I wanna welcome everybody to today's webinar. Dennis has kindly joined us from Prague. So we can hear about intergovernmental organizations and specifically the OECD. So we're gonna ask him to start with his bio and kind of how he got to where he is right now. Dennis. Hey, well, hi everyone. Hi Heather, it's great to see you again. So as Heather mentioned, and maybe saw us, so I'm Dennis, Dennis Bravanets. I am originally from Prague Czech Republic. I'm half Czech. My dad's Czech. My mom's from Mongolia, but I grew up mostly in Prague. Spent a few years in Kazakhstan as well, and then went to the Tufts and graduated in May, 2018. At Tufts, I studied international relations with our concentration in international economics. And then I did a minor in entrepreneurial leadership studies, which now is just entrepreneurship, I think. So basically, I mean, I think academically and everything I've been interested in both international relations, the political science part, the economics, the anthropology courses that we had to take as well, but also sort of on the bit more business and finance side as well, which I think was covered a bit with the entrepreneurship minor. And yeah, I mean, in college, one of the first things was I had a startup with three other co-founders. We built this like mobile app and web app business. It was sort of the first introduction to the world of entrepreneurship and business, but then started diving more into my academics and international relations. And what I've realized is I'm fascinated and interested by the intersection of business and policy. And that's sort of my kind of guiding framework that has been, it's still very broad. And I think with every experience, I've been able to kind of narrow it down a little bit and it shapes it. But the intersection of business and policy is what sort of fascinates me. And so I would say one of those important moments was which I included in the sort of bio was I did an internship in Washington DC at this consultancy called the Albright Stonebridge Group, which is run and chaired by a former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who is Czech-American. So for me, it was an amazing opportunity to work in her firm and everything. And so what they do, it's a commercial diplomacy firm. I spent, I don't know, 10 weeks between my junior and senior year there. And advising Fortune 500 firms and other companies on market entry strategies, sort of advocacy with governments, including a media company who was facing political pushback in essentially European countries. So how does the board of directors react to this? And the real product there was client memos, right? And so papers and writing, doing sanctions policy analysis as well. And so that was a fascinating opportunity to see how companies navigate sort of global trade and investment and political risk as well, right? And so I realized, I mean, this was, and also we worked on tech policy sort of for a lot of the large firms. And that's, I think, a growing business for them and in general, right? And as a space. And so that was really fascinating. As I said, between my junior and senior year, and what I realized though, like you're in an advisory role, so you're neither the policymaker or advisor, nor are you on the business side, right? On the client side. But you get to see a lot of projects and a lot of things and with a lot of really, bless you, with a lot of really interesting people. And so then came back into senior year and I was scrambling like, okay, what do I do? I'm an international student. I was on an F1 visa status. So trying to figure out, okay, like what are my next steps? And I think, again, what I really, I've always been interested in not just front of a pure business role, but still deal with policy issues. I remember I was like interviewing for Uber and some sort of risk analysis job and threat and risk analysis. Unfortunately, it didn't work out, which is, that happens and you get a bunch of no's. But point being, maybe I'll try to wrap this. It was quite an interesting story because the OECD came to the Fletcher school. To Fletcher for some sort of, you know, informational session, I think early fall during my senior year, so 2017. And I'm sitting in the res. I had not heard about this event. This, I'm sitting in the res and all of a sudden a lady from career services, which I didn't really attend much. But all of a sudden the lady, you know, she sat down next to me and asked me, what do I do that it does? She just wanted to see. She said, oh, the OECD was here three days ago at the Fletcher school. And they mentioned that they have a recruitment pipeline for people with just a bachelor's degree. And that's called the Young Associates Program. And so I was like, oh, well, like super interesting. You know, I've heard about the OECD. I've cited it, you know, in a migration paper or something, but I had no idea what it really does. And no, so ended up applying to the specific recruitment program. As I mentioned, the Young Associates Program, which is a requirement, you cannot have a master's. So the OECD is the only, as far as I understand, the only intergovernmental organization today that it has a sort of a hiring scheme for individuals with only a bachelor's.  And so this is a bit of a unique opportunity. And yeah, so honestly, I applied and somehow after, you know, three, four months of recruitment and you know, these things take long.  And I, at the OECD, I work in our Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs, which basically helps advise as policymakers how to foster fair and efficient markets. And you know, and that's sort of, there was, you know, there were about six positions to apply for in specific directorates. And I said, this is exactly what I wanna, you know, this directorate is what I'm interested in. I applied the background fit in, and I will say, during my interview, my then, who became my manager, she asked me, have you had any experience organizing a conference?  And she said, that's exactly, you know, it's a big part of what we do at the OECD is where, you know, we convene and we create a forum to have discussions between stakeholders. So a little bit of how I got, I think to where I am, maybe I'll stop there. Sure, great, thank you. And I'm wondering if you can, before we kind of delve into more about kind of what your job looks like and kind of the whole program, you can talk about what the OECD is and what it does, that'd be great. Definitely, definitely. So the OECD stands for the organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It is a intergovernmental organization, which means it's an organization composed of sovereign states. The organization is established by a legal treaty and basically forms the basis of public international law. And the history of the OECD, it was founded in 1948 and it was founded to help administer the Marshall Plan after World War II. So I would say the OECD, as far as I understand, quite interested in diplomatic histories. I've talked with senior officials and older, you know, that have been around. What is really the history of it? And the NATO command and headquarters is about 700 was, 700 meters north of where the OECD headquarters is and it's in Paris. And so some would summarize it as NATO was the security pillar for the transatlantic relationship and the OECD was the economic sort of pillar for the transatlantic relationship. So that's a little bit of the history. And in 1961, it was changed. It was originally called the Organization for European Economic Cooperation and then it was transformed into the OECD and to extend membership outside of Europe. And so what basically the OECD is, it brings together member state countries and partners as well to work on key global policy issues at a national and local level. We basically are more or less a standard setter. We negotiate norms between these countries. As part of the OECD, there are international legal treaties that are formed as well. There are guidelines and standards that form sort of the recommendation, like what do the member states of the OECD believe in and how do we, I mean, my directorate, what are the expectations on business, on sustainable finance and responsible business conduct in global supply chains, for example, right? What is the responsibility of a multinational enterprise that comes is headquartered in the OECD which has comes with its values being from these member states that are democratic countries, democratic countries that have a market economy. There's criteria behind it, behind membership. And so what does it mean if a company is operating in a, maybe an emerging economy that's where there's maybe governance issues, a lot of corruption, there's still expectations that come from the governments where this company is headquartered, right? And so that's one area, for example, that I've worked on. So I would say to summarize briefly, it's an organization that creates a forum, forum member states like-minded, we call it like-mindedness, like-minded nation states to come together to negotiate policy, to create guidelines and recommendations. And so now we have 36 member states. The latest one is Columbia that joined from, and so the membership has expanded, right? I mean, we have our Secretary General, Angel Guria is from Mexico. He was the former foreign minister and minister of finance of Mexico. And yeah, so one other I think interesting stat is that the OECD member states, which are basically the most developed countries or industrialized countries in the world, the 37 countries represent approximately 50% of global GDP in a purchasing power period. And I would say maybe, because it's a smaller membership, which also comes with criticism, right? It's a smaller membership, that means more like-minded, it's easier to negotiate certain