was married in Libas' studio. And there are moments in the diary marking parties and marking the celebration of her wedding day, which was May 1st, 1965. And for the history of design, the collection provides a real wealth of details about the development of her thought process and methods and this is revealed to her extensive reports, memos to clients and other customers and particularly in the subject files. And the papers also show relationships and connections between individuals in the design world that were previously maybe not so highlighted. For example, the exchange between Henry Dreyfus and Libas in June of 1961, it really reveals their mutual efforts to provide opportunities for each other on the projects they participated in. So there was a great sense of collaboration that is revealed in these papers that might not otherwise have been so evident. And now that they're online, I think it will be easier for people to make those connections. Absolutely. Alexa? Sure, I will absolutely echo everything that my colleagues have said, but I would like to extend that to, I mean, the real vital and central role that the archives materials play in establishing the career that she had and the history that she had, which is, as you mentioned, Susan, in the beginning, her work is sort of atomized across a number of institutions and not clearly documented in many cases and then incompletely documented in the public record. And without the archives of American art, this incredibly deep and long career, I think the full spectrum of it would not be able to be surfaced. And so this very important voice and participant in the formation and conversations around American design would be missing. And to me, that is what is so exciting about having these papers digitized and accessible anywhere. Also the condition with mid-century things, every time I would go down there, I felt like I was killing them a little bit because of just the paper that was used and everything. So it's a huge relief to know that they are accessible and safe. But I would also just like to point out that this is somebody who was at the apex of privilege and power. She was this beautiful, blonde white woman who was wealthy and successful from a very early point in her life. And yet still so quickly she was really brushed off and erased from the history of design. And so as historians, I think we need to really pay attention to this because it speaks to much greater absences that need to be looked at. And for all the design historians in the audience, this is such an exciting time because there is so much opportunity to continue to surface these important contributions. And I think the papers from the Dorothy Leibis Archive are going to be so important to many stories that have yet to be fully articulated. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Liza and Erin and Alexo for this conversation. At this point, I think we're going to open it up for questions from the audience. So there seem to be quite a few. So I'll just kind of share a few. The first one, did Dorothy collaborate or work with the design, or actually did you all collaborate or work with the Design Center at Philadelphia University on this project?  Yes, our wonderful master's fellow has been in correspondence with the archive there. The Design Center at Philadelphia University is one of many universities that received large gifts of these samples, watches that Leibis called idea fabrics. And I think she very deliberately sort of planted them like seeds at all of the textile programs across the country from RISD to UC Berkeley, which actually has almost 800 of these samples. Another question, can you just talk briefly about some of our early life? And was she a weaver? I assume she was. There's a loom. How did she come to weaving? Sure, she started weaving really young. She talks in the memoirs, which there's a question in the chat. The memoirs are digitized and available. And this is sort of the skeleton of her life that we work really closely from. But she put together a loom and started weaving, and it sounds like she fell right into it. She was really creative originally. She had thought she was going to be an artist, but soon she saw opportunities in textile design and weaving specifically. So she honed in on that very, very early. And there was a really interesting and kind of creative subculture there in the Bay Area. And she learned from a Swedish weaver called Mama Gravander, who was doing tutorials in Swedish, traditional Swedish crafts and other places where she was constantly learning about weaving. And then she studied design at UC Berkeley. So it seems like she was bitten by the bug very, very early. Next question. Have you seen anything about the rose panels done for the ballroom of the Queen Mary? No, not yet. Go ahead. There are some photographs in the archive that may be those panels, but Susan and I had been working really hard and together with our fellow to try and uncover some of these transportation projects, which are so central and so important, but really not that well documented. So we hope to have more information on those. I'm going to interject briefly. I see so many wonderful memories and connections to leave us in the chat. And I did put my email in there. So if you would like to thank you for everyone who's done that, but if you would like to talk about this further, which obviously we do too. Thank you for that to us. So thank you for everyone who's done that, but please do reach out and I'll put my email in the chat again. Great. Do you know anything about her relationship to now? And I'm going to bungle this. Namorowski who was a weaving teacher at FIT. Yes, now was involved in the curation of the retrospective exhibition in 1970 at what was then the American Craft Museum today, the Museum of Arts and Design. That was, as I mentioned, the last monographic exhibition on Dorothy Leibos. And she wrote for the catalog. And I'm not sure if they had a relationship before that. Alexa, do you know? I don't know. That's that's what I know. Was she influenced by Annie Albers? Did you know Annie Albers? Yes. Letters in the archive, the wonderful archive between Annie Albers and Dorothy Leibos. Leibos was going to be in North Carolina at a conference or something. And Annie Albers who was at Black Mountain College at that time wrote to her and said, Oh, I hear you're going to be in the area. I'd love to meet and response back and forth. So we know that they did admire each other's work and have some correspondence and that they did meet in person. But I don't know beyond that. About inspiration per se. