Welcome. I want to welcome all of you to today's webinar. September is National Preparedness Month. So today's webinar, we will introduce you to the resources that are available from the Extension Disaster Education Network, EDEN, to help you teach others about family preparedness. Now, first of all, let me clarify. This is truly a train-the-trainer session. It's not the direct training. So I'm assuming all of you who are on want to learn about this so you can share it with others. And that's truly what it's designed for. So welcome to this train-the-trainer session. Couple of housekeeping things. If it isn't already that way on your screen, you can play around with the PowerPoint on your own screen to make it bigger. Scott, just our technical support. Thank you, Scott. Just turn, or just muted everybody else. So we'll do one-way audio throughout just so we have fewer technical difficulties. But please, please, please, as we go, if you have a comment or a question, please go ahead and type it into the chat box while you're thinking of it instead of thinking, well, I'll wait till later. Because if you're like me, you'll forget it by then. So also feel free to adjust your volume, whether you do that on your computer, your speaker, your headset, whatever. Hopefully everybody can hear you, hear me, rather. Let's do a quick check. Below the list of things, you'll see a check mark and an X. If you can hear me okay, please just click on the check. If you cannot hear me, click on the X. Okay, it looks like we're in pretty good shape. Just wanted to do that test. I think everybody has already put their email address in the box. And just to warn you, we are recording this. So others who aren't able to join us live can watch it later. Any questions about the technicalities here? Okay, let's roll. The first thing I'd like to do is share with you who we'll be presenting today. Like I said, my name is Becky Koch. I'm the director of Ag Communication at North Dakota. You'll also hear from Carolyn Washburn, who is a family and consumer sciences agent in Washburn County in Utah with Utah State University. We'll also hear from Connie Wheeler, who is a family and consumer sciences extension associate with the University of Kentucky. Lynette Black with Oregon State, 4-H youth development faculty in Washburn County. And Sarah Kirby, who's a housing specialist with North Carolina Cooperative Extension at North Carolina State University. So let me share quickly what we'll be doing here in the next hour. First of all, I'd like to introduce you a little bit to Eden, the Extension Disaster Education Network. Share with you the variety of courses that are available for you to use through Eden. And obviously we want to focus on the family preparedness course materials. Then, several of the folks who are on today will share with you how they've used the family preparedness materials to carry out training and what they've learned through those experiences. And then finally, we want some feedback from you. How might you use these resources? How might you teach the family preparedness course? What other resources would you like to see with family and consumer sciences for disaster preparedness response or recovery? So first of all, the Extension Disaster Network, I forgot a word, Extension Disaster Education Network, Eden. I would appreciate it if you would go to your polling one more time. If you've heard of Eden, please check if you've never heard of Eden, the Xbox or the X, rather. All right, that's what I like to see. Thank you, so we won't spend much time on this. But obviously the mission of Eden is to share educational resources to reduce the impact of natural and man-made disasters. And instead of each of us reinventing the wheel on things like family preparedness training, here's a perfect example of how we can make one version so each of us doesn't have to do the prep work, but we can all use those resources. We're really pleased to say that institutions from the 1862 schools and the 1890 schools in all 50 states plus three territories are now members of the Extension Disaster Education Network. And when we did a review with what was then CSREES, now NIFA, they just didn't know what to call Eden. Is it a program? Is it a this? Is it a that? And it truly is a network. There's not a lot of requirements, just how can we share amongst ourselves and not, like I said, reinvent the wheel? Eden is focusing a little bit more in program areas, kind of like other organizations are moving away from physical regions in many cases because with technology, we can share more with people we have in common subjects we have in common. So Eden worked a lot on agriculture and natural resources already, that this family and consumer sciences program area work group, Pog, have to have an acronym of course, was formed to focus on and develop resources related to family and consumer sciences, such as housing, foods and nutrition, family, economics, human development. So this group's goal, of which everybody who's presenting today is a member, is to provide and or develop, if there's a need, family and consumer sciences educational resources related to disaster preparedness and recovery that Extension educators and others around the country can use. So so many of you are familiar with Eden, I hope you know about the Eden website, Eden.lsu.edu. I'm getting a little bit of feedback, Scott, is everybody else? I took it off. Okay, I think, thank you. And just a little trivia in case you were wondering, you can no longer have a .edu without a university affiliation and since the Eden website is at LSU, we had to do that, but we very strongly felt it should not be .com or even .org and that's before there was .info and everything like that. So we wanted to make sure Eden was stressed as being educational resources. This is a screenshot of the Eden website. I'd like to just walk you through it very quickly. You'll notice that the very top right, there's obviously a search, but below that there's state information where you can go to any state and see who the delegates are from those institutions. News and features right there at the very top of the list is our Family Preparedness Training, just letting people know this is happening. You'll see topics which are a variety of things, flood, mold, snow, avian influenza, a variety of topics there that have more in-depth information, resources, which again, I encourage you to just go explore. The Eden courses we'll look at here in a minute. Conferences and workshops and about Eden are a little bit more internal, but I would encourage you to look and see what's there. Since both halves of the webpage home site wouldn't fit, here's the bottom half. So there's our Family Preparedness course right in the middle that is a focus on the homepage. Learning opportunities, a link over on the left bottom to e-extension because Eden was one of the original pioneer communities of practice. So right now we have aggro security and floods and avian influenza lives, and here's my plug. If anyone would like to join us in creating the Family Preparedness e-extension resources, we'd love to have you join. You'll also see FAQs and articles related to Eden topics, disaster topics that are on e-extension. So a cooperative effort there. Obviously what we're going to focus on today is the Family Preparedness course. So I want to let you know about the other courses that are available too. And once we get into Family Preparedness, you'll see what resources are included in a course. So the other courses that are now available include animal aggro security and emergency management. Of course, Family Preparedness there on protection and defense, which is an interesting consumer angle to food protection. Pandemic influenza preparedness for faith-based organizations. Research shows that a lot of people will get involved in things like preparedness through their faith-based organization. And obviously that was created when pandemic influenza was a hotter topic. And that one's in the process of being updated right now. Pandemic preparedness for businesses.  Plant biosecurity management. That one's been updated recently too. And obviously is more geared towards our agricultural friends. And Ready Business, which we cooperated with ready.gov at DHS to develop that material for your training options. Now I'd like to introduce Carolyn Washburn with the Utah State University in Washington County who's a family and consumer sciences agent. Carolyn was instrumental in developing this course and I'd like her to share with you what some of the content is. Again, if you haven't had a chance to type your email address into the chat box, please do that. And if you have any questions or comments as we go, please type those in too. So Carolyn, take it away. Happy to be here with you today. I became involved with emergency preparedness when my county experienced a flooding disaster and Homeland Security moved into my office and conference room. It was really interesting to watch the process and I realized how little information the extension had ready to give out to constituents. So following this experience, I began gathering and putting together courses and materials to better prepare communities and families. I think it's very important to help families mitigate their loss and also their fear. The Family Preparedness program that we're really sharing with you today is a national team effort. We started with a nationwide request for land grant institutions to send their disaster materials and then we began to combine and prepare a generic emergency preparedness course for families. Many states provided materials and they were combined with disaster education materials from other states until they were refined and now this is what makes up the Eden Family Preparedness course. This five module course can be a complete program used in a one-time setting or each section can be used independently in a shorter session, whatever meets your needs. Each Eden course like Family Preparedness includes a course introduction page like the one that you're seeing here that describes the course. Also, as you enter any of the Eden programs, we would encourage you to be sure to use the tracker and sign in that you find in the left-hand corner. This is so that if materials are updated or changed, you can be notified and also helps us know who's using the materials. Each of these five modules have excellent information and resources that will help you have successful training materials and classes. This program also provides you with ready-made materials to help you publicize your class and they are very easy for you to customize your contact material and information. Another excellent resource that's with the Eden course is the fact that there are news releases that are already prepared and ready for you just to submit to news agencies and these releases provide information about the classes, what you will be presenting. Oftentimes, as presenters, we do a great job of presenting but we run out of time and we don't take the time to effectively advertise and so here it is complete for you. These five modules each consist of leader guides and downloadable PowerPoints. Handouts are also available for each of the subjects and are made for you with the Eden logo on the left-hand side and then the right-hand side on the handouts are left empty so that you can personalize your own institutional organization. The PowerPoints are narrated online for your review or for other people to learn on their own. Additional resources and online evaluations and report forms are also on the course materials page. Here is what the actual course materials page looks like. The Family Preparedness program first provides a course overview that helps you prepare to teach family preparedness then there's a leader guide and PowerPoint for these five modules. The five modules are Introduction and Why Prepare, an overview of the need for teaching preparedness and getting people involved. The second module of Get A Kit provides instructions on pre-bearing a 72 to 96 hour emergency kit. We know that each of us need to be self-sustainable for the first 96 hours before help may arrive to give us the needs. Our third module of Make a Plan includes how to connect family members and even ideas