policies. And yeah, so if that I think summarizes, gives it a bit of a summary. Great, thank you. And then I was wondering if you can talk about exactly what the junior or the young associates program is and maybe what your day-to-day kind of responsibilities are, but also what are the, you said you chose from six options, right? What are the other options and things like that? Yeah, for sure. And so, as I mentioned, this is sort of one of the flagship pipelines of like how to get in to the OECD as a young professional or a recent graduate. So the young associates program was founded, I think maybe two, three years ago, I am part of the second batch or second class that joined the OECD. And what it is is a two-year program, so call it a graduate program, that's with the objective of giving you a hands-on experience as a policy analyst or economist. And you're basically undertake research and you do research and policy advice for your member state of countries. On different portfolios or areas of policy. And so, as I mentioned, I work in our director of financial and enterprise affairs, which works on sort of normative like expectations of business conduct, so anti-bribery issues of anti-corruption. We also work on corporate governance principles. So we have, we're the sort of home of the G20 OECD principles for corporate governance, which basically outline, what are the expectations from shareholders to the management of a company? And then also what we call the OECD guidelines for responsible business conduct or the OECD guidelines for multinational enterprises, which are one of the, is sort of the premier government back standard of expectations, what does it mean to be a responsible business and actor in the global economy, right? And so that's sort of the area that I work in. The other, we have a bunch of other directorates for labor and social policy. We have our economics department, which does macroeconomic surveys. So maybe sometime if you follow the FT, there's a, I believe around, there's four economic surveys for our member states during the year, two that are interim. And so we released these, the GDP projections, macroeconomic analysis, country analysis, country surveys, right? So we have country desks that, and the IMF has this as well, the World Bank that do the research and then advise our member state countries on how to sort of foster inclusive growth and economic growth in their countries. And yes, it's always funny. You'll see our secretary general meet with the prime minister and have the reports, and he loves holding the reports. That's, so one of the, I think key things about the OECD as well, I mean, and I'm straying away, but I'll come back to the Young Associates Program as well, is that we do not extend any financing. So that's one of the big differences between, for example, the IMF or the World Bank where some would say we're more independent, but there are no real strings attached with sort of the policy advice that we give and the reforms that we're pushing for, whereas the IMF extends financing to countries and that might come with, it's a bit of a different nature of the work, but maybe to bring it back, we have a bunch of other director, we have a directorate for a science, technology, and innovation that looks at the digital economy. So how do we measure, what is the digital economy? How do you transform digital infrastructure in countries? And so we have all these different directorates. Another interesting one is, oh, center for tax policy. And so you may or may have not read about the digital tax reform that is impacting big tech that has become also quite a political and sensitive issue between our member states as well. So looking at, look, these big companies are not paying taxes. Some countries may think that's not exactly fair. They should be paying instead of if a company's headquartered in the Netherlands that has a different corporate tax rates and different maybe loopholes or whatnot, we have different tax regimes. If Amazon is selling in France, perhaps Amazon should be paying taxes where the revenue is generated. So in France and not the Netherlands, right? And so this is one other area that we work on. We then have sister agencies as well, the International Energy Agency, IEA, the Nuclear Energy Agency as well, which do their work. And so for this incoming batch in 2020, we've also had positions in those agencies too. So I mean, for the Nuclear Energy Agency, it's like you're interested in physics, nuclear and economics, it's very niche. And I would say that I would really recommend that you apply. I think it's something that with the OECD, I will say, I think at Tufts, we talk a lot about international security. And I think we push a lot of students into that field, not only of course, but I remember that was one of the big things, but what about international trade? International economics and economic cooperation. And so the young sister program sort of gives you an entry into it. So two year program with the idea that that will set you up to go to graduate school because for you to join the OECD and other international organizations through other means, through other, let's say recruitment processes, you need amount like before the young associates, the entry level official would have had to have, first, I mean, 10 years, I think five, six years ago, you need a PhD. Then they said, okay, we don't just need PhDs, let's master's level, but two years of work experience and minimum, right? So it's a bit difficult when you're a young graduate and you wanna join this world, but where do you start? I mean, does your internship experience count into the two years or is it two year full time?  There's potential for you to stay as well, which is my plan. I want one more year of work experience because I want to get hopefully a dual degree MBA and a master in public policy, which fits the sort of business and policy interest that I have, but generally, so I see my peers, they've done, and the cohort above me, right? So they've done two years and then they go do a like a diplomacy and governance and fill at Oxford, right? Or they go to LSE, some are looking to go into a PhD or a pre-PhD program and you know, your policy programs in the US, you know, SIPA, Columbia, et cetera. So that's a little bit of sort of the objective of the young associate program. And that's, yeah, I mean, there's some other ways also to join for your internships and becoming and consultancies. I can maybe speak to that, but yeah, I think. Do you wanna talk a little bit about kind of like the types of like the projects that you specifically work on in the kind of work that's given as a junior associate and also kind of, you know, do they have separate programming for you guys coming in? Like do you have meetings with officials in the rest of the organization and things like that? Yeah, great. No, that's a great question. So to be, I think summarize the work that I've done. I joined our within the director of financial enterprise, financial enterprise affairs. I joined our center for responsible business conduct. So I already mentioned the OECD guidelines for multinational enterprises, which is a government back set of standards for what are the expectations on responsible business conduct in international trade and investment. I think the whole premise behind it is the OECD will push for open trade, liberalized capital flows and investment. So the whole idea is trade is good for the world, for the economy, foreign direct investment is also good and helps both sides, right? However, if you're investing in a country where there might be high risks of bribery, there might be lower labor standards. There might be human rights violations, even within supply chains. What are the expectations on business, right? And so we have this standard and then there's the implementation of it. So if you become a member of the OECD, you need to adhere to this, you need to commit to promoting these values and standards. Yes, it's soft normative law, right? So they are guidelines, which then some countries create domestic legal regimes using that standard, which can then sanction, you can sanction companies for violations of it. But from our point of view, this is a soft normative standard that we worked to promote. So as part of that, there's so many different parts of it. One of the things what we call is, we have a guidance on due diligence for responsible business conduct, which basically is this whole idea, just because I may be linked in my supply chain to human rights violations, I have a responsibility as a upstream business, right? And so what are the sort of tools that governments can be and recommendations that governments can give to businesses, which should basically have this framework for these expectations on identifying these risks, how do you mitigate against them? And also how do you remedy if you are connected, your business is connected to, let's say, I mean, in Brazil, there was the large dam collapse, right? That took place, I believe maybe a year or two years ago, with a large multinational enterprise affairs. What are the expectations on, well, how are you gonna remedy the people that may have suffered adverse impacts that are linked to your business, right? So that's one area of work that I worked on, and specifically also in the financial sector. So this starts to get into more of a sustainable finance angle and looking at what is actually the role of a bank if it's lending to a company that might be linked to adverse impacts. And so you see maybe the specific language is a little legalistic. We have all sorts of definitions for it, right? Because it can get very sensitive. I mean, these are, there's a lot of reputational risk for companies, especially those that care and we expect companies to care about this, right? And also looking at child labor issues, personally I didn't work on that area, but we look at that as well, within the garment supply chains that sort of came out of the Rana Plaza incident in Bangladesh that took place, right? That killed over 9,000 workers. And so that's one area. As part of the young associate program, there's a bit of a rotation and movement and I'll get to the mentorship part as well. I was asked to join our director's office within the structure, right? So here I'm a little analyst at the lowest lowest supporting my division and we have a, you could almost call it a cabinet.  