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Sorry, I just add quickly that she did know, she did know the Cranbrook circle of weavers and so on. But she was much closer to Scandinavian weavers and had long friendships with Elsa Gullberg. And so that seems to be more of the orbit that she was in personally with other textile design. Next question. Does the archive include physical fabrics, watches and other materials? It does. We do have a series of textile samples from the studio. They were given to us probably much in the same way they were given to other Cooper Hewitt and others with minimal descriptions, but they most do have a alphanumeric number, like sequence on them, that we have arranged them in that way for the archives. And you can view those online as well. So those have been digitized and are available in the finding. Great. Next question. Going forward, will the textile documentation in the archive be married to the textiles in the various museum collections? Will they somehow be interconnected? Well, that's the dream, of course. But it is, as Liza said, the work of art history to make those connections and to do that data entry so that the relationships between the archival materials and the museum collections are captured in the cataloging of the museum collection objects. Next question. Is there any mention of Libas connecting with Joseph Eichler who developed the mid-century modern homes in Northern California? We have not found anything about a connection between Eichler and Libas. She did, in terms of kind of modular home or mid-century design along those lines, she did do the textiles for Frank Lloyd Wright's model Eusonian that he built on the side of what is now the Guggenheim. But to our knowledge, don't know that she was connected with Eichler. How many staff members did she have in her office? And how many of those were designers? I would say it varied between 12 and 20 at different times, including people who did the books and, you know, responded to all of this client correspondence, as well as weavers, dyers, and so on. And there were other designers working in the studio. As Liza mentioned, Emma Amos seems to have been very, very involved in the carpet designs in the 1960s, specifically for Bigelow carpets. And Tamas Keef, who went on to have a very prominent career as a print designer, worked in the studio for some time. So a lot of people came and went, and some people stayed for a long time. But she, even from the very beginning, it was a studio of 12 to 15 people. Great. So here's one who's thanking for such an inspirational event. As a designer and educator, she's interested in Dorothy Leibis' craft program for World War II veterans.  And does it appear in digitized collections or in the archives? You want to take that, Alexa? Yes. The answer is yes to all. And in fact, we had a wonderful art table fellow this summer who was specifically researching Leibis' work on arts and skills. It was a program that she initiated. And again, this is one of those incredible programs or incredible contributions that she made that has sort of fallen from the record. And it was aimed at, inspired according to her memoir, by seeing the injured servicemen come back from, from Hawaii after Pearl Harbor and thinking that, you know, weaving was very much a solace for her personally to talk about how it calmed the nerves. And she wanted to set up a craft program for servicemen as a kind of, you know, they didn't talk about PTSD at that time, but it was that type of somatic therapy and also a little bit professional. And there is a scrapbook in the archives of American art that is dedicated to the work that she did with arts and skills. It was a huge program with many collaborators. That research is ongoing and we're hoping to uncover more. The National Archives has actual samples that servicemen made under this program, but there is information and there is correspondence in the archives. So we are, it is vital and we're looking forward to more research about that. Great. Does the Bonnie Cashin archive have correspondence between the two of them? Yes. The, the keeper of the Bonnie Cashin flame and Bonnie Cashin archive has been a wonderful partner in this research and incredibly generous in sharing her, her knowledge, her vast knowledge of cash in and also the friendship between Cashin and Levis. They were both from California. They were very good friends and they also collaborated. And we have Stephanie Lake has very generously shared with us some wonderful correspondence that she has from the Cashin archive that documents that friendship, which is a really wonderful piece to have because as, as was mentioned previously, it's not in the Levis papers. Next question. Did religion play any part in her design career? Any, any. That has not emerged in the, in the papers. I don't know about her personally. Okay. And then did Dorothy or her studio donate the swatches to the institutions? This happened after she died. So she passed away in 1972. And then there was a little bit of. Uncertainty about. How