for evacuations. The fourth of Be Informed and Get Involved, this module encourages citizens to help others prepare and even realize the opportunities out in the community for you to be involved with. The last module of Possible Disasters is an easy module that you can modify for your own needs. In this one, you can highlight the disasters that will most likely affect your area. Although it's important that all viewers have some idea of disasters, here you can add additional slides if you need more in-depth information or you can delete slides if you don't feel you want to spend time on it at all. Each of these modules reinforce Homeland Security and the American Red Cross theme of Get a Kit, Make a Plan, and Be Informed. For take-home information, fact sheets on several topics are supplied and more are being added to the website. So you may pick and choose which fact sheets are most important for your audience. A few examples of these are making an emergency supply list, child preparedness. A fact sheet on pet preparedness. With over 70% of Americans having pets, it's critical that we remind families to make a plan for their animals. Most families will not leave their animals behind and this fact sheet helps give a little information on building kits or making plans for animals. A fact sheet on earthquakes. Most American cities are billed along major fault lines and earthquake information may be very important to those you serve. A fact sheet on floods, that's America's number one national disaster and so we probably all will be using it at some time. I am tornadoes, biological and chemical terrorism. These are just a few that have been put online. So to help even the most novice disaster educator, a complete leader guide is provided. You can see above here that the overview provides an introduction to you, the trainer, and helps to prepare for teaching family preparedness. This introduction also provides you with additional resources and ways to network in your community and credits for the course. The leader guide for each module provides you with a draft script for each slide with detailed information and then also provides links where you can obtain additional information if you feel this isn't enough for you. The PowerPoint slides offer bullets for very easy reading, color photos to keep attention and better understanding because often visuals will trigger a thought or idea that sometimes the speaking won't. Some slides even offer a family activity that you may want to suggest to your attendees. For example, in this slide, it suggests a gathering experience for family members. Each family member's given a pillowcase and told that they have seven minutes together, anything they would need to survive for the next three days. And when they return, each family member begins to share what they have in their pillowcase and begin to realize what it takes for survival and that maybe they didn't get the best things they should have. But similar activities and ideas are listed on other modules. Today, we're just simply introducing you to these resources to help you teach family preparedness. This program has been completed with the total family in mind. That means you will be providing information on children, family pets, seniors, it may even be information to individuals with disabilities. So use the parts that fit your needs and remember that it's very easy to customize for your area or your audience. Now, I'd like to introduce you to Sarah Kirby. Sarah is a housing specialist from North Carolina, State University County Extension, and she will share other resources that are included in the family preparedness program. Thanks, Caroline, I appreciate that. We're gonna continue our tour through the family disaster preparedness course and we'll find some other items that I think will be extremely useful to you as you work with your constituents and as you provide training. Caroline mentioned a bit earlier about the disaster fact sheets and there are a number of disaster fact sheets on a wide variety of topics. They are available in Word so that you can add them and you can add any necessary localization and also insert your logo of your organization on these fact sheets, which is really nice because a lot of times our clients want to see things that they know are from either our institution or a particular organization. It makes a difference here in North Carolina, they'd rather see things from North Carolina than say California, just because they think it then applies to them. So it's really nice to have this ability to customize. Most of the fact sheets are designed so that the front of the fact sheet includes information about the specific type of disaster. For example, in this case flood and then on the other side of the fact sheet, you'll find suggestions on how to prepare for that specific disaster. And then of course, in addition to the fact sheets related to specific disasters, such as tsunami floods or quakes, there are also fact sheets that Caroline mentioned on disaster preparedness topics such as emergency supply kits, child emergency preparation, pet preparations, excuse me, the peas are getting to me, and of course, first aid supplies. So those are all available. Caroline highlighted the PowerPoint for each of the modules earlier too, but in addition to the PowerPoint with notes for presenters, the course also includes narrated PowerPoint. And these are particularly helpful to you in a number of ways. First, for those individual leaders who are uncomfortable with presenting information, it gives them an option of having the information presented for them so they can actually show the PowerPoint. Secondly, as educators, we know that it's often difficult to reach audiences. People have very busy lives and they need to be able to access information at a place and time that's convenient to them. So the narrated PowerPoint allow us to provide real-time learning so people can come and watch when they've got the time to do so. And then finally, if educators are aware that a potential community members may be in danger of an intending disaster, such as a hurricane, they can actually point community members to the website to go to these narrated PowerPoint so that they can begin learning how to prepare for that specific disaster. And then all they really have to do is point, click, and listen. So it's another option. And also, when we get a little later, we'll talk about some options for using these PowerPoints, perhaps on government access channels or some other places where they may be convenient. In addition to the materials that are part of the five modules in the course, there are also some additional resource materials that are listed that can enhance both the teaching of the course as well as the activities and information that the participants receive. One of them is from the University of Missouri Extension and it is the Family Disaster Plan. And this leads individuals to create an electronic family disaster plan. That also includes specific information for children, for pets, and for household inventory. The second one listed is the Insurance Information Institute Know Your Stuff Home Inventory. And this particular inventory stresses the importance in the process of taking a household inventory and of keeping a household inventory up to date. A lot of times we find our inventory isn't up to date until we actually have a disaster. So the idea is to keep it up to date as you go along. The site also allows people to upload a free home inventory that can be accessed anywhere, which is extremely important because we know that disasters often result in displacement of people and of items. So if you're no longer in your home and your computer's been flooded, you can still access your inventory from another location. The FEMA Ready America site provides a variety of information that's related to disaster preparedness. It focuses, again, on getting a kit, making plans, and being prepared for a variety of disasters. It also includes preparedness tips for a variety of audiences, as well as some specific geographical locations. And then finally, the American Red Cross Be Ready, Be Red Cross Ready, also emphasizes getting a kit, making a plan, as well as being informed. And this site too includes both audio and visual materials. And then all of these really can enhance and supplement the instruction in the five modules or the family preparedness course.  One is that you may choose to provide certificates of completion to your participants. Like the fact sheets, the certificate is completely customizable with your organization's logo, the instructor's name, the date, and recognition for the individual who actually completed the course. And then once the course is complete, there is also an opportunity for students, as well as instructors, to provide some evaluative feedback. They're two different instruments, one for students, and the students are asked to rate the content to share two things they've learned from the course, to share some steps they're going to take as a result of what they learn, and then also to provide some recommendations for improving the course. And then the other instrument is for instructors, and they're actually asked to provide a brief summary of how they taught the course, some comments perhaps that their participants have made, and again, some suggestions for improving the course. Now both of these instruments are online, and EDED uses the E-Extension Instant Survey System. So if you want to get the information from your particular student, you can contact North Dakota State University at any time and request the data from your participants, which can be very handy. We shared a little bit about the course and the various components that make up the Family Preparedness course. So now we thought we'd take a little bit of time to hear from some Extension educators who can share how they taught the Family Preparedness course. And our first presenter will be Connie Wheeler, and Connie is a Family and Consumer Science Extension Associate from the University of Kentucky. So we look forward to hearing your experience with Connie. Thank you, Sarah. In Kentucky, we've had a variety of Extension agents who have used Family Preparedness programs with various audiences in various ways. We've taught in classroom situations. Sometimes these have been taught in one session, and sometimes the five modules in a series of sessions. We've shared with community civic and community service clubs. We've used them with Extension homemaker leaders and members. Some counties have used the narrated PowerPoints with their local cable television stations, and these have run on the local networks. And some counties have even used them as one-on-one instruction in the Extension office or at community fairs and displays in the community. We've found that it helps during promotion and marketing of the programs to partner with some other groups. Use the members and the networks of your local churches and other faith-based organizations, volunteer fire departments, the local emergency managers, your local schools to help you publicize the program. It is always good to include someone from your community to include someone from your local newspaper on your planning committee. Not only will they give you some needed promotion and often free publicity, but they may even write up your program as a feature story either prior to or after the program. Use local speakers from groups in your community. Include someone from the Red Cross, for example, as a follow-up program. If you have local emergency situations, include stories from those who've been affected and let them say how being prepared helped them or could have helped them with the eventual outcome. During the actual delivery of the program, let your participants share a few stories at the beginning of the training. This will help the group feel more comfortable with each other and with the subject matter. But let me warn you here, sometimes stories can get out of hand. Make sure that your audience realizes that you only have time for two or three stories. Once this gets started, everyone will want to tell a story that can take up more time than you might have available. You might have some real-life samples of supply kit items there in your