Well hello and welcome everybody yet again to another OpenShift Commons briefing. This week we have Gareth Rushgrove from Puppet with us. I'm really pleased to have him, not just because he's a puppet expert but because he's really one of the wonderfully opinionated, well-researched persons that I always love to hear speak and so we're really lucky to have him here and especially straight off Dr. Kahn. So please feel free to pick his brain in the Q&A if you're gonna let Gareth do his presentation first, do a couple of little demos, you can ask questions in the chat and then we'll leave time at the end of the Q&A and we'll open it up for a conversation there. So without further ado, Gareth I'm gonna let you get started and we will learn all about Puppet and OpenShift and how to use it with the new Kubernetes architecture. Okay so hi everyone as I just said I'm gonna do a quick introduction to some Puppet and OpenShift bits and pieces. I'll run through a few slides and then just get into some demos and then any questions and answers people want to do. So quick introduction, I'm Gareth Rushgrove I'm one of the senior software engineers at Puppet so I mainly work on building out Puppet, doing a lot of integration with tools like OpenShift and Kubernetes and I'm Gareth pretty much everywhere on the internet. So I'm sort of assuming people are familiar with Puppet so I'm not gonna go into a lot of sort of the details but Puppet is a configuration management tool it's a DSL based language with a whole suite of tools for managing all sorts of infrastructure everything from your switches and storage and through the things that most people do around host-level management but increasingly there's tools around the sort of container space and the sort of orchestrated space as well. One of the sort of how this came about really was I've been doing for a little while a bunch of integration between Puppet and Kubernetes and Kubernetes provides that really strong API that really strong set of primitives the replication controllers services pods etc. But actually we're sort of getting up and running with Kubernetes is at the moment Kubernetes is still a relatively low-level component and one of the things I found as I was doing that integration was how easy it was to get up and running with OpenShift. So that ended up with OpenShift being really the environment I was using to demonstrate and to sort of develop against for the Puppet integration.  So for those that want to have a look at this afterwards good starting point is the actual the module. So Puppet is mainly extended by writing modules so none of this integration is sort of requiring changes to Puppet or requiring some of the new versions. There is just a module on the forge it's undermined then space at the moment. So gara file slash Kubernetes and what that provides is the ability to describe Kubernetes in Puppet code and by which I mean this isn't about installing Kubernetes. I know if you're using OpenShift you already have Kubernetes. It's already there and exposed and set up and managed and so it's not about installing and configuring that. Though we might look at doing so with OpenShift in the future. It's about what you then do with Kubernetes. It's about in this example a sort of trivial pod but it's also about all of those primitives in the API the replication control as services deployment managers etc. For those that are familiar with Kubernetes already what you'll notice about the code examples on your screen is that it follows the same format in Puppet. It's just a different DSL. So if you're already familiar with the Kubernetes structure, the Kubernetes API, you're probably already familiar with how you would write that in Puppet and that was an explicit design decision. In fact there are some tools provided as part of the module which I'll demonstrate later that can take a Kubernetes YAML file and actually just take that and generate them and give you the Puppet code. In fact as well the actual module itself, nearly all of the code for the module is auto-generated from the Swagger specification. So keeping the module up to date is literally just a matter of regenerating it based on the updated Swagger specification. Kubernetes has some really nice features and sort of API driven bits and pieces that make that sort of integration pretty seamless. So far though you might be thinking well I could describe it in one broadly speaking data format YAML or I could describe it in the format that I'm showing. There's not really much value there and I'd agree with that. Really the advantage comes because Puppet is a programming language and yes it can be treated as sort of quite key value-parasque data but ultimately you can create your own abstractions. So for those that are familiar with Puppet we have defined types and classes and you can build those and this is an example of a defined type. This isn't part of the module, this is just something I put together while doing some work around the Kubernetes guestbook example. So one of the things you find with the sort of just taking a purely data sort of centric approach to Kubernetes configuration and like handwriting the YAML files which are really the wire format for the API. You end up with a lot of repetition because it's the wire format for the API but with Puppet you can actually abstract end users away from that and provide high level interfaces. So one of the things that I'm often seeing is that you often end up with a pair, a controller and a service and often like they go hand in hand. The API should treat them as individual things however the user interface to that does not necessarily need to do so and in public you can just create your own user interface, build your own abstractions just using the built-in standard Puppet tool. So that's a simple example and I'll show some examples of that as well. For those that want to sort of like again pick through some of the details, see some of the code, there's a blog post up on the Puppet blog from like a month or so ago and all about a bunch of the examples I'm going to show and sort of going from like setting up an OpenShift Poster locally using the provided backup machines to trying out the Puppet code and getting the configuration in the middle done and there's more blog post as well both on the Puppet blog but also on the Kubernetes blog about the sort of like the advantages of higher level interfaces to Kubernetes. Ultimately you can use many different interfaces at the same time for different purposes and Puppet sort of declarative nature means that it's very good for that sort of like high-level like change control managed sort of jank and whereas there's something like the user the more the sort of graphical user interface in the Kubernetes console is fantastic sort of like they're like seeing the state knowing what's going on at any given moment. I'm also going to add a quick bonus example, I think it's probably relevant folks here. I've recently done a little bit of work around using Puppet with Atomic and with Atomic often being used under the hood of OpenShift. I thought that would be hopefully interesting to the same audience as well and all of that's powered by a set of open source images that we've pushed to hub so I'll talk about that a little bit as well. So hopefully that's a reason like example and it's not my introduction rather and people are still here and I'll hopefully be able to click through to my console and show some demos. Yeah we're all still here. All right so the screen will be a bit small but I'll make it bigger. That looks perfect. Does that look good? That looks really good. Okay so I'm not going to set up an OpenShift cluster. I've already got one up and running so I'll let the screen refresh a little bit sometimes a little while so I've already got it's just a single node OpenShift cluster brand new 113 so there's anything running so far. We've just got good enough running there's nothing else there it's totally fresh cluster. I've also I've done the configuration I've put that the Puppet module simply uses the standard kube configs so you just need to put them into the relevant place puppet to discover them and then everything just works again like the blog post covers setting things up so I won't go into that in too much detail. The module ships with a number of different examples and the one I'm going to have a look at today is setting up a small Redis cluster so open up a public kube config file so here you can see the public module has types for basically all the the primitives and kubernetes so we've got a kubernetes underscore replication underscore controller type and here we're setting up master we're providing the metadata we're providing the spec and again this is a very low level part so you can see here there's a lot of duplication in the same way as the ammo file I'll come on to how