to proceed next. But in the end, Ralph Higbee, who was mentioned, who was the studio manager in New York. Sort of divvied everything up into groups of. Five or six large panels and a hundred samples. And distributed those to institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt, the National Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Art. And a bunch of universities that have been mentioned, including RISD and the one in Philadelphia, Philadelphia College of Textiles and the Moore College of Art, I think, and several in California, her home state. Who has the rights to interpret her designs for fabric or wall coverings for residential and commercial use? As always, that's a tricky question. The studio itself was disbanded after her death. And so it wasn't, you know, like so many textile companies are purchased by another company. That didn't happen. The studio was just closed and disbanded. And she did not have any children. She did do a lot of work for some major corporations like Goodall and Bigelow Sanford. And she did a lot of work for some major corporations like Goodall and Bigelow Sanford. And so those companies may have some rights in the work that she created for them. But otherwise, there's no, as far as I know, no rights holder for the Dorothy Liebes in her own right. Couple more questions. Was there any mention of Evelyn Ackerman, who also was the mid-century designer of textiles? She was active from the mid-50s to the early 80s. That's not a name I recall coming across. Doesn't mean it's not there. As Erin said, sometimes things are hidden away. But we'll keep an eye out. And if we find it, we'll let you know. And then I guess another person, someone asked if she worked with Trudy Garman Prey, whom we also have the archives for, but I don't know. They did know each other. We know that from the archives, but they did not collaborate to my knowledge. Next question. Were the blinds all hand-woven? This is Peggy Osterkamp. I have the shuttle she used for weaving the blinds. Wow, Peggy. Wow, Peggy. That's fabulous. Yes, most of the blinds were hand-woven. And there are great pictures of them being woven in the studio and there's a lot of correspondence about needing a wider loom to make super wide blinds. She did at some point provide hand-woven samples to Columbia blinds for some more commercially manufactured blinds, but all of the ones that you see in the pictures that we've shown and others are hand-woven in the studio. Okay. Maybe one last question. Do you know of any sort of contemporary analogs to Libas, textile designers now who are working in a similar style? Just one. Yes, many. Her exploration with materials is something that I think, and Susan and I have discussed this, I think if she were working now, she would be 100% dedicated to sustainable materials for textiles. So I think that's something that really resonates. Yes. And I think that she was extremely influential and the Libas look has persisted into our time in the interest of mid-century modern design. So the sort of nubby hand-woven, heavily textural fabrics as a counterbalance to the clean shapes and cool materials, I think is something that has had a lasting impact. Great. Okay. I think we're over our time. And there's still questions. So please, you have emails for Susan and Alexa in the chat. Please, you know, keep them coming and also memories for those. And if you have any textiles that you're looking to put in a safer place, remember Cooper Hewitt. And anyway, thank you all for coming. This was fantastic. Thank you, panelists. And, you know, can't wait for the Dorothy Libas show to be up in two years. Okay. Take care. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.


The reason I continue gaming is honestly because I think gaming has a unique ability to bring people together. Sherri Lynn is a longtime gamer. Ever since she was a child, she has enjoyed exploring the range of characters and settings that games provide. There's so much to know about every game universe that you can connect with someone that also games on such a deep level, even if you just met them. As a member of the recently established Cal Women in Gaming, she's also focused on unlocking levels of participation for women to compete, pursue a career and participate in gaming. As she describes it, the gaming community at Cal is male dominated. I do know a lot of female gamers struggle with guys like or just the gaming community in general like questioning whether or not they're a real gamer. She says these mischaracterizations are challenged to grapple with, but that the growing esports community at Cal is much more welcoming than other environments. Nearly half of gamers in the United States are female, but there's a stark difference when you take a look at participants in professional esports. Kevin Pahn works full-time as a Cal esports program manager under the Division of Student Affairs. The position is one of the first of its kind on a college campus. With regards to better gender representation, he says there is a growing push for a more inclusive culture. Because esports tries so hard to emulate traditional sports, part of that emulation is this masculinizing effect of people in a competitive environment. Through programs like Cal Women in Gaming increase outreach and better representation, there is hope to redefine what it means to be a student athlete and gamer. A lot of women feel like they have to conceal their identity as women. They're not on the microphone when they're playing. They might not show up to physical events, but they still participate online. And part of that is women not feeling like the space that they're entering is inclusive. And part of that is perception, but there's also part of that is reality, and that's what we're trying to change here. For CalTV News, I'm Tomas Manglonia.