room and tubs, five-gallon buckets, or other ways to store your emergency supplies. It helps to have these available for people to look at and touch and pick up and feel. Have a sample of a communication plan for the participants to look at. You can try giving away some of the emergency items for incentives to attend the program. You or a committee member can often get flashlights, emergency radios, first aid kits, storage boxes, pool top food cans, or other items donated. If you're doing a multi-session program, be sure to give the incentives only to those who have attended all the sessions and during the last session. It's important to use the materials with all the audiences in your community. Who are some of these special audiences? Well, first of all, we all have the elderly and the handicapped in our community. Take into consideration both physical and mental requirements of these populations. Do you work with senior citizen centers or do you have a large senior population among your clientele? Preparing makes sense for older Americans. Do you have pets? You need to plan what you will do with your pets during an emergency. Will you take them with you to a shelter or will you board your pets at a kennel in a safe place? These decisions need to be made and planned for in case of an emergency. And often they need to be planned for well ahead of time. Babies and young children need specific items that other family members may not need. They have to have special food. They need special clothing and special hygiene items for these audiences. Do you know other special audiences? I'd like you to take a couple of minutes and type into the text chat box some other special audience groups that you may have worked with or you may have realized that you need to work with on this subject. College students, that's a really good one there. Renters. You don't often see those as a special audience but they certainly are because many times renters don't have access or don't have a lot of items that they can use for supply kits. All right, if any of you think of any others just add them in there to the text chat. FEMA has some great resources that we can use with special audiences. They have a website at ready.gov where you can find materials. The FEMA materials are available in several formats. Many of the materials are available also as downloadable handouts. There are many that are available for special audiences such as military families, families with new babies, elderly handicaps, families with pets. Some of these are also available as printed brochures. They're nice. They're colorful. The picture here is a quadrufold brochure of general information about emergency preparedness. It's also available from FEMA in a 16-page booklet form. Both of these plus other brochures and handouts are available in both English and Spanish. There's an order form and a toll-free number for ordering of these free materials at ready.gov. You need to know, however, that you need to allow up to six weeks for free delivery. The next person to share today is Lynette Black. Lynette is a 4-H youth development faculty member with Oregon State University in Westco County, Oregon. Good afternoon, everyone, from the beautiful state of Oregon and the host location of this year's EDEN conference. Feel free to contact the visit either contact me or visit the EDEN website for more information on the conference. There's still room available and if you'd like to come visit us we'd love to have you part of our conference. Similar to Connie, I've given several presentations for specific adult groups such as senior citizens or community organizations. I found that generally when invited to present the time allotted is not enough to share all the information in the family preparedness presentation. A nice thing about the way we've put this program together though is that it's easy to pick and choose educational segments. The focus I may take depends on several factors such as the time of the year, current events, and of course the people requesting the presentation. Just last week I was invited to present to the seniors at our local senior center and this is an annual event scheduled every September during National Preparedness Month. This time we did a quick review on the survival kit and then focused mainly on developing a communication plan. Again, depending on the organization requesting the presentation I may focus more on pet preparedness, especially a big request when it's 4-H, wildfire evacuation kits since we just had the wildfire events around us, developing kits for children and as a 4-H agent some of my special audiences will include camp counselors. Camp counselors being prepared for an emergency if it should occur during camp and other 4-H agents. So 4-H agents are great ones for being able to also teach this presentation. I also teach the entire 3-H presentation for community members as an extension service program. My goal is to teach the entire lesson at least once a year, usually during September, the National Preparedness Month. However, since I'm a 4-H youth development educator my focus is on empowering youth to teach the program. In the true 4-H fashion my evaluations have indicated that when we train youth and preparedness we reach their family also. Our trained 4-H youth have taught preparedness to 4-H leaders at state and regional leaders forums to other 4-H youth at state and national conferences and as invited guests for 4-H clubs. They've also given presentations to the local school board and community organizations. 4-H youth have used this training to help their communities through community service projects as well. One club created pet preparedness kits for pet owners and other clubs have combined them with their geospatial projects with emergency preparedness and created evacuation maps or shelter maps and other things that could be used to help their communities. Outside of 4-H I've taught the program to high school youth in school or after school settings. In one particular case, high school youth use the knowledge gained to develop survival kits for every classroom in their school. And then touch the teachers and other students how to develop kits for their home, for work, and for their automobiles. A few lessons I've learned regarding youth and disaster preparedness, however, is one can be challenging to reach an interest youth in emergency preparedness. It requires creative interest grabbing techniques. But once that interest is caught, youth take the lessons seriously and are apt to develop community service projects as a way of helping their community prepare for disaster. And through the emergency preparedness method, or I should say build emergency preparedness message, often falls on deaf ears, youth are oftentimes able to open those ears and affect learning and change. Youth are powerful motivators for adults. Now Carolyn Washburn from Utah State will share how she has taught family preparedness courses. Utah has been involved in many family preparedness training days. We often do them as Saturday events and invite the total family to participate doing a section for children where they'll deal their own 72-hour kits while parents attend classes, then bringing the families back together to provide an emergency lunch meal. We also just finished a booth at our state fair where we handed out many of the new Eden resources. It was great to see how anxious many of our people were to receive our new earthquake preparedness, and this was a great opportunity for our university. Other classes, Utah has held, have often been just one-time section classes, they could even be provided to special interest groups such as seniors or to individuals with handicaps that have a real need to understand how to make a basic preparedness kit and to find some comfort in knowing that they have some preparedness. Each of these modules offers a complete program that has proven very effective to Utah attendees. These materials have been used for local county emergency teams, to county health officials, to medical teams, and to CERT teams. As you can see here, we have a CERT volunteer and they network with us a lot. Happy for us to come in and teach some of the sections to their people. Many of the committee members use these courses to help provide information to others they work with. Many church organizations have invited us to provide training using these resources. It's an excellent resource to teach agencies about Eden services. And if any of you happen to be going out to the NEA-FCS National Conference, be sure and visit the Eden booth and maybe even attend the Eden workshop that's going to talk more about family preparedness program. And now we're back to Sarah, she's from North Carolina, and she's going to share with you how she has used this program. Thanks again, Carolyn. My experience is somewhat similar to everybody else's with the exception that I do service training for our agents as well. And they're not just family and consumer science agents, but they can also be agents in agriculture, forage, as well as community and rural development. So family preparedness is important for everyone to know in cooperative extension, and our agents certainly have been a recipient of that. Also our extension and community association, which is our large volunteer organization with North Carolina State University, also the four more extension home-makers. They have been recipients of family preparedness training. And then finally I would say that the work that we've done has really been important with our collaborative efforts. So we have worked with emergency management, like Carolyn was talking about, as well as the Red Cross, to present train the trainer kinds of seminars. So it's good to cross train with other organizations. I think collaborative efforts really help you reach a broader audience and also help you to be able to capitalize on the resources as well as the talents of other organizations and agencies. So the one thing I would say in terms of this current family preparedness course is that it really is extremely useful for a number of reasons. And first is that the messages are consistent and they work consistently across the country. Second, that they are customizable for your specific location. They can be used to train both professionals as well as lay people. And they have really all the materials that you need to address preparedness needs. So I think that this particular course really serves a vital link for many people who are working in the family preparedness arena. I want to go back now and ask you all for your input again. We've talked about the course. We've talked about the components of the course. We've shared a little bit about how the course has been used in various states and with various audiences. And Connie's even asked you a little bit about some audiences that you might think about. But let's try again to see if there's any other thing you've thought about how you might use this family preparedness course with your organization or with your audience. Is there anything you've thought about since we presented this? Just take a moment and write it in the chat box, if you will. I don't know if anybody is typing or not, but I will say when we did this last week, we did have an agent who suggested using it for government access channel. Tracy even said, looking at the information using TV and radio programs, that would be excellent. One of the things they were talking about was showing the PowerPoints over and over, though, on the government access channel. Becky, motivating to share it with 4-H, absolutely, youth have a big role to play in family preparedness. And the idea that if we really prepare youth for disasters, then it's less fearful for them as well. Cross-training master food preservation, that's an excellent idea. An excellent idea. And one of the other suggestions from our previous webinar was working with childcare facilities. And I think Becky mentioned that many already have a plan, but this may be something that you could do, not only working with the childcare providers, but perhaps even the parents of those children. So that's an option. Anything else before we move on? I've got one more question for you before we end. And that is, are there any additional needs? We've