profit can be used to solve that repetition problem shortly but this is demonstrations in the lowest level parts so if I go down you'll probably see a service you'll see another replication controller for the sort of masters and slaves so we're setting up a problem sort of master and slave based kubernetes cluster and so far this will follow exactly the same format as the ammo file if we had a ammo file that described this we could actually run the generate command and that would give us the public code for purposes of this I'm going to run a public apply so probably is often run with sort of an agent and a master so the public server you can connect to and things call home I'm just using local public apply here to demonstrate the types and provide the providers provided with the kubernetes module and but this would totally work with having an agent as well and I'm also going to run it with test just so we get a bit more output so what's happening under the hood is that the public module simply reads the public code and converts that into the relevant API calls to communities on top of open shift and open shift does the rest so if we flip through the sort of outputs you can see it's checking if a few things are existing it's creating the things that aren't so it creates there we've seen a couple of replication controls a couple of services so in theory we should be able to see them now up and running in open shift so also you get services we can see ready master ready slave we should see a number of pods starting to launch or already running so so far this is very similar to how you might use kubectl to do exactly the same sort of thing with kubectl apply but one of the things I can do here is use puppets idempotent nature so we can we can keep running the same commands we can still run the same code through puppet and ultimately puppet doesn't try and recreate things it doesn't create new things it just simply says oh those things already exist um and so you can have that constant you know sort of fo production setup like like that running constantly allowing you to change the code if you want to change the system but also running and having that constant tick that constant feedback that your system is currently still configured exactly how you want it um that has the advantage that if people do have like sort of individual command line access and and start doing things where maybe someone for whatever reason logs in and changes something unbeknownst to the rest of the team actually put people would put that back and tell you about it so if I were to for example delete a service let's delete that so the service is gone and if I run puppet again um instead of finding it it should find that it's missing and it should recreate it hopefully there we go so we see a notice there that the ready the ready slave service was created and it should all be back so again like it's the same pattern of usage as with puppet on a host with packages or users or files and and again like the in a production setup you'd have all the reporting and all the data going back into something like a video on another tool so there are some advantages there to the sort of just using the standard demo files and quick there's still a lot of syntax um let's see what we can do about that so unless I just the single demo file and I'll work backwards here as an example um I also have a defined type just called ready scuster and it takes a standard title in this case first and it takes a size I'll show how this is implemented in a second I'll give it a quick run first so here I'm I'm running the folder which then runs a bunch of the files in there um and we can see that it actually very similar output to the previous one it created it created two services to replication controllers so we should be able to see those thing um and you can see the the ones that are perfect with first so that setup took um that size of two and if you look here we have a single master and two slaves let's play around with that a bit so let's bump the size to five and rerun our public code and again some of those definitions don't need to change but one of them does and we we see the change notice appearing there um the output is a little bit verbose it can't contains everything um it would be nice to sort of format that better for users for in a cli here and that's definitely something I'm interested in doing um but the change results are there and if you had a a report on the other side you'd have something to pass that out anyway so what we should see now is well we updated the replication controller the replication controller then said well I'm running two replicas apparently and I now should have five and the pods have all launched um and we could go the other way what's maybe even more interesting is well I've created this high-level primitive um for for called Redis cluster and well now I can reuse it so rather than something having to note all of the implementation details now we know what a Redis cluster is we can create lots of them we have we've we've got a high-level interface just by using puppet as a programming language and that that's the real key to sort of the advantage here um on top of just using data so you can see here that there's now a second master starting to come up a few slaves and you could imagine changing those numbers and adding more and like doing that at a very high level rather than and we'll look at the implementation here um so under the hood Redis cluster is simply a defined type in puppet um it takes an argument of the size but it has a default of two so you wouldn't even have to provide a size you could just say like give me a Redis cluster and it's called this um for those that haven't seen puppet four has uh full typing hints so even here I'm I'm saying that this has to be an integer if you pass a string or an array of it will give you a nice error so again like we can create these high-level interfaces with fully typed parameters um which really helps sort of people avoid errors uh we've got a controller service pair I mentioned this is another abstraction so we've got a few abstractions going on here but you can keep digging in and it's only at the bottom layer it's only here where you see like the actual the low-level Kubernetes types being used and I mentioned before about that sort of the Kubernetes wire format is quite repetitive um but ultimately it doesn't have to be because we we have the ability to use variables so yes we're passing the labels into the metadata and into the spec so everything's wired up correctly but we're not having like if I want to change the value of app or the value of role well I change it at variable level and that's going to propagate through like the number of places it's used including in multiple different resources in the Kubernetes service and Kubernetes replication controller in this case so I'm using replication controllers and services as good high-level examples but the module spots pretty much all of the uh like the different resources in Kubernetes as I mentioned because actually the code is all generated from the spec so that's really a sort of a good introduction hopefully to the Kubernetes module I say yeah you could create a complex set so you could create the rest of it we could go on and make actually an entire setup and other high-level types that are specific to like sort of our business problems um and we could demonstrate it integrating with all this other rest of the tools but I'll leave that as a bit of an exercise for people who are interested in following up so I think I think did you have another demo that you want to do there yeah I've got one quick for the demo as well okay go for it and then we'll go so I mentioned briefly that we've just shipped a number of uh images to the to the hub containing puppet software so these are containers with puppet server so the open soft puppet server and puppet db a number of the sort of uh the dashboards from the community and the puppet and a factor uh image one of the advantages of doing that is that we can run on top of something like atomic where the unit of software isn't an rpm unit of software is a container but suddenly we by shipping those we have pretty good atomic spot I'll just demonstrate that really quickly um I'm uh not running on an atomic host but I have vagrant running I have a virtual machine running atomic um and that hopefully should be up and running the the code for this is actually available in the examples repository for the puppet in docker project so if you want to try this out yourself you can just sort of uh go along and type vagrant but I've already got that up and running for this sort of quick demo I've also set up a I'll briefly show the program file and I'm using the uh the sentos atomic host box um I'm going a bit more memory so it's a bit more savvy um and I'm when when the