So there you basically, I did a three month rotation where I supported our whole directorate, feeding talking points, briefings, short policy papers to our secretary general, so secretary general is going to meet with Prime Minister X in a week and a half on a mission. He will be speaking about corporate governance and anti-bribery and responsible business conduct because the minister or the prime minister cares about that issue, draft talking points, briefing notes, et cetera, right? So that's been super interesting and so there's a movement as well within the young associate's program. You can't really move directorates. I don't think that's very common, but there's quite a bit of mobility internally. And I think a lot of that actually comes, when you join as a young associate, I think you have a bit of a platform from which you can connect with officials and they know that you work hard in school, that you can do the job, you are young. And so there's a lot of networking internally. I think in terms of programming, there have been events, but I think some of it has been more on us actually. So maybe a 20-second story, I was in our canteen, I'm having lunch, I'm talking to my mother. All of a sudden next to me sits our deputy secretary general who was the chief economist in the German Ministry of Finance and was the main guy behind Germany's, they basically, during the Eurozone crisis, he was basically the guy behind Germany's policy. So he sits next to me and I tell my mom, let me chat with, this is an opportunity for me to talk to, you know, deputy secretary of Rutger Schuchnecht. And I speak with him and I say, look, you know, with a bit of background, we're the young associates, would love to have lunch with you or some coffee. He was very happy to do that. Ended up having a meeting with him. And also we had a meeting scheduled with our secretary general with our program.  Yeah. Great. And I was wondering if you can talk about, so people stay in for two to three years? Is that the limit? Yes, yes, generally, exactly.  Like, is that encouraged or is that? Encouraged. There's no sort of, you know, return guarantee offer. Perhaps that might take place, you know, three, five years from now, or, you know, there might be some funding associated with it, you know, going to grad school. The program's still very young, you know, so our team is working really hard to try to shape it and bring us back and everything. So, you know, but I think it's about building those relationships, you know, internally. Hey, look, you might do a one-year master's, I don't know, LSE or somewhere in Europe or back to Tufts or two-year master's. And they might say, look, sounds great. We know about the project that's gonna come up. We'll open up a position for you, so that can for sure happen. And I've seen it with the cohort above me, yeah. Great. And can you also talk about kind of the skills you put into use? At the beginning, you were talking about policy briefs and policy analysis and kind of what can, if students are interested in something like this, what are the skills that are good for them to hone both hard and soft skills? Yeah, I think the first sort of key part of this is writing. Like we're in the business of writing, you know, which is, I think, you know, I, and of course research as well, right? I mean, you're, you know, you're going to be tasked to, maybe I can tell you about a specific report. So we have a business and finance outlook for 2020 that's gonna come out later this year, but it's about 2020 and what's going on. I co-drafted a chapter looking at basically sustainability and corporate lending, so bank lending and what are, you know, what are the sort of changing expectations and legal regimes that are happening. It's part of that, you know, let's say the soft and the hard, soft side, I interviewed about, I think, 20 heads of environmental social governance at leading banks in the OECD. So, you know, being able to communicate, being able to, you know, ask the right questions, understand the topic and be able to dive very quickly into an area, read up a ton and come out with the analysis and say, what does this mean for business? What does it mean for this government? And take that and then write it, write about it. Make sure that your writing is clean, it's consistent. Your references are bulletproof because they will read it up the chain. And you do not want someone up the chain to say, well, actually I went into the report and I couldn't find the number. I need you to go back, right?  But because we're in the business of evidence-based policy recommendations, you need to make sure that's, because it will be cited, right? It might be mentioned by the Secretary General. He might use that stat or that, that let's say a policy recommendation to tell a government what they may or may not should be doing, right? And so yeah, so I think, you know, in terms of hard scale, and I don't work as an economist, right? So there's, I am not in the business of a lot of quantitative work. I think there still is, you know, data work that you have to do, some data gathering, et cetera. But so it really depends where you are. But on my side, I will say, I mean, my boss, my first manager, she went to law school, so she's a legal expert. So even though I personally am not, you know, I work on policy, but that is of course interconnected with economics and law as well. So being able to, I think, navigate these areas. And I think on the soft side as well, especially when you're a junior, you know, do the work and be willing to recommend something to your boss and to your manager. You know, your manager might tell you to take one approach, but you're the one who's doing the research, right? And the analysis. And if you think you might be finding something that's a bit different, speak up, make the case for it, right? And I think that's when things become exciting and you can build more responsibility. So yeah, so I think, you know, being able to find the evidence, you know, scour the web and databases and being able to condense that into, you know, what's the point? What's your message? And that it's substantiated. It needs to be substantiated. And last thing I think on the soft side is, we're in the business of diplomacy as well. So sometimes you have to say something without saying it directly.  Yeah. Gotcha. And as, you know, students who are current undergrads, what's the best way to kind of practice that type of writing? Cause, you know, at university, you're usually asked for something longer or a longer research paper or you're not condensed in the same way. So what are good ways to practice that? Do you think? Yeah, great question. I mean, as part of the recruitment process, you have to have a writing test.   And so I would say potentially, as in terms of training is giving you self, you know, maybe ask your professor or a colleague or a friend or a student, your roommate, give me some sort of prompt and time yourself, right? In one hour, you're going to write 500, 600 words, you know, whether it's, you know, short paragraphs and essays or talking points. I think that's really, you know, under pressure, you know, being under pressure, time pressure is something that's, I think we all, you know, any young professional faces and especially, I mean, with us, you know, so you have to sometimes turn out a lot of writing very quickly. And I would say I really point to, you know, get those internships where you are doing this, right? I will, you know, I was taught how to write both at school but at the Albright Stonebridge group. You know, we had former chief speech writers like teach us how to write concisely and also follow the style guide, you know? I mean, every organization has sort of guidelines for how they want you to write and study it and learn how to do it.  And so that also helped a lot. So, yeah, if that helps. Yeah, no, that's great. All right, one of the questions we have from Sarah is she thanks you for your time and asks when you join a directorate, let's say bribery and corruption, work with a particular region or member state or do you work with all member states equally? Yeah, no, that's a great question. It depends. So I would say sometimes we have this director called the Global Relations Secretariat, which basically leads on engagement with non-member states. So there it's like, you're gonna be doing policy analysis and report writing, but for Kazakhstan, which is not a member, right? Or you've countries within sort of Eurasia or post-Soviet.  You're an expert in the region. We also have regional projects. So for example, if we're talking about, you know, Latin America and the Caribbean, we have a specific project looking at promoting responsible business conduct in Latin America.  So it depends, but you will like, for example, on like, you know, an anti-Bribary. So we have the convention on anti-Bribary, which is I think one of the most sort of hard law kind of treaties that we have. And there's monitoring every year of countries, each member state, and not just member state, but adherent. So non-member states can adhere to these instruments. So I believe even Russia is an adherent to the anti-Bribary convention. So as part of that, you will go on mission to Russia. You will do fact-finding missions, you will speak with officials, you will speak with NGOs, et cetera. You're gonna have to set up those meetings. You're gonna figure out who is who, right?  