talked about some of the components of this particular course. Are there any additional needs that you have that need to be addressed in terms of topics in the family preparedness course? Tracy, I'd like your idea, too, about running the TV in your lobby and running the program information sort of over and over loopiness so that people see it. But any additional topics that we ought to cover in the family consumer science? Information in Spanish, that's an excellent idea. It is not, but that's an excellent idea. So preparedness or recovery? Exactly, Becky. This is preparedness. We might address recovery as well. Any other thoughts? Obviously we know that this is just a beginning, but an important beginning because being prepared certainly helps you in responding and recovering to disasters. So we do hope that you have learned something valuable today, that the resources will be valuable to you as you work in your area of disaster preparedness. And we hope that you'll use the resources as you work with your organizations and constituencies, partners and collaborators. Let's see. Oh, Karen, interesting. A family preparedness bingo game that's fun and interactive. Maybe you'll share that with us and that may be something that we can add to our plan. Female publications are available in Spanish. You're correct, Connie. So that's one option as well. Kids going back to school that were uncomfortable. Very interesting, Becky. I'd love to see the bingo game too, Val. I think that would be a very interesting thing. And Lynette knows of a website that will make bingo cards for you at no charge. So there you go. I think that's a great idea, though, and a fun way to learn about disaster preparedness. Any other thoughts? I'll use them with you, exactly. Learning needs to be fun. It does, Tracely, especially when you're talking about something that's kind of scary, especially if you're working with kids and youth. You know, an impending disaster makes everybody a little bit nervous, but particularly when you don't have some sort of concept of what a hurricane brings or flooding, or even if you do, especially if you're young and you've already been through it. So helping to make it fun and to take some of the fear out of it could be very helpful. And Daki would like us all, again, to share our email addresses so that she can share things with you and she'll make sure that the bingo cards and the information that we shared can get out to you all, so then you've got that. So please be sure to do that. Okay, well, I guess our time has come to an end. We do thank you for taking some time and sharing your afternoon with us. And we do particularly thank you for the important effort that you guys do in preparing individuals for disasters. Sarah, this is Becky. This is Becky. I just want to remind people that if they missed the beginning or any part, we have recorded today's webinar, and as soon as Scott is able to do his magic and get it to me, I will try to get it up on the Eden website on the Family Preparedness course page. I think I can do that. I do have to run back to the Emergency Preparedness expo for a little while, but I should have that done by tomorrow. So if you missed any part or want to go back and review sections of this or share it with your coworkers who might not have been available for today's webinar, we'll go ahead and put this recording on that Family Preparedness website on the Eden website. Sarah already kind of wrapped it up, but I want to say thank you to this team. They've put a lot of effort into this and greatly appreciate it. That's Karen. We will have the entire chat log. I can certainly send that to you. I don't know if everybody wants to receive that, but we can have that available. If there's more discussion, it looks like we're on a roll with keying in now. So if you have any more thoughts or ideas to share, we don't mean to cut you off. We're actually done a little bit early here. If you need to go, you've certainly gotten the content, and thank you for joining us. But if you have additional ideas to share or questions, please go ahead and continue to type those in the chat box. I just got an email from Keisha and Thomas and we're not able to type into the chat box, but mentions working with or perhaps partnering with FFA. Has anybody out there partnered with FFA? The regional office is in their campus and the whole idea of getting youth involved is really a great idea, Keisha. I think that'd be great. Anybody, has anybody done that? Great idea. I'm in the process of working with our local FFA chapter with the agro-security program, which is another Eden program, but to work with agro-security with them. That's great. I think sometimes in extension we think of 4-H first and we're used to that, but FFA certainly is a great option. I don't see any more comments or questions coming in, so maybe we ought to just wrap it up. Again, thank you so much, everybody, for joining us today. We hope these resources are user-friendly for you, that you don't have to invest a lot of time in preparedness work yourself to teach family preparedness, that you can just pick these up and roll with it, basically. And again, I want to thank the team that you heard from today for making that possible. So joining us, and we look forward to hearing from you with the online report for instructors on how you end up using the family preparedness resources. So thank you all very much for joining us today.


what we're gonna see on the videos well it's full hd and it's supposed to be full hd as well yeah so i'll be referring to you in some slides so yeah so you can you can stand up and wave people i actually believe in the meritoclavic thing is so people have to know who they who they can punch yes and that's as well oh actually just a second i'll do a bit of you just a second i did a stupid mistake that i want to rectify and now we'll return back to screen configuration no i'll tell people that yeah yes yeah thank you so just in the last minute and a half i actually noticed it that the date here was the last weekend when i was given this talk a variation of this talk at fosden so it's kind of a deaf con at fosden right so now it's the right date at least for today and we can start with it so um the is the idea for this talk actually started more than half a year ago when we gradually work it on the server side to get all the bits and pieces for the single sign-on available and then i started looking how those pieces can be combined together to have our laptops and overall our desktops working nicely so that there's no excuse anymore called mac os 10 to be on the desktop with linux it shouldn't be cool it should just work and i came first to non-foundation at the goa deck with this idea and a practical demos of what can be achieved with as little as possible which show it what rod blocks we have now six months later we have those some of those rod blocks eliminated and it actually shows how far you can get with even a little of effort there and some of that effort is a really small one but some some of the work was groundbreaking but let's go there so we talk about enterprise desktop and the goa deck was last year quite interesting in this sense we had two talks on enterprise desktop one coming from redhead one coming from susie the susie talk was traditional uh enterprise desktop mainly a linux desktop to run your office applications and traditionally people think that the desktop for enterprise is actually that you get office applications to run some documents to write some presentations to show and so on and you are basically limited to that okay there are printers that can be used to print if they don't work that's all a fail meaning the server guys and not the desktop people and when desktop is enterprise linux desktop is usually mentioned it's in the migrations from windows where people try to compare how easily to use it basically what the icons there what is the ux experience natural for them and so on but not all the um integration into the environment that that this desktop runs with so yeah enterprise but almost yeah i work from home and in a sense my local office network which i do have we have office in finland for redhead but it's the same as i if i work from home because there's no it support uh that that supports that office we do support we associate it's supported by ourselves so working from home with vpn is equal working from the office that we have except that i don't see my colleagues and i can be of certain freedom of what i wear or where i see it or lie and um but at the same time the company services that are in use or in enforce it to be used by employees they also not in this certain central place and that place is actually might be spread out over different clouds not even the single one and we can even have something that's inside outside an internal cloud or a single machine somewhere or provided by external providers there are plenty of them and i'm sure everybody can really experience about that and also even if i use the corporate laptop and i have certain limitations to what i can do on it uh redhead is very good at allowing to the open source work on on the corporate laptops and so i need to have corporate identity to sign in into corporate applications whatever they are they might be just i don't know uh places where somebody else brag about bacon and pizza but still it's a corporate stuff i have my home network which i also need to use even from the corporate laptop if i want to print which is my printer is there or it at the local office the printer is actually managed by the company that manages the local space at the same time there are plenty of social networking and if you look at the messages that the defconn for organizers are putting out they are explicitly asking you to be active on social networks promoting your talks and talks of your colleagues and written blogs and so on and i only have this leftover so i have to have access to those social services if i want to participate and win something that they promise it for the best blog about then i'm participating in multiple free software projects so so to say i have multiple hats to wear if they all fit here but sometimes i need to kind of junk juggle them but also at the same time i have um governmental ideas issued to me and sometimes i have to use those governmental ideas when talking to tax office luckily in finland people don't like to talk face to face with the government so the government made a perfect system where you're just logging over the web using your smart cards and bank credentials that avoids talking but it means that you have those identities to be supported on linux to be useful and i also have my private data whether it's a private data on a corporate laptop which supposedly not to be there it's still there and i want to protect and share it with those whom i care about and i kind of crazy person that wants to have access to that all at the same time is this a rare example i think most of you can relate to the same story so i work on free ipa which is really a management of identities and policies i store it in a single place and force it at the at the end endpoints which those laptops are one of the example applied locally and it's a number of different free software projects unified together in a common management framework to rule them all so it's available in multiple distributions slowly but surely it's most of it capabilities infiltrate stable versions so like two years ago we missed by one week a deadline a freeze deadline in debian so debian has free ipa server side but only in testing because we just missed a deadline hopefully next deadline will already be we will be ready to that and gnome foundation and gnome as an organization runs free apa as their accounting system so all gnome developers they have account in account gnome org which is free apa if you go there right now you will see that it's standard free apa login screen which you will see today so how enterprise are we there are multiple ways of scoring so let's score by one of those thing by password if you have multiple passwords to enter you're not enterprise and the lower number of passwords you enter because in an enterprise marketing materials if you sell enterprise products the single sign-on phrase is