machine comes up there's a provisioner that will pull down the relevant images I'm using in this example and uh run it but basically run a puppet server inside a container on an atomic host so you could run an entire puppet infrastructure if you want to do and I've set up a couple of provisioners for running factor and running puppet and I'll show those running so this is just a shortcut to running things over I say so how we're doing this is that the container mounts the volumes from the atomic host and connects to the host network so the output here isn't of like the container context it's of the outlying atomic host uh so you can see a bunch of things around so what is developer and atomic host we can see things from the host not from uh here we go the the os you can see what it's saying this is a red heart machine sort of sentos machine and we'll be adding proc full support to factor um for detecting but it's actually an atomic machine and then you could do all sorts of other nice things um and you can run because factor can now just detect things about the atomic host well puppet can be used to manage things on that underlying host and that might include starting other containers or it might include putting some files under the underlying host and or users or firewalls or anything you would normally use puppet for and you can now do that on atomic so again the example here is in it's on a puppet get a repository uh in the puppet in docker examples repository under the puppet labs name and and with that uh they're my demos hopefully they were interesting and i'm happy to take some questions that's great can you pop over to that github repo that you were just talking about and just throw that up on the screen so that we end on that and that and people can know where to find all these examples it's pretty mind boggling all the ways that you can schedule stuff on um kubernetes and open shift and atomic and and i've always had a great love for for puppet so um i'm looking forward to getting to use it some more again yeah the the examples repo um uh with the puppet in docker work and the atomic example in particular is on the screen perfect perfect all right well i'm opening up the questions we've had a couple of basic you know really basic ones which i've tried to answer in the chat about kubernetes and and other things and you know as always when you're talking open shift someone always brings up ansible but um there are so many tools out there right now um that different enterprises are using whether they're using and puppet really just want to make sure that um that whatever the tool of choice is is available for people to use and and i think there's puppet is is is one of the widely popular offerings so i'm really appreciative of getting the chance and having you create this module and um do this um for all of the puppet users out there in um open shift lab it's it's pretty pretty cute hi uh okay this is rob great i have another question um i do i handle isv's uh that we are having partnered with ourselves and we're directing a lot of them now to open shift as a means of integration with our other products that say well we'll get them into open shift we'll put fusing open shift we'll put other things open shift that's a great place to to integrate what can we do with puppet to simplify the um of people to that you know into kubernetes because often they they they come in they don't know anything about open shift they have typically gone into you know up gone into the uh the google or the microsoft cloud or amazon cloud and what can we do this what what can puppet with uh kubernetes do to make this as painless a process as possible because i my concern is we we often throw up it's like well to get to our unfamiliar technology you have to learn two or three other technologies to get there yeah so you know these guys probably don't know puppet they know kubernetes they don't know open shift um and there's just sort of going like look full of god we just want to we just want to get this thing you know coordinated with with one of our other products uh what can we do to sort of simplify that so this this so that kubernetes my my ask is how can we make puppet kubernetes and open shift practically invisible to them that's a good question i i don't really want to make puppet invisible to them um i think what it is is that a lot of people already have the puppet expertise in the house they're already using it to do their ci cd workflows they're already using it the script all kinds of things because it's it's wonderful um and and what we're trying to do is keep them in a familiar world um and then allow them to use the tools they know to move forward into a cloud native open shift kubernetes universe well i was wondering like i thought that the same thing is that i i think puppet's probably not going to be the sort of the de facto sort of default entry point to people coming in like as you described um but actually puppets in widespread use across lots of organizations so there's a lot of prior out around the puppet language and what we're finding is that puppet as a universal tool in particularly in organizations where they have that sort of they're running a bunch of AI x stuff they're running a lot of rail stuff they're running maybe even should we say some windows bits and pieces and they're now looking towards running uh open shift and puppet as a universal tool and language across that sort of diverse infrastructure is the sort of sweet spot but not everyone will have that sort of diversity and there are sort of there are close there are sort of more native kubernetes tools and native open shift tools i think all of them can will coexist mainly around the strength of the kubernetes api let me well here's i guess here's the cut here would be the partner ask and i know we can't achieve it but how can we get as close to it as possible and that's um what they would like is they go to a website they upload their app hit submit and magic it's on open shift as an available container you know kind of like one of the old gears where other people can use it now and it can be used and spun up and and integrated with everything else i mean that's everybody's ask is you know make make me an easy button yes how close can we get to an easy button we're pretty close to that easy button right now um actually that was the image that that big easy button is one of the there's two prongs to this conversation one is we can make it we can we make open shift the easy button for enterprise kubernetes deployments so if you want to deploy open shift and you're in a customer situation or an end user somewhat some operations house um and they want to deploy kubernetes and open shift and with a real simple set of scripts and sorry they're all ansible garitha that's one one path in and the other path in it um that rob that i'd ask you to take a look at now um is the um open shift online using um open shift three using the new version of open shift is now up and available for the developer preview and what you're describing um is is a little bit based on um your memories of open shift two with our cartridges and gears and um our sort of the marketplace and quick starts and all of that so that you could really get in quickly and reuse and save um the quick start so you can get an app up and running and anybody who who had access to that quick start could start it really quickly and the same user experience um from the web console with the new release of open shift um is is there um it's a little more complicated because there's a few more things that you have to put in place in order to make um containerize what we call an application know be aware of all the other containers in its service um so but the the users right and i think what we're departing in middleware where these are not just java you know these are not just the ear and war applications that we traditionally we're recruiting things like machine learning companies big data analytics blockchain others often it's not and one of the reasons i'm interested because and i know it's it's an ethometeor engine so it's not these aren't even written in java frequently and so it's how do we bridge that gap as a result i i'd actually ask you to get as we have take take a look at the um the new online experience and also take a look at um under open shift can you see me for that yeah i will and uh a link and take a look at the source to image set of tools um because once uh once people start creating their images um and they push them to private registries which are often hosted on open shift as well um and then that's how you get your um reusable images that people can other people from within that company or organization that have access to that registry can use and deploy from the open ship console so that's that i think is the methodology and and i know we've gotten