So again, giving a vague answer, it's a big organization, right? So it really depends.  Like personally, I never really looked too much at, you know, corporate responsibility or like sustainable finance, but I saw that opening. I said, I think I can, you know, I can do the job and I applied for it, and you just have to kind of break in, you know, in the beginning. Great. Another question from Guarav is, can you please talk about opportunities for students who are not a citizen of a member country of the OECD? Yeah, that's a great question. It's a bit tricky, especially with the OECD. To be an official, you have to be a citizen of a member state. I remember one of my friends from college, she was applying for it. He was starting to network with some alums at the OECD and then he realized Romania is not in the OECD. You know what I mean? And so that's where it gets a bit strict.  So for example, I think I mentioned, you know, Columbia becoming a member, as part of the monitoring of Columbia and its adherence to the OECD, you know, there was a lot of work done on anti-bribery, anti-corruption. There's, I had a friend and colleague who's from Columbia who was not, you know, she was a consultant. Many times then these consultants will then become an official staff member. For example, Costa Rica right now is sort of one of the main countries that might become a member. So, you know, there's consultants internally who will likely then become officials. So that's one thing. For an internship, you do not have to be a member, you do not have to be a citizen of a member state. And then finally, the sister agencies and there's certain other parts. So for example, we have the development center, which does like a lot of development economics work and reports and advice for, you know, development strategies for countries. There you do not, I believe you do not have to be, you do not have to be a citizen of the OECD or a member of state to have an official job. But that's because for example, I believe India is a member of the development center, you know. So there's some intricacies. The International Energy Agency also has a broader membership than the OECD itself. So you can leave from a different country, not OECD members. Great, great, thank you. Then, Leif has a question. Hi, Leif. Can you elaborate on what kind of econ skills the OECD requires? Are there any tracks within the Young Associates Program for people without econ courses, such as diplomacy tracks? Yeah, yeah. No, that's, so of course, I mean, the ease and the acronym, right? So economic cooperation, but as I mentioned, I think broadly there are a lot, there are people and staff who maybe never even took an econ course, you know. And so, you know, it's not like it's a requirement. There's no requirement. You need to have had, you know, macro, et cetera, econometrics, but it depends on what you're working on. So as I mentioned, my work is more, you know, on the policy side and promoting certain normative standards and stuff. So there's, you have to understand the economic context, you know, of what you're working on, but it doesn't necessarily mean you are crunching numbers, you know, doing econometrics every day, et cetera. And I haven't had to do that, but it depends where you are. But even if you joined the economics department, for example, one of the positions was in the office of the chief economist, there you're basically taking what the, you know, PhD 20 years of experience economist is doing, what does that mean? And you put it on a slide deck, et cetera, you understand the economy. Maybe you might actually, you know, you will work on the technical stuff too. But so you don't necessarily, you know, it really depends, especially at this early stage. However, so I guess if I understand the question is, you know, correctly, do you mean, are there tracks for non-econ people? Is that, is that it? Yeah. No, that's true. And I mentioned, for example, the global relations secretariat, you know, if you're, you might work on some sort of, you know, the digital strategy for Kazakhstan, right? Something like that.  In your cover letter, et cetera. But I think there's tons of opportunities. It's, you know, it's a large organization. We have a bunch of directorates working on various issues. So. You just maybe run through the steps of the interview process or the application process, just what that was like and how it played out. Yeah. No, definitely. One of the questions is, what titles do you look for in job openings for newer graduates? Got it. You know, if you go on the site or when you look for it, what are you looking for? Got it. So I guess, first part, just about the process. So like the portal, there's like a portal. So if you look up like Young Associates Program, you basically, sorry, I just have a cat here. Oh, cat. But I have to, it's bothering me a little bit.  We have a bit of an old school website. It makes it a little difficult to navigate, but you know, you find it, the portal opens up in like November. So let's say if you're gonna start September, 2021, you're gonna have to apply December, 2020. November, 2020 is when the portal opens up. What's happening right now is all the directorates are submitting applications to HR saying, hey, we want a Young Associate.  And so you go, so you apply.  And from that, they do a screening, a broad sort of sweep from all the applicants. And you can apply to multiple directorates, but they recommend, you know, we recommend sort of more like two, math, two, three, because you don't wanna be spreading yourself too thin, right?  So I saw directorate for financial and enterprise affairs. I did not wanna join the cabinet of the Secretary of General, which is a completely different line of work, right? Non-substantive, much more of like support, you know, advisory support and, you know, briefings and things like that.  After that, you're given, it's kind of a, it's a little bit like consulting to an extent. I mean, then you have like a, some sort of cognitive test thing. I had, you know, they kind of change it every year. And so there's some sort of test. I had some like logic thing, which, you know, you can prepare to an extent and of course, happy to be in touch, right? With people as this, you know, as this kind of opens up, right? And give some advice. So then you have that step. So there's a lot of steps. It's part of that. Then they put you to the directorate.  Now we're gonna send you to directorate for their, them to look at your profile. Then you're gonna have likely a first phone enter. Oh, you're gonna have an HR phone call with a, you know, staff from HR, more behavioral. I remember one of the questions was, for example, you corrode a report with your colleague and your colleague did not send it or didn't deliver and your manager replied to, you know, on email, like how would you deal with the situation? How would you react, you know, et cetera? So behavioral, they wanna know, are you able to work in a multicultural environment, right? Et cetera, that's very, you know, diplomatic. And so after that, you start to get into more of the substantive stuff. So then you're gonna have a likely a written test that I've already, I think, mentioned or talked about, which is particularly true policy area, right? So when I got my written test, I said, all right, I'm going to scour the website, you know, read all the reports in such a way that I even footnoted, I added footnotes to my written test to show that I know what you're talking about, that I show, you know, showing mastery, right? Of that substance, the policy area. After that, you'll have probably a final interview. Just, yeah, but likely when you're at that step, you're pretty deep in. I will say it's quite a numbers game. I will say that there's limited positions, there's a lot of applicants, you know, from 37 member countries, so, but again, I will say I literally, I was in Ginn, I submitted two minutes before the deadline, I did no networking, and it was just going through the process, I then reached out to a young associate who was already in it to just say, hey, like, what's the process like? And we're all very happy to chat, you know, we all went through the process, but yeah. Great, great, thank you. And then, is the OECD have similar programs for non-OECD nationals? Are there other programs similar to the OECD that you were thinking of during senior?   That's one other way to enter the OECD as well. And other than that, you know, other international organizations, I believe that the World Bank has a program as well, maybe a year or something like that, and you know, the World Bank's membership is much broader, so there's that. But I will say it was, you know, I found out about this because of that story of being in the rest and just, you know, the OECD came too tough, which was just great, right? But I think in terms of, you know, generally this is quite limited opportunities at this stage, but even, I think the IFC now, everyone's sort of moving towards getting younger, people, you know, kind of reducing requirements on the education side, right, for masters. I think the IFC also has some, you know, jobs that you do not require a master.  