kind of rules them all none of those products actually has real single sign-on but they have them to do it so a typical workflow if you're happy enough to reboot your laptop is actually you have to sign in in your local system account so you enter a password you jump on to virtual private network VPN to your office environment that might include a password and maybe a token value one way or another certificate and god knows what if your corporate environment uses Kerberos or active directory you most likely will obtain the Kerberos ticket and then supply this ticket to the application or you're supposed to use Kerberos ticket as evidence that you are who you are to those applications and therefore go with single sign-on in those apps but you already strike stroke like three times that password before you go to that's point and many of those enterprise apps actually do not support Kerberos so in fact you will have to be requested to enter a password again so can we be really better than this obviously crossing out some password entering procedures that you have to do I would say every day would probably be good can we really slim it down to one or two let's see let's try to log in I'm I'm not gonna run live demo so I have pre-recorded videos which show the same stuff this one was done in in VM and basically I'm just trying to log on to that VM the VM is enrolled into free APA server that I have and the VM is actually not on the same network as I have therefore I use a VPN to log on there and as you saw there's no there's nothing to enter there's no password required because I used Kerberos credentials that I obtained it when I tried to log on and those Kerberos credentials were forwarded over the Kerberos proxy through the public internet to obtain a ticket so here is the in the second output of K-list you see the first ticket is HTTP slash that's that's the ticket to my VPN service that this ticket was obtained without any credentials entering because they already have credentials and now as that I'm on the VPN to my internal network I can actually run IP commands to that IPA server which is behind the VPN so it's not accessible from the public internet but it's accessible obviously on the internet on the intranet so this is this is the basic thing we just logged on on a system that is configured to be a client to free APA SSSD as a local daemon that enforces IPA policies and provides all these users and IDs it handles log on and Kerberos keys the log on verified over a public network using proxy for Kerberos protocol the VPN connection based it authenticates based it on the Kerberos ticket that I obtained it on top of the ticket grants and ticket or initial ticket that I got when I log on my credentials were entered only once in that log on screen it's kind of a paradise right what I'm dreaming at night so this Kerberos proxy it's actually in at some time good things come out of Microsoft not only in form of Hyper-V and Azure and and so on but also some real good things like this Kerberos proxy they had this exactly the same problem with the Windows lab Windows workstations for the customers and they invented this protocol of proxy Kerberos data over HTTPS to allow to get the initial ticket then use that ticket to establish the VPN connection and use IPv6 over that VPN connection to bring together all the laptops it happens behind the behind the curtain you don't see it if your active directory administrator configure it all this thing you just don't see anything it just works but it took them a certain amount of time I think they introduced this first in 2007 or so and it didn't really work well until 2008 or so because the client side need to be updated they needed to build IPv6 infrastructure to host all these virtual VPN environments and so on so Nathaniel McCullum implemented this protocol for MIT Kerberos and as a separate Kerberos proxy server and then we integrated one with I think Christian did this work to integrate it in free APA for two so now if you deploy free APA for two you get the Kerberos proxy enabled by default it's on the same HTTPS port like the management interface that IP runs which is neat you just do it and your public network can be used to connect and get there. GNOME guys are really spearheading the deployment two years ago once we introduced the Kerberos proxy in free IPA for zero I think even before that they simply deployed it for their own needs to allow their developers to use JSS API for SSH connections and that is to replace the SSH keys access to make sure that you have single sign-on but you still have pretty serious security over that one ticket is expiring over some time SSH keys people have had to keep them decades instead of rotating them regularly and on the VPN side last DevCon we talked with Nikos from the OpenConnect and we persuaded him that it's actually an interesting problem and he solved it in less than one week so OpenConnect client supports JSS API negotiations since Fedora 22 and the OpenConnect server supports it own Kerberos proxy so you can use actually OpenConnect server as your proxy that's what I do and my VPN runs open runs Kerberos proxy in the same time as as the VPN itself OpenVPN does not support JSS API and its developers have interesting mixture of understanding why JSS API is interesting and they think that it's kind of not the technology that you should use you should use X509 certificates let we'll leave this them that's not quite true well I mean there are some stories you can really look up using the search engines the responses that I refer to and they did not change in in the last five or seven years it's been on that's actually the first time we actually talked about JSS API so in 2005 people were asking on OpenVPN development list for support for JSS API and it was negatively responding all the time IPsec has this standardized for ike one if I understood Paul yeah so it's in the works now and Liberus one would get it hopefully this year so there's there's improvement compared to what we had even six months ago um could we do a stronger authentication of the at the VPN edge because you don't want to just allow everyone to connect into the enterprise with with ticket that was obtained with a single single factor so yeah with Kerberos 114 which is out we have support for so-called authenticator indicators they are already like Nathaniel found this week they already put the OTP indicator if you use it to two-factor authentication to log in but we don't have enforcement yet this is coming very soon it's high on my priority yes so two-factor authentication is what we support in free APA for HOTP, TRTP types of tokens so things like Ubiqui with HOTP, TRTP token written in it or you can use free RTP client on android or iOS or you have some blackberry stuff even oh it's outdated so yeah that's the that's the cheating stuff yep and the um the two-factor oath is enforced for users on the Kerberos site so once you try to log in if you have the two-factor and force it and one factor is disabled then you will not be able to get Kerberos ticket unless you really use there are some problems on how to make it sure without the clients that know how to deal with it so SSSD knows how to deal with it a regular key in it doesn't you need to be you need to do some tricks so how this works this is free OTP you can install it and use and I guess many of you are using if you're in red hat so let's try to see it here is the same session that I had right so this poor user has been a member of group USB access this is just to allow you dev to map permissions to allow the programming the USB token and I'm doing this programming actually in the console just because we don't have from the browser we don't have access to USB devices and that's probably for a good thing and it also means that having some nice desktop UI integrated with IPA that knows about the features like these tokens and is able to program the token without referring to the actual commands would be very nice to have that then you'll actually implement the UB key support in just one one night now I have the token and suppose I inserted the actual token into the machine let's pretend that this is really show I close the screen and now what you see is that instead of the password prompt I get a first factor prompt I did not change anything I just locked the machine and when GDM asks me for the prompt what to enter SSSD sees that the Kerber server actually is responding with the I need additional information kind of response and that means that it also returns a prompt that I can show we are a bit weirder so we told them call them first factor second factor of course that people who want to have them name it properly can file bugs and talk to to the people who one is the password is another is token generated by UB key exactly saying can happen if I load the free OTP and have a token generated let me launch free OTP yeah so if if I press on this one then it generates a code and I enter the same code UB key is just a keyboard in reality actually we're going to yeah so using Bluetooth as a keyboard your phone can be keyboard and free OTP then inserts the code into your laptop do we have all the system departs fix it actually okay so now I enter it the first factor and second factor and I logged in and looking at the credentials the Kerberos credentials you can see that I actually have a fresh initial ticket which means that this ticket actually has now authentication indicator saying that I did two factors we don't have on the client side and the Kerberos actually ingest this API library is a way to pick up this indicator and see and verify that it's actually valid and sign it by all the partners it's coming some point later but it's there so the basics are there now what I can do with it right with this token okay coming back here is a summary we got the one-time password programmed to UB key we handle login and SSSD notices that there is a pre-authentication request from the Kerberos server say that I need more info and what info and it pushes the GDM to show that we log into the system verify it over a public network using Kerberos proxy forwards into the actual QDC then we got the ticket first factor is provided to GDM to unlock the GNOME passwords and key storage if we don't do this on the first logon ever in your system your GNOME key ring will be encrypted with a password that is for sure never will repeat again and you will not be able to encrypt decrypted so what we do is that we split these prompts we provided infrastructure to actually handle prompts separately exactly for these reasons for a small thing like reusable key store the secret store if you are offline SSSD has support for that it knows that you are offline you cannot reach the identity server and it only asks you for the first factor it asks for the first factor and then does the hash comparison with the stored hash of the hash of hash basically of a local of the password that was used once you cannot log in offline to the system that you never log on to but if you log it once and you have this enabled it's not enabled by default at the first attempt when the password will be needed it will be upgraded to the online use and you will get the request for the password for the token again credentials were entered only once now if i have them what i can do with them or almost everything so i can authenticate even against the wall if the wall understands this protocol i can obtain um sum a surgeon or any other equal thing that uh basically reports back what what this identity is i can access network file systems that's the first thing that started like 15 or more even more years ago i can display properties of the tickets i can renew tickets i can choose what principle to use and to authenticate with jss api now uh that's the interesting part uh the epiphany web browser does not support jss api since 2009 when its support was removed uh from lip soap this is the famous bug that's still being fixed do not spoil my presentation please so webkit gtk is unusable for some or two interactions open id even if you want to um involving caribou's one cannot use for example google apps with jss api in normal line accounts no single sign on as a result of it basically that's it can we do better than that i would say yes so