off track here because that's always doing these sessions but um we're nearly back to my talk at docket con around just and the the sort of diversity but also like barely early stage of a lot of the container build tools um but like as we were talking there like the next six six twelve months is going to seem like a better stuff tooling like improvements to what's there and hopefully some i'm sorry i didn't mean to get you off your didn't need to get a job topic but for us this is a big one because we're we're steering this way and we're looking for anything that makes their life easier to get there and and it's you know so that we don't have to say okay you guys are absolute experts in r and you know every statistical um app ever ever built but we need you know uh but you you know here's how you get into that the da da um open ship and kubernetes yep so i as as you probably me or may not know i'm a python person um and uh we have a couple of good write-ups on the blog um i think graham dumpleton did them um on doing basically what not for r but for python um creating custom um source to image um toolings for pythons and get all the bits that we need and and you'll see a directory also in the open shift um world and i'm trying to think of it in the repo where it is exactly but i'll i'll i'll dig it up and i'll post it with this um recording but um there is with source to image you're building the tooling or someone is building the tooling whether it's one of the python folks and the evangelist crew or one of the engineers that you can build reusable tooling to build out as many images as you want for the r community for example and so you're starting to get the baseline um tool chain for build services and continuous integration and deployment of images um be centered around tools like s2i and some of the other ones that garith mentioned um it is docker content so the high-level tools for doing all this um and pushing them to private registries which you can then expose to your organization organizational why and set the the user access to them so there is a whole um workflow and that's probably a topic for yet another briefing um sometime soon so um it's a good question and um i think the documentation is probably lacking more than the tooling at this point um so we'll have to work on that i think a bit more good question there's a couple other folks on the call um the briefing right now if there's any other questions um you can toss them in chat if not um this is about the normal length that we do our our briefings for so it's pretty good and um great content i really love the atomic demo so i think we're going to have to push a little bit more um content around that as well so i think that's um a great great use of atomic and puppet together so thanks garith yep i love thank you all right thanks for having me all right and there will not be a briefing next week because it's red hat summit week so we'll be giving ourselves a break and which is not really a break but um and then coming on back on in the following week so thanks again and um everyone have a great week and hopefully we'll see you all at red hat summit


Glenala State High School, Breaking Down the Barriers From humble beginnings as a Year 8 reading program, Breaking Down the Barriers has grown into a major program for all year levels at Glenala State High School. A result of a four-year partnership between Minter Ellison Lawyers and the school, students have an opportunity to better themselves and prepare for life after school. A major focus is still reading and one-on-one mentoring, which helps students develop literacy, workplace and social skills, improve their health and well-being and receive financial support through a scholarship program. All proof that from little things, big things grow.


So our third panel today is actually a really incredibly important one, and we know that we just had the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria's landfall yesterday. And we know that the impacts of that disaster are continuous and are happening in many, many different ways. So this particular panel will review the residual impacts of the hurricane on Latinx communities in western Massachusetts, exploring the lived experiences of the latest Puerto Rican migrants to the region, and the challenges of housing this displaced population. And the panelists will discuss the narratives and activism that have emerged through this post-Maria moment. So I know we're at the end of our program, so some of you guys are feeling a little tired, so if you can just stretch a little bit. Yes, thank you. And I say that because this topic is a little heavy for many of us, and a lot of us are still carrying the weight, so let it go. Deep breaths. And so what we wanted to do is just briefly just talk a little bit about the work that WGBY as a public television station has done over the past year. And it's just one piece, one small, tiny piece of all the work that has been done in this community, in the region. And there's people in this room right now that has done some amazing work, so I want to acknowledge them in this room. Some of you guys, if you missed out, Holyoke had some amazing programs yesterday. And I actually had, while it was heavy on my heart, I got to end the evening laughing. So they had an amazing comedy night. So I want to thank Josie and Miriam back there for helping organizing a lot of that effort and just being instrumental in just making sure that our stories are being told. So thank you. So we thought we would take you back to tell you where we are today. So as community organizing work, many of us that are in this room know that it could be very lonely and it's hard. And sometimes, and in many places, most of us do it because it's in our heart and we lose sleep because of the amount of work that has to be done in order to accomplish it. But we don't always have allies. But I think one instrumental thing that happened at WGBY is that we were able to engage an amazing group of Latino advisors and non-Latino advisors. And I just want to kind of honor some of them that are listed on this slide. All of them have helped in numerous ways in the effort of the work that we've done in the Latino community over the years. I will say that many of you guys may have been members, supporters, viewers of WGBY and we're grateful and thankful. But it has taken us many years to get bilingual programming on the television station. So a lot of that is because of the supportive view that are in this room. But people on our advisory board like Madi who have been instrumental in bringing in resources that we don't currently have. And so I just kind of wanted to just start off with acknowledging that and that as organizers all of us need allies, all of us need support, all of us need a shoulder to cry on, to complain, to fight and to say nomas. And sometimes we need other voices in places that you work because you sometimes are the only representative of those communities. I just wanted to just say just a few words about the Latino advisory board. We aim to get together definitely once in the fall, not every season. So fall, spring, and then if we can manage also summer, but a couple of times even in those seasons as well. And one of the key things that has been important with regards to this advisory board, as you could see it's a cross-section of folks. So it's not majority necessarily professors or people from K-12. It includes those folks but also other community folks too that really get the mission of not just what's happening with WGBY but the work that Vanessa and her crew is doing through the station to really engage the Latinx community in the region and particularly in Springfield. And so we've had this board for a very long time now. 2005. 