Yeah. Great, great. And then you talked about the importance of kind of that internship with the Albright Stonebridge. And how did you find that? How did you look for that? And then, and also as you build your network, how are you doing that within the OECD? And, you know, how are you looking for mentors within the OECD? Oh, thank you. That's a great question. And a little bit of a story as well with Albright Stonebridge Group. So first, I think I reached out to a Fletcher alum, Chris, who is a Hungarian American, went to Fletcher. I found him through the alumni directory. And I hope that our students know what it is because it's such a resource where you can filter by location, right, of alums, education, the firm. I think it's like force.toft something, you know, and so maybe we can find the link at some point, but I remember, you know, I found out, I sort of found out about the Albright Stonebridge Group somehow this was also late April. Honestly, this was around spring fling time and I did not have an internship secured, you know, for that, between junior and for that summer. I got rejected by something else I thought that was gonna go, you know, come through. So then I reached out to him by email and, you know, this alumni directory is amazing because you also have the Gmail of these alums, you know. I'm in there with my Gmail account. So this goes straight to the personal inbox. I set up a call with Chris and within a week I got an answer. You know, I went through the interview process as well. And so I would, you know, really use that. As I mentioned, he's a Fletcher alum. He went to Boston College for undergrad, but tapping into the Fletcher network is what I mean, especially in this field, you know, we have to use what we have, right, around on campus. Great, great. And then developing then, yeah. Yeah, right. So I think just one thing there, I spoke with Chris four weeks ago. He worked a lot on the tech practice and your practice at the Alba Stormbridge Group. I have kept in touch, even though the internship was 2017 summer. I was a public policy manager at Facebook, you know. So, you know, it's working for Mark and Cheryl, you know, on their policy work, right.  I keep in touch internally at the OECD. It's all coffee chats, you know, reach out. I would say there's one individual that I would really credit with helping me when I moved to the director's office and I was doing a different line of work. I had to support with writing a speech on fintech regulation, which honestly had no idea about, you know, 700 word speech for our deputy secretary general, Kono, who would speak to a banking association. Know that this guy Rob, he, that's his policy area. He's the expert, you know, I wrote to him, hey, we have this request, we need to get this done. He said, take the first step, take the first step on drafting it. I did the, I worked hard. I did the job to make sure that it's a nice draft, that he knows that I can do the work, right. And I maintained our relationship, even after those three months. And, you know, he, for example, he went to CIS and did an MBA at Michigan and he's in America, you know, and he knows talks and everything. So he's always really, and we're in a very European setting, right. And so there's not too many people studying the US as well. So there's a bit of that too. I've networked with the, you know, the Czech community at the OECD that's important for my network in Prague, right. So developing all these relationships, having those coffee chats, which means you might have to work a little bit later, you know, because it's taking time out of your day, but all of these things and, you know, we're young, right. So it's, especially when you have your, you have secured this position, you're there to learn, right. And to ask for advice, read about their bios and the work they've done and the institutions and to just sort of foster that relationship, I think. Great. Asking for recommendations, right. Like, do you know someone who has worked on something else, you know, who are the Tufts alums who are at the OECD and other places and even for graduate school, right.   So, and then it helped with your day-to-day work too, when you need to reach out for other things. Great, great. Well, this has been great. Thank you for spending the time. Is there anything else you wanna leave the students with or? No, a big thank you to you, Heather, huh. And the IGL, as I mentioned, it was a big talking point when I was interviewing.  Yes, and hands-on and, you know, it's I think pretty crazy sometimes, the amount of responsibility that we got, you know, with Epic, with the conference and, you know, then a conference, you know, and with speakers that are even more high level than what I've seen at the OECD sometimes, you know, and so it's a great training and so, you know, again, you know, happy to connect with everyone and yeah, and keep helping out. So it'd be great to get more Tufts alums, right, and on the OECD. Great, yeah. So is it okay if people ask for your email to hand that out? Yeah, definitely. Last name, first name at gmail.com, please, if you wanna circulate it. Happy to chat to our own LinkedIn or whatnot, so. Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much again. Great, thanks so much. And if people are in Paris sometime, I mean post-COVID world, whenever that will be, you know, please come by, we can always get lunch at the OECD and everything, so. Or have an IGL alum event there too, you know, so. There you go. That's what we need. All right, we'll look forward to it. Enjoy the rest of your vacation. Thank you so much, yeah, bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.


Hello, I'm Chad Hansen. I'm the chair professor of Chinese philosophy emeritus at the University of Hong Kong. And I'm speaking to you from Hong Kong. And we in Hong Kong like to think of this as a kind of pivot between East and West. And we're going to be presenting a course to you on Chinese philosophy that focuses on the concept of doubt. And this is a concept that we kind of like to think of as the inspiration for the Star Wars idea of the guide that Luke focuses on when he goes to target Darth Vader's death star. Use the force, so follow the Dow and it will take you to your target. Han Solo treats all of this talk about the force as an ancient old weird religion. But we'll see that it's not really religious, but it lies on the boundary between religion and philosophy. It's a natural scheme of nature's guidance. Science that does not depend on a supernatural force, but that we just discover in nature. The practical impact of knowing Dow is knowing how to do things, knowing how to follow nature's guiding paths. We will talk about the philosopher Menchus and his theory about the ether, the flood-like ether that fills the whole universe and all of you so that you can feel the force and feel the perturbations in the force. We will talk about Zhuangzi's axis of dowels where everything is possible. We'll talk about Shendou's great dowel, the space-time history of everything from the beginning of time to the end of time. We'll talk about Laozi's Dao Dejing, the most translated of all the texts in Chinese thought into Western languages. Our survey focuses on a hundred schools of thought. We'll start with Confucius because he is the first and then we'll talk about his great rival Mordza. This is a very interesting character that you may never have heard of unless you were watching Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos, where he was featured as one of the forerunners of the theory of light. But he's also a very interesting forerunner in ethics and in politics. His ethical theories and political theories, if we look for a counterpart in the West, we have to jump up almost 2,000 years to find counterparts that are all close to what Mordza advocated in the fourth century BC. So we're going to explore all of these and many more ideas from this classical period and we invite you to join us for this philosophically motivated course studying Chinese, ancient Chinese metaethics. We're studying the roles of humanity and nature in Chinese teachings about ethical guidance and about morality. If you're interested, please join us at the edX website. Look for HKU03X to find this course. If you want to join us in the next segment, we will be talking about the texts and the content and the focus of the course.


This girl was stolen from her parents. This is her story 30 years later. It is of the utmost importance for a parent to keep their children safe. The greatest nightmare could be losing your child to an abduction. This is an incredible story about a girl that was raised by foreign creatures. Marina Chapman was born in Columbia in the 1950s. She was playing in the garden when tragedy struck. A strange truck stopped nearby and somebody grabbed her and used chloroform to put her to sleep. She woke up in the jungle being carried over a man's shoulder. One of the men in the group shouted and Marina was dropped on the ground while the men ran away. She found somewhere to hide for the night. The next morning when she woke up she was surrounded by monkeys. She sat there as their curiosity had them poking her in the eye and pulling her hair. Their curiosity intensified and Marina began screaming but nobody came to help her. She followed the monkeys looking for food to eat. She watched the monkeys who learned to ignore her. She found some berries to eat but she got sick. An older monkey however whom she refers to as grandpa led her to some muddy water to drink so that she could throw up and recover. Grandpa meant no harm. For the next five years Marina lived amongst the monkeys. She learned how to communicate with them. She learned how to survive watching and mimicking them. She even sat in the trees with them. When she was 10 years old Marina came across some hunters in the forest whom she approached grunting. Marina had to learn to speak again. She had to learn to adapt to the highly social human society around her. She was eventually adopted by a family who sent her to England where she met John Chapman a scientist who she married six months later. Marina never found her family but this story is an example of a terrible event that one strong young woman managed to overcome.