let's look at the hacked version done by thomas popular and david woodhouse from intel um now i'll be fast because i will be showing just demos right so i got logging i i got the ticket and now with that ticket i'm logging into the free ip web ui uh using the jss api the browser that i use is epiphany it's a standard fedora 23 with hacked uh lip soap and webkit gtk packages now the next step i go in normal line accounts and enter my email for this user which as you can see in the background uh and google then accepts it because i have paired my free ip install with the identity provider called ipsilon which supports pulling data from ipa including email information and pushing that data out to uh to the service provider and google apps now service provider to this so i logged in into the docs and you can actually see that that's me once the cursor goes there yeah that's the same email as the as the one in the database you have to pre-create users with uh within the google apps but at no point google sees any credentials you use they get signed assertion from your identity provider that is enough for them so what else the google calendar bug is uh that's why you see this kind of uh the screen is not really good there right um it's the bug with the browser for the user agent string uh which turns the google apps to to serve you um mobile yes and you can see that i have all the in normal line accounts i have all this stuff basically enabled for use of the uh well session cookie that that was obtained through the perverse credentials okay that's that's the work uh that we hope to get into you know 320 can we do better than that yes so that's exactly what happened here the google apps accepted it you can get more from patrick's talk tomorrow about the same time about epsilon and he will show some of these demos and his own demos as well um this should work with any identity provider that knows how to use how to utilize ssd features uh that expand beyond posix attributes because email is not a posix attribute and this is what um google cares about yes yes yes i think it had it had created a lot of issues for epsilon guys when my logout was implemented yes so what we can do in the gnomon line accounts a lot we can visualize uh and see the properties but unfortunately those properties they are not really well visible right now i will skip parts of it um we can have multiple credentials used and the one that that you want to use can be selected uh from the console using kswitch uh command but we would like to have something more uh user friendly for your definition of user and um we can have ticket renewals and that's now a big problem that everybody complains whoever uses gnome with kerberos the ticket is expired but nobody pops up a message for that one does not initiate it so i talk it with debar she on it and hopefully we get we get this fix it at some point um the browsers have their own problems so firefox for example needs manual configuration but at least it accessible for the users chrome requires system wide configuration or command line parameters you have to specify all the time we have the um uh fix it lip soup uh webkit gtk epifani will just work against any as uh https website as much as conqueror does already but a conqueror html engine for example is not enough for google apps and for the other applications and there are some limits that you need to be aware of like gss api flow is uh synchronous so you have to do it outside of your ui thread but that's not news for ui developers but any any kind of practical use of it right the google apps is one thing you probably don't want to to do google apps for your home if you want to stay under the budget right so let's do some practical thing it's two minutes demo i skip it one uh demo in this one and i show another one so this is uh actually i'm becoming an administrator from active directory this active directory it has established it cross forest trust relations with free ip a and now i will use these credentials over epiphany to log in into the own cloud instance that i have and that works with the epsilon with help of the epsilon it accepts the uh gss api authentication so now what will happen it takes a bit of time that this windows administrator is actually part of my own cloud environment it does not exist in free ipa it purely exists in the active directory that i have somewhere uh under the table of my office and you can actually see i will get it a bit larger here and scroll it that the cloud id is a fully qualified username including the realm or ad domain so this is this is something you can do and practically yes this is a setup um that i have hacked own cloud to basically accept uh some assertions coming from uh epsilon and auto create users if they are come in this way again no need to enter passwords from the first log on with the two factor authentication towards use of this application i'm i'm there right if i on on pause we can see that we should be able to go into we can see that tickets were obtain it a first initial ticket for active directory real then the cross forest ticket for access in ipa resources and then the ticket for epsilon so we got through the whole stages and finally got to the uh to the on cloud system and credentials we enter it only once that's what i want to see in let's say fedora 25 for majority of services that support gss api there and i need your help actually this is not existing in the standard own cloud community edition uh on cloud company sells this as their uh enterprise edition features so now i'm kind of commodizing that feature and uh even more because they don't have support for active directory trusts and going through it we do yes and we want to have a normal line accounts working well for all summer enabled services not just the way how how it only works for google apps now but doesn't work for on cloud within the normal line accounts free api also has support for user certificates so you can actually plug the hole and have your own environment at home for all your small company that way you trust your infrastructure so you i'm skipping this because that's what i show it you can control your own infrastructure that's the very important part of it you can improve user experience we become uh older and older and we don't remember all these techie steps anymore well 20 40 years in future is going to be interesting challenge to every single one of us here and finally somebody can profit with it not only redhead thank you i'm here here and uh today and tomorrow you can come and ask uh i don't think we have any time left otherwise uh i get kicked completely by the guys who do the call wait yes


Lakeland Public Television presents Currents. And welcome to Lakeland Currents. I'm Bethany Wesley. Tonight, we focus our spotlight on housing. More specifically, we will be discussing a growing need in outstate Minnesota for the development of more workforce housing. While you may occasionally hear about the need for some job growth throughout greater Minnesota, in some cities the jobs are there, or could be there. But the companies that are wanting to expand or establish themselves there are reluctant to do so because there is not enough middle-income housing for would-be employees. So what exactly is workforce housing, and why is there a shortage of it? To answer these questions and to discuss potential solutions, tonight we welcome to the program Dan Dorman, the Executive Director of the Greater Minnesota Partnership, and Tim Flathers, the Executive Director of the Headwaters Regional Development Commission. Welcome. Welcome back. Thanks, Bethany. Thank you for having us. As we get started, why don't you tell us a little bit about what Greater Minnesota Partnership is? Greater Minnesota Partnership is an advocacy organization that works on economic development issues in Greater Minnesota for Greater Minnesota. So our goal and our mission is to try to create better jobs, improve job quality, improve the quality of life, helping to build tax-based, vital cities, vibrant cities, but exclusively in Greater Minnesota. One thing that we noticed that the metropolitan area, just because of that's where everybody's at, you're all herded up together, easier to organize, they have a stronger voice at the capitol, so our job is to try to make sure Greater Minnesota doesn't get lost in the hubbub and the mix, and so we advocate again for Greater Minnesota economic development programs. Tim, our viewers hopefully will recognize you from an earlier appearance, but tell us a little bit about what the HRDC's role is with housing specifically. Well, housing is an issue that is pretty broad within our organization, and we're really interested in meeting housing needs of communities throughout the region. It includes development of housing. We've focused on affordable housing principally. We have a non-profit subsidiary corporation that does housing development work. We also provide staff support to a couple, or three right now, housing and redevelopment authorities, and we do things such as housing rehabilitation work, down payment assistance, and trying to make sure that people have access to affordable mortgage financing products, particularly on the home ownership side. So we do a variety of different things in the area of housing. And will you remind our viewers, if you'd be so kind, in terms of what your footprint is, in terms of what the HRDC manages? Yeah, the HRDC Regional Development Commission serves five counties. We're headquartered here in Bemidji. We go down to Park Rapids and serve Harbour County, and then west we go to Clearwater County and Minoamon County, and then north Lake of the Woods County. So we serve Badat, for example. Okay. All right, so as we turn our attention to workforce housing, Dan, can you tell us, how do you define workforce housing? How does it differ from, let's say, low-income housing? I think Bethany, the easiest way to think about it is middle-earners. And if you think about, like, specific jobs, it isn't about low-income, like, food manufacturing workers or something, because there's already programs for that. But it could be anyone from a beginning nurse, beginning teacher, or, of course, the manufacturing jobs, kind of that pay range of maybe $15 to $25 an hour right there. You make too much to qualify for low-income stuff. But for some reason that I really can't explain, the market isn't responding like it should in creating, in this case, what we're advocating for is more rental housing that will lead to single-family home ownership. But it's about making sure that there's a housing supply available for those people when those jobs are created. And it's an issue, it's a growing issue as you mentioned earlier in almost all parts of Greater Minnesota, from the southwest corner to the northeast, northwest, central Minnesota, it is a, like I said, it's a growing deal. It's starting to hurt our economic development and job creation in these cities. And so we think it's important that the legislature take some action. Tax credit proposal, we think, would work, sort of copied it from our neighbors in North Dakota and Iowa. We cobbled something together, you know, better to, you know, not reinvent something, you know, steal an idea that seems to work. And we think it would really help these communities continue to grow and prosper. When did the issue really kind of start to emerge? When did you start to hear things from communities that said, you know, we really could use some more of this market rate or middle-income housing? From my perspective, we first started hearing about workforce housing back in the mid-90s and it became an issue. But I think the characteristic over the past few years, in my estimation anyway, we started to hear more and more about workforce housing for moderate-income people or higher-income people. I don't think that's a traditional part of the issue. The market's being broken, I think, is a new twist on a very old problem that we've had. I live in Albert Lee and it's funny to say the mid-90s, because that's when it started to become an issue there. It started to talk about it, you know, form committees and how are we going to do this? And our local communities really don't have the tools they need to respond to it. But I would agree with