2005. So over a decade at this point that many of us have been original board members. I've continued to be board members actively involved but also have been very important I think voices in supporting Vanessa and the team in trying to move forward the kind of initiatives that are happening. And I think a lot of times people think about community partnerships as only at the grassroots level and I wanted to really emphasize how important it is to have someone like Vanessa in this level of working at these kinds of institutions as well that is really critical for us to be supportive and to try to figure out ways of how the resources that we have at our institutions can then be supportive of the work that they're doing as well. So that was a key thing that I wanted to mention. And as a result of a lot of our organizing work together the Latino advisory board was instrumental in not only helping us engage in the Latino community with different events and activities but what we realized was that yes we launched the Latino Youth Media Institute yes we opened a facility in the North End yes we did all of these we did a Presencia Gala and that's how the show came about. But we didn't have TV content. So yes great you have a community engagement department in education but there's no content and we're a television station. So hello you organized this since 2005. It took us to 2016. To put a show on air. So I say that because patience is huge in the work. And it's something that I've had to learn because there's been many times where I just wanted to throw my hands up and say I'm done. Like it's not worth it. It's too much work. No one's listening no one's paying attention but then you have groups of individuals that come in and say well Vanessa remember this is why you and your team is doing this work. If you leave who else will they feel that will they even feel the position right. And so those are all just discussions that we've had that it's hard but we were able to put a show on air. And so you know I want to acknowledge Veronica who is here as one of our hosts that we you know she didn't come into WGBY to be on TV she came to engage the community but we were able to put the show together and it took risk. It took for an institution that doesn't necessarily ever did bilingual program to take a risk right. So the issues and challenges of oh my god we're going to lose viewers we're going to members are going to stop. You know all of these risks that they had that I didn't see and for me was more like you're going to gain so much more. Let me give you some numbers let me give you some stats of how many Latinos are in our region did you not know. And so it took us a long time. Yeah. Yeah I also wanted to note in terms of the long term relationships and again these partnerships you know they're not one stop deals right you don't show up on one semester and you're like bye. You're like this is a long term commitment that we're making and that's the thing. That's the one you know the commitment that you have and the long term commitment and that's really key and central in being able to then see the long haul and being able to really be committed to the work that's taking place you know in these various different partnerships that we have. Yeah and so I just wanted to since the topic is about Hurricane Maria a year ago I think because of the work that we've done for such a long time it allowed us and the station to really take a risk one that we haven't done before and you know my heart was really heavy and we were at a television station and there was no plan there was no there was no plan of how we would react how we would respond what stories we would tell the idea of doing something that we do every single day what became kind of like oh well is that our space and so it took us to go in the office and say what are we doing if it ain't a clothing drive if it ain't opening up our doors if it ain't doing a fundraiser what are we doing and it was hard it was hard to convince that our airwaves was important to educate non-Spanish speakers and so we took a risk and in the middle of season three of Presencia we were given like three days to pull the show together and I will say because of our advisory board and the community everyone responded immediately and we were able to put a show together there's many challenges that people don't understand and know but captioning bilingual show is not easy there is no one in the region that can caption live bilingualy believe it or not so it's an opportunity there is a lot of challenges in regards to just putting bilingual content on air so we are doing something I think as a station that a lot of other stations nationally even PBS are not doing and so I'm proud of the work that me and my team and when I say a team is really me, myself Veronica and we can count herself I mean a team is just like there's not many of us there's like three of us and allies in the community so we were able a year ago to do this anniversary special we chose to do it in English which was very difficult but we captioned it in Spanish and then through conversation we said well we need to do more so our flagship program connecting point and their producers decided well you know what we're going to use our airwaves to tell more stories and say they had their producers go out in the community and capture those stories and yes while they were only in English we felt that that was an audience that didn't really understand the dynamics of what was happening and the numbers and how many people were still suffering and you know I had to even educate people in our station of Puerto Rico's part of the United States so it's hard it's a hard job it's not an easy task but I think it has been very educational and we had the opportunity every summer to do a media workshop and so Veronica and I and others decided to okay well we're going to take our media program and this summer we're going to bring in a combination of students that are recently relocated from Puerto Rico that have been displaced with students that live here on the island of Springfield and Holyoke and we are going to bring them together and we're going to have them learn about the history of Puerto Rico about what it is being Puerto Rican of the diaspora and if they spoke English great if they didn't that's fine between Veronica and I we created a dual language summer initiative and and those students that are Puerto Rican that never been to the island of Puerto Rico had to practice their Spanish and those that came here that didn't have really good English language skills had to practice their English even myself so it was a great experience we were able to take them on field trips at Hunter College and you know all of these all of these things but it all happened collectively. They also had the opportunity to read Sonia Nieto's autobiography if you haven't read it's a beautiful book and so they had the opportunity to read that and meet with her and talk to her about that and interview her yes. So we definitely had some scholars and we did a lot of it what we found as challenges was that you know we went into it as our past experience the work that we've done in the past but what we realized was that a lot of these young people were dealing with some mental they needed to heal right and they were asking them to tell their stories and to kind of relive them and so we had to kind of take a step back and we had to sit there and we had to create spaces where that they were going to be productive today and me and Veronica would have conversations and it's like it's hard it's hard how do we get them to be productive if right now they're the only people that are bringing income into their home for the summer because we made sure we paid them a stipend so it's difficult to try to get them to tell their story to be able to come to a space to learn new skills when their mindset wasn't there they're not knowing if they're going to go back to Puerto Rico or stay here not knowing where is home not knowing if I'm going to have lunch I mean dinner when I left here so you know me and Veronica would strategize of like okay we just either I'm buying lunch you're buying lunch or the station is buying lunch but we need to make sure that they leave here at least with one meal for today and the challenges of I have to take public transportation what what does that even mean so we went through a lot of emotions I think this past summer but it's been it's been amazing and what I do want to do quickly is just show you time for one so so we will we can send a link but if you're more than welcome to go to WGBY and look up the Hurricane Maria project and you'll be able to see all of the digital stories that the young people produced but I do want to leave you with one just for the sake of time and again we want to just note that it you know again there's still a lot of recovery efforts that are happening not just on the island but also here in western Massachusetts and particularly in the larger New England northeast area that a lot of families are still struggling I mean some of you know FEMA stopped paying for some of the folks actually a growing issue of homelessness that a lot of us are sort of becoming aware of trying to grapple with and so this is just one one little piece of the larger sort of issues that are that we're engaging with but that these even the storytelling is not innocuous it's important to document it and to make sure that they get seen and recognized music FEMA, FEMA knows how Puerto Rico is and there's still a lot of houses that we're still seeing in the news these communications, we're still seeing houses that don't have a roof yet, they don't have light, there's no road, no road there are people camping on the ground because that was a storm on the ground and now you don't know which one is your condensation or anything so Puerto Rico is still not up yet we work with children with different severe conditions paying