Hello everyone. It's time for us to start talking about the process of mitosis in the cell cycle. Every single cell in our body undergoes a cell cycle and subsequently the process of mitosis. Within the cell cycle, we first have four phases. The first phase is known as the G1 or GAP1 phase. The second phase is known as the synthesis phase or the S phase. The third phase is known as the GAP2 or G2 and then the final phase is known as mitosis. In the GAP1 phase, the cell basically stops and checks to make sure that the cell is ready to undergo the synthesis phase. In the synthesis phase, the cell replicates DNA, so you go from having one copy of DNA to two copies of DNA. This is crucial for the process of mitosis because what's going to happen is you're going to have one copy of DNA will go to one daughter cell and a second copy of DNA will go to the other daughter cell that's produced by mitosis. The G2 or the GAP2 phase is used by the cell to make sure that everything is ready to undergo mitosis and then finally we have the process of mitosis or the M phase. Let's break down mitosis and look at the different phases within mitosis. The first phase of mitosis is known as prophase. Now in prophase, what happens in our cell is that the nuclear membrane dissolves and the chromosomes start to tightly coil so we can actually see them. If you've ever seen pictures of chromosomes, a lot of times what you see is them tightly coiled and you see an X. Now this X is made up of two copies of DNA and they're identical. This is one copy here and this is the second copy here. These were made during the process of synthesis. Let's look at a cell with four different chromosomes. The next step in mitosis is metaphase. Now in metaphase what happens is our chromosomes line up on the equator and they start to get ready to divide. We also have spindle fibers which have connected themselves each to one copy of every chromosome. The next phase is when the chromosomes start to get pulled apart by these spindle fibers. So the spindle fibers are pulling them apart to the different poles. This is known as anaphase. And then finally we have telophase. Now in telophase the chromosomes get pulled to completely apart to the different poles by the spindle fibers and then the cell gets ready to undergo the process of cytokinesis. This is where the cell actually splits and goes from one cell to two daughter cells. The key to mitosis is the fact that the two daughter cells are completely identical to the initial cell that you started with. You start with four chromosomes. Granted there are two identical copies of each chromosome but four different chromosomes in your first cell. And what you end up with are two daughter cells with four chromosomes at the end. That's key.  Your body uses mitosis all the time. And the idea is that you want to end up with cells that are identical to the ones you start with. So again if you cut yourself your body has to heal and it uses a process of mitosis, blood cells are made every single day and you want them identical to the cells, the parent cells so you use the process of mitosis. So that's one good reason that we should care about mitosis but what's another one? Well unfortunately many people are all too familiar with the process of cancer. Cancer is basically mitosis gone awry. It's mitosis where it just doesn't stop. Mitosis despite what it may seem is actually a very carefully controlled and regulated process. There are actually genes and proteins and such that inhibit mitosis and keep it from happening until it's needed. You don't want your body just producing cells left and right if you don't need them. But what happens with cancer is you get a mutation in some of these genes and it doesn't suppress the process of mitosis anymore. So you start getting a buildup of more cells and more cells and more cells and more cells and these are cancer cells and ultimately this can be fatal. So a simple mutation or buildup of simple mutations can actually cause mitosis to no longer be able to control itself and it just goes crazy and makes too many cells. Hopefully this has given you a good idea as far as why we should care about mitosis as well as a good rundown of the cell cycle and the different stages that are involved. Our next lecture will involve the process of meiosis which is a complementary process that's also incredibly important to our survival.


Friends, the 21st century is the era of knowledge. This is the time to increase focus on learning, research, innovation. And this is exactly what India's national education policy 2020 does. This policy wants to make your school, college, and university experience fruitful, broad-based. One that guides you to your natural passions. Friends, you are among the best and brightest of India. This hackathon is not the first problem you have tried to solve. Nor is this is the last. I want you and youngsters like you not to stop doing three things. Learning, questioning, solving. When you learn, you get the wisdom to question. When you question, you get out of the box methods to solve problems. When you do that, you grow. Due to your effort, our nation grows. Our planet prosperous, friends. India's national education policy reflects these periods. We are shifting from the burden of the school bag, which does not last beyond school, to the boon of learning, which helps for life. From simply memorizing to critical thinking, for years, the limitations of the system had an adverse effect on the lives of students no longer. The national education policy reflects the aspirations of young India. It is not process-centric. It is people-centric and future-centric.


So I have to admit, last night at about 11.30 at night, when I was going over and over this presentation, I was secretly hoping to myself there might be some massive eye emergency affecting everyone in Salt Lake City and the turnout would be pretty poor. Fortunately, it looks like for the people of Salt Lake, that was not the case. All of you were able to join us this morning. So as I was introduced earlier, my name is Rachel Simpson, I'm a fourth year medical student at the University of Arizona. I'm very happy to be joining you here at Moran for the month of July doing research with Dr. Moschvar. And I'll be talking to you today about an issue that I think you'll find is pretty interesting and also pretty important to discuss, medical errors and refractive surgery. So I would imagine most, if not all of you were, pretty familiar with this book, Waking Up Blinds. And if you're not, you probably should be. But it's a pretty harrowing account of stories of medical errors and malpractice in the field of ophthalmology. And I just want to quickly talk about one of the cases, Mr. Houston, a 73-year-old gentleman who was getting along just fine. He had pretty good vision out of one eye, pretty poor vision in the other, but wasn't really experiencing any compromised activities of daily living. He could drive, he could read. One day, his local ophthalmologist suggested, hey, maybe you want to think about getting that treated and send him to a major referral center. The ophthalmologist there suggested surgery. He agreed to it. Of course, what ended up happening was that he had surgery on the wrong eye, experienced a number of complications. Two years later, he was completely blind. You can see this issue is, it's pretty important. And taking a step back, just looking at the broader issue of medical errors in general, really came to a forefront. In the late 1990s, there were a number of media exposés about how serious this problem really was. In response, the Institute of Medicine put together a task force that basically came up with, to errors humans, huge guidebook that looked at where are all these errors coming from, what can we do to stop them. It's from there that we got this definition of medical error. We also got things like the timeout protocol, which is of course that mandatory pause where we take a second and just make sure, do we have the right patient? Do we have the right materials? Are we operating on the right side of the body? Do we have everything we need? And these interventions were helpful, but you can see from this slide, they really didn't fix the problem. This scope of the problem is still pretty significant. That number one statistic right there is pretty interesting. It would be the sixth leading cause of death if the CDC was able to actually list medical error as a cause of death. So what we wanted to do is look at this within the scope of refractive surgery. And we felt like it's particularly important in refractive surgery because there is no margin for error. These patients are coming to us, and yes, they might have glasses or contacts, but for the most part, they can see just fine. They have no underlying ocular pathology. There's no true medical indication for surgery. So we're taking someone with the best corrected visual acuity of 2020 almost every time. We're operating on them, and then if there's an error, we're risking permanent visual compromise. So we reached out to ophthalmologists across the country and asked them for cases of preventable errors during late-six surgery or refractive surgery. And by preventable, we were looking at only those errors that happened in the preoperative period. We collected 18 patients, 15 patients experienced unilateral errors. Three were bilateral, and there was one unfortunate gentleman who had two errors in the same eye during two separate procedures, which I'll tell you about in just a second. We analyzed the data based on where these errors were coming from, how the patients did afterwards, and then we also looked at how can we prevent this in the future. So we identified three major sources of error. Cylinder conversion error, which I'll talk about in just a second. Data entry error, which is pretty self-explanatory, although there's some interesting stories associated with that. And if we have time, I'll be happy to share them with you. And then timeout protocol failure, which again is pretty self-explanatory. The timeout protocol was not performed as it should have been. So I just want to take a second and talk about cylinder notation because I'm sure the vast majority of you in this room are quite familiar with