what Tim said. So there it was more, maybe rehabilitation, low income. That seems to have worked its way through in many communities, but it's that, you know, you don't make enough, you know, you don't make $50 an hour, but you've got that, again, that new teacher or new technician. They're having a hard time finding quality place to live. And what does that do? Well, it becomes a competitive issue. Well, why do I want to live in this community? I want a decent place to live and raise my family. And so we think that it's an important issue to be solved. But I would say it started in some ways in the mid-90s, but really over the last probably 10 years, that middle income has really grown in importance and the legislature so far hasn't reacted. You know, there's always that lag, right? It makes some sense, but it's really on the forefront. The state is very active in housing. We've spent roughly almost $100 million a year in primarily low income stuff. So the state does have an active role and plays an active role in housing. In a lot of ways, we think this is just an area that needs some attention. Tell me a little bit about how widespread the issue is. We talk a lot about rural or out-state or greater Minnesota. Is it throughout all those areas? Are there pockets of it that are experiencing more than others? You know, I think there definitely is. I think when you look at, you know, the news lately, Thief River Falls and the possible expansion by Digi-Key, they've got a problem. Roso, down in my neck of the woods, both Albert Lee and Austin, you know, the interesting thing, the city manager from Austin was in St. Paul this week to testify on behalf of our bill. They haven't built a market rate apartment building in Austin, right, home or formal, haven't built a market rate apartment building in 45 years. And it is getting to be a problem for them. So we hear it, you know, there. It's maybe not quite the same issue, even though they have different housing issues in communities like St. Claude Rochester, Mankato. They probably have some different issues, but still an issue for them as well. There are some pockets in the metropolitan area that would say they have needs, but it's really different because in the metropolitan area, they have seen growth in this area. People are building apartments. And, you know, the one thing that I think makes the case for state investment is if you think about other state investments in the metropolitan area, it's really helped their housing market. You look at the light rail, the green line light rail or the proposed southwest light rail corridor, when that was being talked about. I remember there was an article in the Star Tribune, and there was a big fight going on over, you know, what kind of housing was, might create too much high income, not enough of low income and all this. And I'm thinking, you know, what a good problem to have, right? We don't have those mega investments by the state that help create housing in greater Minnesota. And I think one of the reasons that we're advocating makes sense and would bring some equity to the distribution of state resources. So as I was preparing for this, you know, you look at different articles and different research out there, and they said that there are businesses that want to expand or, you know, either relocate or expand, but they are hampered because there's not enough housing. You're hearing that repeatedly then. Right. And they're writing checks. You know, you look at Agco and Jackson, you look at Digi-Key, you look at Polaris. You try to help stimulate this. That's not occurring in the metropolitan area. There's another program that doesn't quite work like we'd like it to with maybe some help it could, but it's called a challenge grant program, right? And I was interested this week by the data sheet that was put out by the state and had all the projects on one side and what they did. And the last column was local investment and all of the corporations that had contributed to help do this were in greater Minnesota. All the metropolitan projects, because it's so much easier to do there, hadn't required that contribution. You know, sometimes I think that if those guys had to write checks to see this happen and probably get solved a lot sooner, but we'll deal with what we have to deal with and advance our cause and tell our story. And I think it's compelling and hopefully will result in greater economic development opportunities in greater Minnesota. Tim, in your conversations with the clients and the areas that you represent, have you heard similar concerns in terms of needing more of that middle income housing out there? Absolutely. First of all, I'd say when I have discussions in communities about housing, it's usually broader than just the workforce housing issue that we're describing. It's usually we have a lot of housing needs, including the workforce housing need as we're discussing it. One example I'd use is Black Duck because we've been having a lot of current conversation with them, but Anderson Fabrics, major employer, key critical employer not only wants to expand, they have been expanding, but unfortunately their expansion is taking place in Chicago. They're contracting for employment because they don't have the housing to support an expanding workforce. And like Dan suggested, they're a willing partner in trying to make something happen, but they're dealing in a pretty tough housing market at the same time. So we need to find ways including what we're talking about here to try to help Black Duck meet those needs. As you talk about this issue, I'm assuming you've talked with developers in terms of what would it take to get more development happening? How do they respond? What is the problem? Our chief author in the Senate is from Red Wing, Senator Gaggin. When I first met him, because he's new, met him this year, before I can even start going through the proposal, he said I know exactly what you're talking about, because I've got a couple of developers in our area that tell me they can build high-end stuff and they can build low-end stuff or affordable stuff because there's a lot of subsidies. What they can't figure out how to do is this middle-income stuff, because whether it's financing, there's a whole lot of reasons that seem to have broken the market. And I wish it was different, it just isn't. So yeah, that's what it is. It's kind of that gap of what are the rents in the community? How does this translate into a performer to build a new apartment building? And it just isn't working out very well in greater Minnesota. You have some issues with if you build it, you go get the appraisal and you try to borrow money against it, the appraisals don't match what you're putting in like they would in the metropolitan area. So you have a problem with financing. There's a whole lot of problems. That's why we think that we've got a sort of a market-based solution, a tax credit program that would help address that. And we really believe that this doesn't have to be, I think we're going to be in the affordable or low-income business forever. We're always going to have to take care of that. We hope that after four or five years of a program like this, that the market starts to correct and say, hey, we can make money, we can cash flow these projects in greater Minnesota. So we're hoping this jump starts the market and doesn't need to become a permanent program. Do you hear concerns too about, I mean you talked about Black Duck in terms of these smaller or more rural cities that might just have one or two key employers, are they hesitant because there's always the chance they could pick up and relocate? There's no question about it, because if you think about it, if we all decide we're done with this, we're going to go form a housing corporation, we're going to go build apartments and lease them out. If we go to the Twin City metropolitan area or Rochester or St. Cloud, we're not dependent on one or two manufacturers. But when you're dependent on that one manufacturer, boy you hope you've got your eggs are in that same basket as theirs. That is another one of the concerns that developers have that I think is impeding some of the development. And it's not only the developers, the developers have to get financing, so you have to think about it from that standpoint too. So there's risk on both parts. And the risk is heightened if you run into that situation. In some ways it's got to almost sound almost like a good problem for communities to have. You have businesses that want to invest, that want to grow in your community, but they're being hampered. That's what you're hearing, that communities are losing out on potential. And they just don't have the tools available to them that even in the low-income area, say whatever city, black duck, but midgy, they could do a low-income TIF or tax increment financing package for I think up to 25 years to do a low-income project. They can't do that for workforce. And so there's a bill that we support to help change that to allow communities maybe more local tools. But that still isn't going to be enough to I think spur the kind of development that is really required. Tell us a little bit about what it is that you would like to see happen. Tell us a little bit about what the proposal is that you've really been trying to work with legislators on. It's a tax credit proposal. It is a 40% tax credit up to a million dollars per investor. Up to 2.8 million dollars a project. So we want to make sure there's more than just one project done. We don't want to see it get gobbled up one project a year. But really the ask isn't that large. It's 6.6 million this year. That's not going to fix the problem in one year. But it would be a good start. And so what would happen is the developer would apply for the credit. They'd get the credit, build the project, and then be able to take advantage of that tax credit. So we think it's also a good way to target this. Because sometimes there's been overproduction of low income units that you have a higher vacancy rate there than you might want to have. If you create that investment or the incentive for a developer, it's just an area where it's needed. Otherwise, even with that tax credit, it's not going to work out if there's not enough people there that will lease these new units. So we think our proposal will target this a little better as well. Are you finding support? It varies. Last year we did make it into the Senate tax bill. Not the final tax bill. It didn't get passed anyway. But after two years we finally got into there. It varies. I think that we've got some work to do with legislators because I think they hear what we're talking about and hear low income and then see all those dollars that are going there and figure, well, this is already being taken care of. So it is an education process to get the new people up to speed on it. But yeah, I'm optimistic that we're going to see something happen this year. There was a grant program that was started a couple years ago. We supported it. We thought there was going to be some issues surrounding the budget. So if you look at the project in Roso, I think the first year was like a $700,000 grant. They had to come back the next year and put in almost the same amount to make the project happen. So there are some issues in that program that could be worked out to make it work better. But we think our tax credit proposal would actually result in more units being built in a quicker fashion. Is it fair to say that when you're talking about this, you have to be really careful to make sure that you want resources like perhaps taking some away from low income housing, you know what I'm saying, to make sure you can get both? I'm pretty passionate about that because frankly I think from a state perspective we, this is a tool that's really, really needed, but we still have a really big need for affordable housing. I don't characterize it just as low income, but it's low and moderate income. But income assisted housing of some level is still needed in at least in the region that I serve, it's pretty universal. And so yeah, I do think we do want to be careful with that because this is all about an additional investment in housing in an area that has not been addressed in the past. But it shouldn't