for drugs, laboratories and medical treatment but given the circumstances of everything that has touched us through the Uracan-Maria, being sensitive to the pain of the genes and this population that has been so vulnerable the donations that come in addition that have absolutely nothing to do with the economic part whether it's the diapers, the disposable towels, the gloves well yes, we've made the approaches to all those houses to be able to support them in that specific area you know, that's the most tiring, that's the most tiring because that was a motto to help and motivate but we have to keep working wow, how strong, because Puerto Rico is still working the debt is there, no bank has lost it no government institution has lost it here you cover the interest, the contributions as you want and if you don't pay, I'll stay with whatever you have I'll teach you look at the Macau, the Macau doesn't have money the Macau doesn't have a store for you to leave to wash your mind, eat your butter sit with your family you know, the same town is a terrible deterioration here there's nothing, you have to go to another town to Fajardo or to Cagua, to Junco, to Distancia all human beings that somehow or another have really been affected we have to recognize that what they need is the support of all those organizations that are in the condition of holding their hands of guidance, giving them the tools that what we've found is just giving youth that platform is the most important and the most rewarding part of my job and I think Veronica would agree that is the most important part of our work and why we, I think, deal with the day-to-day you know, there's a word, I just can't come up so I heard I have time to show one more and so this one is about a young lady that lives in the island of Springfield and never been to Puerto Rico I thought in order to know more about where I come from I do some research about the hurricane and why people like my family left the island even before the hurricane close to a million people left the island from 2010 to 2016 this could have been because of Puerto Rico's debt crisis better economic opportunities education, poverty or other reasons depending on the individual these problems become a lot more prominent after a hurricane damage the entire power grid was completely shut down it was built in the 1970s where the minority of Puerto Ricans live and had little improvements made over time this is important because Puerto Rico was left in the longest blackout in US history and the second biggest in global history people had no power for around 10 months and some still don't even have power right now this left families that lived on the island with little resources and 92% of hospitals affected close to 5,000 people died due to the effects of the hurricane according to a recent Harvard study in fact around 135,000 people left Puerto Rico to come to the US just six months after the hurricane hit 135,000 people may not seem like a lot but that's the size of a whole city and more than the people that attend the Super Bowl these families migrated to mostly New York Texas, Connecticut Massachusetts and even Pennsylvania you might even know one of these people so keep in mind that when Puerto Ricans as you and US citizens come to your community they still have to face the challenges of adapting to a new environment they will have to adapt to the cultural, social and economic changes while even encountering language barriers and discrimination this shows that migrating might not be something Puerto Ricans want to do but rather something they feel they need to do I feel like we need a comedian right now I wanted to tell a joke so while Joseph just sets this up our intention was not to leave you with a heavy heart but it's to really send the message of the power of storytelling and how all of us in this room have a story that we can share and it's why we do presencia it's why we do the work that we do at WGBY and why we need all of your support our next series of panelists we're going to continue this conversation in another direction I want to just start by saying that when we introduce students to some of these stories there are a lot of different reactions when people hear these stories and for some of us it encourages us to think more about our own story and to have different kinds of conversations in our communities and with our families and if we're faculty with our students and our colleagues and for a subset of our students and our colleagues they really want to do something and whether that doing something is opening your home or opening your wallet it encourages us to think more or opening your wallet or whatever and for for us in the Department of Anthropology and the UMass Alliance for Community Transformation I work with students who are really invested in social change and are really interested in power and learning more about how power works and how to address some of the structural inequalities the ongoing colonial relationship that characterizes what happens in post disaster the sort of disaster capitalism that creates these conditions that shape our stories and one of the things and the resource that I have found to be the richest for engaging people and for my own learning about how to shift power has been basic relational style community organizing so I I work with community organizers who are engaged in sort of ongoing ongoingly building relationships with both institutions that anchor communities and with community leaders and building up community leaders capacities to address to understand how power affects those communities so that they can intervene when they decide to come together to make change so I want to sort of I think that an instance like this is an opportunity to sort of show how that actually looks when a community comes together what do we mean by community organizing and what do we mean by social change work what are the details of that what are the kinds of relationships and relationship building and how do we turn into how do we use stories to speak back to power what does that even mean so I'm not the person to answer that but the Pioneer Valley project has been working directly with folks who are who have been displaced by Hurricane Maria and are living in the island of Holyoke in Springfield and with some of the community institutions that support them so I'm going to pass it over to them to tell that story oh does that work good afternoon I'm Tara Parrish I'm the director of Pioneer Valley project and our organization has been around since 1996 and we came together as a group of congregations multi-faith organization labor unions and other community groups in Springfield most recently we began a chapter in Holyoke and that's how we got engaged in the work of organizing with displaced families from Hurricane Maria our initial the goal of Pioneer Valley project is to bring people together around shared values so either faith values democratic values social justice values and to build collective power to develop grassroots leadership and to create systemic change around issues that people in our community define for themselves and also then have the tools to engage directly with decision makers to create structural changes so we've done a lot of work on a lot of issues over the years and in our effort to build new relationships in Holyoke and to grow our presence in western Massachusetts we began meeting with pastors Latino evangelical congregations that's where we have started and it was during these conversations that we met some of these families who then after coming here had connected with these faith communities and then joined the congregation and so I can remember we have an organizing staff whose work it has been whose work it has been to really build the trust and relationship with these communities but it started in the congregations led by Latino clergy and who brought these people into meetings and said you need to hear these stories these are the stories that we're hearing every week now and this was months after the storm right it was sort of like these families had been shut away somewhere and then people started to hear their experiences we didn't know that we were receiving the second highest number of evacuees until we started meeting the families and we started looking at this yeah we were second only to Florida in terms of the number of people and so it was through hearing those stories and and then families starting to share with each other because again families were living together really in hotels whether you like it or not there's this community of people it's the community that we didn't choose but then we have to figure out because as of right now there are still families in these hotels but these folks really in many significant ways came together in their shared experience but also sharing their hopes for what