it. But as a medical student, it was something I was pretty new to. And also, if we work through sample conversion, I think you'll see, even though the math is extremely basic, there's a number of opportunities for errors to be made. So there's no standard on notation that can be positive or negative, and it really varies widely across institutions. So we have a sample MR here of minus 350, minus 150, at 80, and negative cylinder. If we wanted to convert it, the first step would be switching the cylinder sign from negative to positive. So now we have minus 350 plus 150 at 80. Our second step, we're going to add the cylinder to the sphere. So in this case, it's minus 350 plus a minus 150. So you can see already, if you happen to forget that pesky little negative sign, it's already a difference of three diaphthers with the sphere. So our patient is now minus 5 plus 150 at 80. Our last step is to convert the axis. So we look at that last number. If it's less than 90, we're going to add 90. If it's greater than 90, we'll subtract. So for our patient, it's less. We're going to add 90. And we have our final and positive cylinder notation. Again, this is not rocket science, but there's three steps. An error can definitely occur. And our first case is an example of that error. A 57-year-old gentleman presenting for lasik surgery with a pre-op MR of minus 6, minus 2, at 180. And you can see here clearly there was an error when his notation was converted. He was supposed to be treated at minus 8 plus 2 at 90 and was instead treated at minus 8 plus 2 at 180. His post-op, he experienced basically a doubling of his astigmatism. This gentleman was offered retreatment with lasik, and I guess he was feeling trusting of us if he agreed. Unfortunately for him, a second error of cylinder conversion occurred. Some lucky gentleman ended up with a post-op MR of 125 plus 725 at 130. If you remember, his initial astigmatism was plus 2. So he experienced some pretty significant visual compromise. He required multiple follow-up procedures. He had two relaxing incisions and a PRK. He was still only able to achieve a best-corrected visual cutie of 2030 with contact lenses. So a pretty significant outcome for a man who before surgery saw a fine 2020 with contact lenses. Second example is an example of data entry, and I'll just draw your attention to the OD. You can see he was a hyperopic pre-operatively at 380 minus 50 at 75, and somehow that pesky negative sign came into play here, and a hyperopic patient was treated with a myopic procedure resulting in almost doubling of his sphere. He again also experienced pretty significant visual compromise post-operatively. He was not a candidate for surgical follow-up and was treated with contact lenses. And here's actually an example from the chart of that very error. You can see in the chart he's plus 380 who's entered in the computer at minus 380. Our third case is a timeout failure. I'm not going to go over his MR for you. I'll just tell you the story of how this happened. Patient had a name that was quite similar to another patient that was having refractive surgery that same day. When his name was called in the waiting room, he responded to the other patient's name. During the timeout procedure, when the doctor went to verify his name, he said, oh, I see your name's Joe.  Proceeded to calm Joe throughout the procedure. It wasn't until the very end that the patient said, you know, Doc, you keep calling me Joe. My name's actually John. Clearly, at that point, the mistake was realized and the patient had been treated with the wrong patients' MR. Fortunately for this patient, the only thing was under correction of myopia. He was a good candidate for re-treatment with LASIK and didn't experience any long-term visual compromise as a result. So overall, definitely the most common error we discovered was cylinder conversion error, followed by data entry, and then the timeout failures. Interestingly, all four of those timeout failures, it was the wrong patient that was operated on. So overall, these patients entered surgery with the best corrected visual QD of 2020. They saw just fine. The average postoperative best corrected was 2025. So that's a pretty significant finding, again, in patients who didn't need to have surgery. Six patients lost at least one line of best corrected visual QD. 16 of them were good candidates for surgical follow-up. Three of them said, thanks, but no thanks. I'll take my chances with contact lenses. The patients who were treated surgically, they did okay. But interestingly, 18 total procedures were needed to correct the errors in these patients. And again, we're talking about an elective procedure. So it's really pretty a significant number. Nine patients were treated with contact lenses. The ones that did really poorly were the non-surgical candidates. As you can see, their best corrected visual QD, even with contact lenses, was significantly compromised. Our best outcomes, as I said, were seen in the surgical candidates. If we break that down by error, it's the cylinder conversion and timeout protocol had pretty similar outcomes. We think it's pretty coincidental. We don't really think that the nature of the error was predictive of how the patients were going to do. We think basically, given the small sample size, it was just luck. Poor outcomes were seen in the non-surgical candidates. And it just so happened that most of these fell in the data entry category. So overall, our recommendations are we want to look at maybe standardizing the cylinder notation since it seems like the vast majority of our errors were observed during this portion. And also, if you look in the literature, there's really a paucity of data available on these kind of errors. But there is three case reports, and they all report cylinder notation error as the source of error. Secondly, you're going to want to make sure that proper timeout is performed every single time and that the patient is saying their own name. And then third, we need to be verifying their refractive treatment parameters every time, integrating this into part of the timeout protocol so that you're looking at the chart, looking at what's entered in the computer, and making sure that everything is matching up. And that is it. Be happy to answer any questions you have.


Hello, welcome to the Vulnerability Assessment Worksheet overview. I am Tom Docher presenting on behalf of the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services Infrastructure Protection Unit. During today's presentation, we'll cover the Vulnerability Assessment Worksheet Purpose Format and Use over the course of the first three agenda items. We will cover these items and then we'll follow by a more detailed look at the worksheet proper and annex one to the worksheet. The presentation will wrap up with the contact information for further assistance in arranging for a vulnerability assessment. The Vulnerability Assessment Worksheet is a supporting document used to inform the organization of factors used in an overall risk assessment, as well as providing specific information necessary to complete a nonprofit security grant program application. It assists in preparing the investment justification. It can also be used to provide the required findings from previously conducted threat and or vulnerability assessments. The format of the Vulnerability Assessment Worksheet is divided into two parts, the worksheet proper and annex one. The five page worksheet generally provides information for direct use in corresponding sections of the investment justification. Annex one also consists of five pages and documents possible vulnerabilities as an aid to capturing vulnerabilities and mitigation options. Annex one is a short form of assessment template that includes certain essential assessment elements. Many assessment formats exist that collect information on risk to an organization. The annex is not focused on capturing all possible vulnerability related data, but acts as a guide in collecting sufficient information to assess vulnerabilities that may be mitigated under the nonprofit security grant, as well as some information pretending to overall risk and its mitigation. The vulnerability assessment worksheet is designed for use by someone with a background in security, emergency response, or the military. It does not explain or establish a standard, but rather documents elements common to security or vulnerability assessments. Local law enforcement personnel and firefighters, retired or on duty, members of the applying organization, and consulting security professionals have all completed the form. However, best success occurs when completed in close collaboration with the members of the organization responsible for both the application and oversight of the project. I'd like to emphasize that the nonprofit security grant program does not mandate a specific set of standards or methods for the conduct of a threat or vulnerability assessment. The assessment is a means to an ends as part of the application for the nonprofit security grant with the overall goals of addressing identified risk include threats and vulnerabilities to build or sustain a core capability identified in the national preparedness goal. And as part of providing the information for designing mitigation options that those options would be both feasible and effective at reducing the risk for which the project was designed. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has published a series of guidance documents for establishing risk to an organization and how to categorize and mitigate terrorism related risk. These documents also do not establish a standard, but are practical guidelines that your organization can use to understand the risk and assist in mitigating risk. If your organization wants to better understand risk and mitigation of vulnerabilities, the risk management series published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is a good foundation. There are many methods to establish an effective security for an organization, some derived from standards set by industry security associations such as ASIS, some from guidelines published by governmental organizations like the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the area of cybersecurity, or as a result of studies and practice such as crime prevention through environmental design. Each of these are set of practical and defensible processes for determining risk and adopting measures to reduce that risk. Your organization may have someone with the skills to complete the vulnerability assessment or have the appropriate background to bring in the outside assistance necessary to complete a vulnerability assessment. This is sometimes overlooked, leaving the overall project manager who has the skills to provide general oversight to work through the vulnerability assessment process without the same degree of confidence that they may have in their ability to manage the overall scope of the project. First look to members of your own organization to assist in the vulnerability assessment. However, if necessary to go outside your organization, the first step is to look at your local law enforcement agencies. Departments may employ officers or other personnel who work as community services liaisons or crime prevention specialists. These individuals if available are a key to a successful assessment, bringing in local knowledge and tying an organization into local policing efforts. Local law enforcement should be considered first with the understanding that departments due to a variety of factors may not be in a position to conduct an assessment. Nonetheless, vulnerability assessments, regardless of who conduct them, are best conducted with the knowledge and in collaboration to the extent possible with local law enforcement. When reaching beyond local law enforcement, keep in mind that California has a network of fusion centers that act as an information sharing system concerning threats and hazards throughout the state. Your area center can advise what local assessment resources are available. Although each center has some capacity to conduct assessments, much of their work is focused on sharing information and their limited assessment capability may not be available to conduct nonprofit security grant related assessments. Please contact your center as early as possible and keep in mind that they may direct you to other resources. Contractors, other public agencies or private associations may also have the capability to conduct assessments. In all cases, setting expectations and goals, indicating the use of the assessment for the purposes outlined in the nonprofit security grant, should be done early in the process of selecting and working with these entities. The definition of a vulnerability assessment varies among organizations and among security professionals. As noted above, the Federal Emergency Management Agency defines it in the context of the nonprofit security grant as a threat or vulnerability assessment. A full evaluation of risk to an organization contains both threats and vulnerabilities to those threats, as well as the consequences of an organization from the occurrence of an incident. The investment justification requires information on threat, vulnerability, and consequence in order to complete. The vulnerability assessment workshop, ADEX-1, contains areas for documenting each of these, as well as documenting additional information that is both administrative and specific to the grant. Your vulnerability assessment, in a technical sense, can have a limited scope. At its tightest focus, an organization may assess the physical vulnerabilities of its facility with the goal of deriving detailed recommendations for upgrades allowable for purchase under the authorized equipment list. However, a vulnerability assessment in full evaluates additional elements such as exposure to natural and technological hazards, planning for actions during an incident or event, and restoration and continuance of operations in the face of specific incidents. The goals of a vulnerability assessment should be discussed with any assessors and expectations clearly delineated prior to the conduct of an assessment. The vulnerability assessment worksheet, ADEX-1, provides a structure to perform in an assessment that collects information on physical security, emergency action planning, and actions to maintain continuity of operations. We will now transition to doing a walkthrough of the worksheet itself. The worksheet, as I've said before in the comments on the format, has two parts. The worksheet itself, sections one through six, which is essential information for the investment justification, and ADEX-1, which is the on-site vulnerability assessment template. Before you will see the fiscal year 2018 proposed vulnerability assessment worksheet. Section one is designing a capture information of who has conducted the assessment. As I've noted before, there are a number of different credentials that an individual may have in assessing infrastructure or facilities. The list that you see here, CPP, PSP, TLO, is not definitive. With CPP being certified professional protection professional, PSP, physical security professional, and TLO, terrorism liaison officer. Once again, they are examples and are not definitive or comprehensive showing what would be a proper credential for someone to conduct an assessment. Section two is general information concerning the applicant and is generally corresponds to section two of the investment justification. As we go on in this part of the worksheet, you'll see sections three through six of the vulnerability assessment worksheet generally provides information that concerns the investment justification sections three through four, looking at background and consequence, threat, impact information, and specific information concerning mitigation options for vulnerabilities that are assessed during the assessment process. Here you see information threat information, then vulnerability information. Once again, although they're noted as being threat assessment and vulnerability assessment, they're simply capturing those elements of an overall risk assessment, the threat and vulnerability. As we come to the following section, this corresponds to the target hardening section of the investment justification and is an aid to collecting the information that is required to properly fill out that portion target hardening of the investment justification. Upon completion of that worksheet proper, you have annex one nonprofit onsite vulnerability assessment template. Once again, this is a guide or checklist for areas that may be assessed as part of your overall vulnerability assessment. And once again, it covers not only specific physical security vulnerabilities, but also additional information on consequence and emergency action planning and potential continuity of operations. The vulnerability assessment template is designed to use a process in which the facility is looked at from outside, from the perimeter inward and followed by a look at procedures that are used in place. Many of the questions are asked in several different areas that are similar. In other words, in some areas there are references to lights or to alarms that may be repeated in others, but are designed to elicit a different response or perspective based on the area that it is looking at, such as perimeter, interior, building access, overall lighting. So starting with perimeter assessments, you can see that the actual information in the way it's collected varies from simply descriptions to asking questions that elicit a yes or no answer, such as, in this case, is there a perimeter fence or other type of barrier in place around the entire site? Generally, the prompt is if not explained. In other words, if this particular item is not there, it is a potential vulnerability and therefore this is an opportunity to write down both the facts of how that particular perimeter looks and then any particular options that might be for improving the security at that particular location. Once again, as we go through there, it's a means to collect the information for each of these particular areas and as a guide and checklist. However, it does not establish a standard or provide guidance for the mitigation options that would be associated with the vulnerability that is observed. As you can see, going from outside perimeter to lighting to physical protection, each of these are generally moving from outside to inside, that intrusion detection, those circuit TV systems, and then moving from those particular areas into more procedural type of information, such as site security patrols, site access controls, operation security, in this case, either procedures for reporting suspicious personnel or activity onto visitor control procedures and ending with a look at the communication plan for the organization or the means of which employees, volunteers, and members are communicated both before, during, and after an event. And simply at the end is a section to note any of the other attachments or any other photos or other information that was brought in to the assessment. So once again, we've walked through the worksheet understanding that sections one through six are the worksheet proper and followed by the annex one, which is a guide and aid to completing a vulnerability assessment onsite. The fusion centers in California have the following areas of responsibility. Before you see a map of California and each of the fusion center's areas are outlined in a separate color. Contact information for the fusion centers will be shown on the following slide. When contacting any of the fusion centers, please state that you are contacting them in reference to a vulnerability assessment that may be used in a nonprofit security grant application. In addition, please be prepared to discuss the deadline for the assessment. Keep in mind that the centers generally have a series of already scheduled assessments. Also, vulnerability assessments may be conducted at any time of the year if your organization is considering an application for the nonprofit security grant. Please contact your local law enforcement and then one of the fusion centers as soon as possible. If you have any additional questions concerning this presentation, you can contact me, Tom Ducker, at the California State Threat Assessment Center. The contact information is at the top of this slide. You have a phone number and be contacted through InfoShare at caloas.ca.gov.