replace other things. I mean, you know, if you think about it probably the highest priority would be homeless people, right? I mean, it would be hard for me to say, oh no, don't do that and do this, right? And so it is, it's an additive, it's a need that we have, but I do think it's justified again because if you look at how the state influences the housing market, the metropolitan area we talked about, the light rail, Viking stadium, these things do create housing and we just don't have, because we're sort of located all over, right? We don't have that light rail, but we do have a good interstate system, we're trying to you know, improve that all the time as well and I should point out we've got those good roads and stuff, it's important to use those, drive safely on those roads, put that cell phone down when you're driving and obey the speed limits. I think that's important too, plugging that for a totally different reason. So, tell me, I know that some companies have really gotten kind of creative in terms of how they're going to stay, they don't want to leave these communities, I think is there one that's like busing people an hour or so to try to keep their employees going and so, you know, have you heard from companies that they really do want to be in rural Minnesota? I was just at a board meeting last night and one of my commissioners lives in Shevlin and he was talking about people in his community that are busing up to Thief River Falls and working at Digikey and you know, it's pretty successful and people are willing to do that because it's a good job opportunity and there's no housing available close by so they're, they want to be in their community anyway, but they don't really have an opportunity to move because there's just no opportunities for them. There's companies in the southwestern part of the state too that are running their own transit systems to bring people to work Mayo Clinic in fact does one, they run their own buses around that area to make sure they can get people to work but yeah, that's how, honestly, desperate but I mean, they don't want to do that right, they'd rather be spending their time and resources improving their business and selling more product and employing more people, but part of that for some of these companies has been transit systems and it's not an area and so again, we're not trying to take anything away from them, we're just trying to say, hey, we've got different needs and they need to be addressed. Each community has its own unique needs I'm sure as you guys hear repeatedly. Yeah, I think Tim was right that you know, it depends on where you go, it's a different mix, some areas need a lot of both, some areas need more of affordable than others, some people say, hey, we've got plenty of affordable but this middle income so I don't think it's a cookie cutter I think every town is almost different, there's not a one size fits all solution. Do you find that there's communities that exist that have some housing available, it's just not what they need so like the low income housing for example, they could live there but they don't meet those income requirements? Yeah, I can't speak specifically for this area, I live in Albert Lee and you know one way, we hear a lot from the school district, this is a problem and I know a guy that manages a section 8 building, it's a nice building down by the lake and he can always tell when the new teachers are in town because there's a knock on the door hey, you've signed me up, right? Well great, what do you do? I said, well just took a job at the school district, sorry you make too much money, so those units sit empty, it's not a high rate but there's always empty units there, they sit empty where you've got these other people saying, well maybe I don't want to move to this town maybe I want to go to the cities because I can live in a better apartment and that is happening it's a strange deal but it is happening and I think you can see more and more school districts start to talk about this, which is really different than what you think the mindset is underpaid factory workers this nefarious evil, it really isn't that, it's really people that are making a decent wage but they also want a decent place to live and who wouldn't, what's wrong with that? Let's talk about some of the tools that do exist, you referenced TIF earlier in terms of the way that it can be used to develop certain types of housing is there an option for housing development such as this? Not for market rate housing, it is for low income but the legislature restricts which always bothers me it seems like in full disclosure I'm a former state legislator and when we run for election, we're all in favor of local control, it seems like too many of us who get to St. Paul now want to control the locals so they do not let cities we've joined with the league of cities trying to change that, the coalition's a partner in it trying to make sure that we could use TIF but in the cities that I've talked to they're going to use it, no question about it but it isn't going to be enough in and of itself, so I think that would be a needed tool and it's local dollars there are no state dollars in TIF programs so you know why St. Paul restricts it that way is beyond me I think our communities are responsible if the city council says hey this is what we want to do and this is this makes sense for our community I have no idea where the state's standing in the way but that's a tough sell in St. Paul and why is it a tough sell? It's because I think some of the abuses that people have seen and they've occurred in the Metropolitan area well don't ring us up for that you know in fact one senator will go unnamed but this particular senator was originally against TIF for anybody but then kind of moderated their positions that you know I guess this does make sense in the Metropolitan area because you kind of sit down with them and have that conversation about it's a little different game out here again it's not the same as better, worse or anything it's just different and so you might need different tools in the Metropolitan area they've got different tools, we may need some different tools, there's nothing wrong with that Is that a big part of your process right now trying to educate in terms of the problem for metro based legislators? Absolutely and even the even the new greater Minnesota legislators because for some of them you know you're learning so many things there's LGA, other issues are flying at you transportation, what do all these things mean and you've got to try to figure this out, now somebody's over here talking about housing but you know we're spending all this money over here so yeah there's an education piece to it that's why we're there That's one of the reasons like that we're really interested in being part of the partnership is that we don't have the ability to be spending time in St. Paul we're four hours away and so it's just difficult and being a member of the partnership allows us to be part of a voice that's going to be heard because we don't necessarily think individually we're going to be heard very loudly at least and so it's been a good thing for us to be a member of a group of communities throughout the state that are engaged in these dialogues and willing to provide some leadership to try to get things done The Center for Rural Policy they were in St. Peter they came out with a report about four years ago who speaks for greater Minnesota the Capitol on these issues and at the end of the report said nobody they also didn't think anybody could do it it would be too hard to do what we're doing but we don't believe that we think we can get it done but one thing they noted in that was that you know the Metropolitan Area has their own organizations but also the statewide organizations and not again intentionally but are picking up a Metropolitan feel and Tim hit on one of the reasons right there's one organization that has a meeting right before session to put their priorities together it's an afternoon like a Friday afternoon typically in St. Paul you don't get people driving four or five hours to come down for a three-hour meeting right so who's in the room tends to be and I've been there tends to be people like if you do the dot and then draw the area unless there's a board member it's people that are within 75 miles of the Metropolitan Area right and that's a statewide organization but that's who's there at the meeting and that's what their priorities begin to pick up that Metropolitan feel even though it's unintentional and that's what that Center for Rural Policy report talked about was that you know somebody needs to be out there talking about hey don't forget us you know again it isn't it isn't we're not taking anything away from we're just trying to say hey like I don't think people in the Metropolitan Area wake up in the morning and say boy let's put the screws to those guys up in the midgie or that dormitory let's go you know make things hard for them it's just not top of mind because they've got their own stuff they're dealing with and it's just it's important it's important to get them to have that voice at the Capitol on a consistent basis. Do you have any idea in terms of what kind of number of units could be beneficial statewide I mean has there been any research into actual figures in terms of the stats in terms of how much could be used I think Minnesota Housing Finance would say you should have brought the brochure but as I recall it's about 6,000 units right now I mean today that they could fill them today if they were constructed so I mean there is a big that's why in one of the committees this week people were like well why don't you do this as well why don't you do this as well trying to help the bill right well just you know do some low or do some single family home stuff and another representative pointed out it's only 6 million dollars a year it's not you know this isn't going to solve all housing issues you know if you think of the scale we're talking about 6 million a year versus 100 million a year in low income again that's not bad I'm not saying take that money I'm just saying you think of the scale we can't solve that at 100 million dollars a year I'm not saying a big dent in it at even 6 million dollars a year the deed program I referenced earlier is only 2 million dollars a year and while nice it just isn't enough to really bend that curve very much Is the leg time concerning then in a way you know that the need is here now and even if you got funds yet this year it's going to take what two years to get them constructed and operational The nice thing and the one reason you know that we're trying to establish this program within deed or the department the other the big housing players Minnesota Housing Finance Agency and because of the nature of their programs they've got federal tax credits it's a much more complicated process but we were at a meeting in Thief River Falls with the League of Minnesota Cities Minnesota Chamber trying to understand the issue get more information and one of the cities talked about when they did a MFHA project it was a two year process the deed grant program they were able to get it spun around less than a year so that's one reason why we want to work with deed because we think that this is economic development not low-income housing and so deed seems to be much more responsive that's not a criticism I'm going to throw that in there so I don't get a bunch of angry people it's just different and it's a different need so hopefully it's not two years Are you feeling kind of confident at all? I mean do you feel like there might be a chance of success yet this year? I do I don't know I hope it's the whole six million that I don't feel as confident about but I think we're going to see some action we've seen growth each year that we've tried this first year we couldn't get any traction next thing you know we're in the senate tax bill so hopefully this is the year that we're able to push it over that end line and actually get it signed and go on I want to thank you both for joining me today thank you for tuning in if you'd like to learn more about the greater Minnesota partnership or this issue I encourage you to visit the website on the bottom of the screen thank you join me next time