was ahead because without that it appeared to be and was described as a pretty hopeless situation and so you know we began engaging with these families and building relationships and trust and then eventually began bringing the families together who then started to ask some questions about their situation and you know why are we still in hotels why aren't we in apartments now why won't our senators meet with us even though we've been requesting it for months why will they meet with other groups of people but why won't they meet with us so there has been this process of asking questions and then looking at well how can we answer these questions and making the connection between the stories of struggle and also the policies that could begin to answer parts of those questions right and looking then at what are the structural barriers that exist at this moment related to this storm related to why we're in our hotel room six months later right so our relationship with these families has been around them seeing their stories as a tool to build power and also a way of examining the structures that were in their way from creating the life that they seek to have here in a post Maria environment right so I'm gonna pass to Emily to talk more about the process of people coming together but then also experiencing themselves in a different way and their own path to power so like Tara said after we met and heard of the stories of the family Rosa brought the families to us and we started hearing the stuff that was happening in hotels that we never heard of and how the families they were self medicating they were using drugs they were depressed so we heard and said we gotta do something this is something that is happening in hotels to people who are invisible to our community this is something that nobody knows that is happening and somebody have to do something so we got the pastors and we said what are we going to do about these stories what are we going to do to make sure that these families become part of our community so we started organizing the families sorry I work really close to them and I have seen and I know a lot of the stories so sorry that I get emotional but so we organized the family and we decided that it's time to make sure this family come out of the hotels and then they go into permanent housing and they have a normal life so we started requesting for meetings with our elected officials we did a big action in Holyoke and we invited almost everyone and all the city councilors from Holyoke and Springfield where most of the people are or the Latinos, Puerto Ricans and other are and we invited Stay Wraps which most of them didn't show up and those who show up some of them were really supportive like Josie that's here and Nelson Roman of course and others like Senator Staff and didn't have an answer for the families of how they were going to help them and if they were going to fight for these families and at that moment we decided that we needed to register all these families to vote and make sure they have a saying and make sure they put people in seats that would work for them so after that meeting we decided to continue to escalate to different areas and we requested a meeting with our elected officials Elizabeth Warren and Markey we were denied so we took the families to downtown Springfield and say if you don't come to us we're going to go to you and we're going to make sure you hear their stories and you know what these families are going through we continue to request meeting and we continue to ask them to be champion to make sure that they were so FEMA to continue to support this family because they were going to extension to extension and every extension that was coming up they were like afraid to be homeless they were scared what's going to happen to my kids they have a lot of kids with disabilities most of the kids who have come from Puerto Rico they have like a 40% of them have some special needs and we continue to ask them to be champion but they continue to push to the side and like yeah we're already doing what we need to do we're already fighting for them but they were not fighting enough they were not doing enough for these people because it cannot be possible that from September and we are now when it was like around May May and this family were staying in hotels and they didn't know much about this family they didn't know the numbers of families that we had and at that moment we had like a 180 families already in hotels thus that were registered who knows how many more were staying with relatives and at that moment we got tired of asking for meetings with them the staff will always say all the senators are not around all the senators cannot meet so I was like okay and we're gonna go to them so we took 100 families 100 people 100 families put it in a box and we drove to Washington and we went there we put it together within like three days we're like okay then you're not gonna meet with us and we're gonna show you the power that these people have we're gonna take them to Washington and they're gonna speak to you directly and hopefully you're not gonna say no and we got those meetings we met with StayRab we met with Elizabeth Warren we met Markey we met everyone like Richie Neal everyone who was there they wanted to meet with us we had time to meet with you guys we gave them a photo op so at that moment the families were taking control of what was happening the families were leading those conversations at the table we make sure that every single family had an opportunity to speak to a different elected official so they took the control they asked the questions and they asked them directly in their faces are you gonna fight for me are you gonna make sure that I'm not homeless Kat was there so she can talk a little bit more about it hello everyone my name is Kat wow that's thank you Emily first I wanna just talk about how I was introduced to PVP and I was taking a class called grassroots community organizing within the class grassroots community organizing I was introduced by introduced to PVP because it was within one of my group's project and let me tell you I was wild and astonished by how dedicated the people of PVP they had they had the most integrated way to to put themselves within a community and allowed them to find and build their own voice so I guess I'll talk with when I love them so much in what they're doing I love them so much in what they're doing that I interned from May the end of May through the end of July I accompanied them to Washington DC and I was there the first day they told me Kat you have to get these buses call every single one of these people and give me quotes I was like okay they're just giving me so much so much responsibility for something that was not only near and dear to my heart but they had actual people behind it all the families that I grew so close to this beautiful little girl I I'm not going to tell her name but she was I talked to her very personally and I built such a relationship with her and her family I mean it just shows that building relationships defines everything within a community and that receiving I don't know what else to say I'm like I'm lost for words because I'm so blessed to be even considered in the fight for them that's fine I guess I just want to I just want to say that it is actually really difficult within the context of the university sometimes to communicate the the power that we say that relationships are at the center of everything and that in community organizing and it's very difficult to communicate what that means and it's hard to communicate it to students as well as colleagues but the relationship between story and voice and collective power is something that community organizers are really adept at building at helping people to come at shaping spaces and structures for people to come together and realize they're not alone and understand how power works and why they're suffering understand that it's not them that it's not them alone and that it's not their community's fault that there are reasons and analyze those reasons together and mobilize collective emotion rather than individual emotion because that's when shame turns into anger and righteous anger that is not individual but it's collective and then doing something with that and that process is something that I haven't figured out a shortcut for students for anyone to understand except by accompanying it and Cat mentioned, thanks for using that that word accompany because I think that ultimately that's what that's what I think has been so powerful in working with these organizations and working with students to integrate students it's not to help it's to accompany and witness and accompaniment is not easy it requires understanding who you are in that and our students are a diverse range of students some of whom are Puerto Rican students for whom this is their history and some of them are white middle class students from the suburbs of Boston who maybe didn't know that Puerto Rico was part of the United States and these folks who have been displaced are citizens of the United States and who they are is really different and you can't run from yourself when you're doing this work when you're talking to other people when you're learning how to listen deeply but I want to pass it back to Tara to talk about the end results of this and it's not over but the interim results what is going to DC and mobilizing this kind of power lead up to what does it all mean so of course yesterday there were many remembrances of the one year anniversary and we were in Holyoke with the pastors with many of the families talking about how struggling together has been a really important part of this journey but that the struggle is not over and this has been an experience and I can say this as someone who's not from the Puerto Rican community that I have experienced the sense of that there really is this idea of tiered citizenship I mean I've never seen it so clearly as I have in this experience but I also want to say that in the process of these families sharing their stories and building a narrative that's not just about those poor people who lost their homes but we are Americans we want a future we want what every other person wants right we want our family to be safe and secure and we want to move forward and by doing that strategically and powerfully in a variety of different spaces with decision makers these families on September 14th when the final FEMA deadline passed none of them became homeless because they mobilized our legislators who mobilized our governor to create or to allocate funding to ensure that they would not be on the streets and folks in Florida don't have that just Massachusetts and so the other thing that I want to say is that not only are those who unfortunately are not quite into permanent housing able to stay in hotels still but as of right now over 50% of those families have received permanent housing so in the course of their first meeting on April 5th their first public meeting till now they've prevented their own homelessness and those of all the other families in Massachusetts they've gotten several FEMA deadlines not just for Massachusetts but for any family in any state and they've also accessed hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Commonwealth to ensure that they not only remain housed but that they can access resources to access permanent housing and so this isn't just a story of struggle this is a story of hope mobilized into collective power and now the struggle isn't over but it's a worthwhile struggle this is the last panel so we are going to go into our table discussions but we have about 5 minutes so we haven't done this today but why don't we just take a question if there's any kind of key questions amongst the panels themselves or someone from the audience for the panel just let me get you I was just at an emergency preparedness conference in Florida that I got a full scholarship to attend thanks to an organization called Naleo which is a national association of Latino electric officials and there were a lot of folks there actually from Orlando which Florida received I think it was the number one state at this point in terms of the influx of displaced families after Hurricane Maria the number was something like 300,000 people by the time they had stopped counting and I think it was December some insane number but anyways so this woman was there from Orlando and she's an electric official there and she said that basically when the last FEMA deadline expired what they ended up doing was because they didn't have what we got with Governor Baker what they ended up doing was basically reaching out to a collaboration with the Hispanic Federation and every family got $1,000 so if you do the math, $1,000 is not really a lot so I'm in a room of electric officials and they're celebrating that families got $1,000 and I'm looking at them like did you all have your coffee this morning but it just shows how again I think it was Tara that mentioned the whole tiered citizenship we don't really need further proof of that other than Hurricane Maria and Carmen Julian Cruz, the mayor of San Juan says we can no longer hide behind Viña Coladas and palm trees and that is a perfect analogy because those of us who are Puerto Rican and who know our history and the painful history and the fact that Puerto Rico is a colony and everything that comes with that we knew this was kind of the reality but it took a lot of people to see the post-hurricane Maria life to really kind of realize that so I just wanted to kind of give that as an example of how there is so much discrepancy even between the states and how what other group does this happen to and there's this parallel in these analogies to like Hurricane Katrina that are very visible but then I think it almost went to a whole different level when you talk about that tiered citizenship and just a reminder that we're in a nation that is not really conducive to welcoming folks that are not the norm and I think somebody used white supremacy earlier this morning and I know it's a difficult term but it's just we keep having kind of these examples so I just wanted to give that that very clear example which was just like a week ago from that feedback regarding Florida Any question? Any other? I need to take into deep consideration for and you saw it on the panel is that we suffer from PTSD this is not something that just happened and it just went passing these are human beings and we are all complacent in the system what are we individually doing about it it's not about what we do with these people what are we doing in our daily lives to change the systems that created this and that continued to create this because as a Puerto Rican going to college and I see the stats I'm like why are the Puerto Ricans at the bottom of everything every social ill so this didn't just happen they knew we couldn't fight back but we have and we will continue as we have systemically through people power through spiritual power but it's understanding the depth of this and that gets started through Hurricane Maria this has been systemic and it's not just with us so it's about that level of praxis it's about that level of reflection not only in the classroom not only when we volunteer and then go live our lives it's about in our daily reflection of how we live what we choose, where we put our money and I just feel like I just ETSD of this has been incredible that the minute we see anything Puerto Rico Maria it's like it just gets us all emotional for on levels and levels and levels and levels and levels whether we lost someone during that time whether our community is just feeling the scars just open so please understand that that this was not something that just happened and it was in the news like Katrina to us many of us Katrina was something that happened over there this is in our blood and it's through generations of this generations so those of us that live this work it is lives and the more that we teach our young people community members that they are powerful which is what they try to shut down our people will rise thanks you know I can't think of a more powerful way to go into our question that we are going to have because it really addresses that very directly so the question that we want to have for this kind of dialogue session now is what can we do to support Puerto Rican climate migrants and other Latinx communities relocating to the region to become active agents in their new communities so I think that in a way that's the call to arms so I think in this kind of conversation now you know let's write it out let's plan it out use the cards because I think there has to be an actual plan for dealing with this moment and I think that we are all involved in it all can be agents so that's the question so the question what can we do to support Puerto Rican climate migrants and other Latinx communities relocating to the region to become active agents in their new communities and you can kind of take that from any perspective any point that means what do you do as an academic what do you do as a community member what do you do as a student what do you do as a staff member as a librarian as a postman whatever it is you're doing what role can you play in getting through the change that Eveline just kind of urgently described needed so what the tables can get a little bit more denser maybe people can join if you're only a table with one or two people join one of the other tables and same routine that we've been having all afternoon so just have that conversation write out those cards and put them up and we'll say a couple of words before we move on to the transition to the last part of our day today