Good morning. Welcome to week 11 of our class. It's wonderful to be here and to join all of you. Welcome to all our e-learning students as well as you've joined in week after week. We hope we are being encouraged and learning together. Did you all finish your class late because I see very few students today? Your previous class? Yes, ma'am. Okay. Thank you everyone for having a five minute break. Okay. All right. I think till people come in, we'll get started and maybe just do like a quick recap about what we... So, anybody would like to go? What is it that we focused on last week? We did one of the counselling skills. Which one did we do? Questioning skills, ma'am. Okay. Thank you, Avni. Yes. We did about questioning. We did yes, Chhaya. We did productive and unproductive questions. We did open-ended. We did closed-ended questions. We looked at different kinds of questions. We also did kind of a role play to give us a fair idea about the excessive use of questions and how we may need to channelize it and intersperse it with previous skills of responding. Okay. So, today we're going to try and complete two other skills and wrap up this entire topic of counselling skills. So, the first star we'll be looking at personalizing and the next star we'll be focusing on influencing and taking action, initiating action as a skill. Okay. So, we're going to be focusing on this. So, run along with me today is probably a packed day because we have a couple of things to cover. Just to keep it in the context of what we're learning, how we're understanding. I've brought about a couple of examples so that it can get a bit more simpler for us to deal with this because these are bridged courses. We may not be able to spend too much of time on it, but at least you get a fair idea as to how it goes on. And for those of you who may be interested to taking it further and really building up these skills on a deeper level. Okay. So, I'm just going to share my screen. Just give me a minute. Okay. All right. So, we had started off with micro skills and we had looked at the initial three skills of attending, responding and questioning. Today we're going to be looking at personalizing skills. If you look at some material that's given, what I'd also like to do is by the end of today's class I will just add in some reading material for you. This is not from written by us, but then it's something that has been picked up from certain counseling textbooks. There are certain PDFs which I will attach at the end of the class on the stream so you can take some time to reading it. I will add a little bit more in detail from what your notes have so that you can just kind of recap it from those notes as well and maybe just consolidate an entire process together. So, I will be adding in a couple of material for you to read through. So, we looked at attending, responding and questioning skills and today what we're going to do on personalizing skills actually falls a lot under responding skills. Okay. So, there is a large part of it in responding but I've just broken it down a little bit more so that there isn't a confusion. It gets hard sometimes when you're just learning it theoretically to really pick up the difference between these and how it is done differently. So, I've just taken it as a separate thing so maybe in the notes that you may be reading you may find it coming under responding skills. Okay. So, don't get worried. It's all there. It's just the way that it becomes categorized often differs from author to author. Okay. So, personalizing skills where we had spoken about this the last time when you look at the meaning of the word personalizing, what do you think it means? What does the word to personalize mean? We had spoken about this a bit last time, right? Oh, sorry. I think I stopped sharing. I'm sorry. Just a minute. Just a minute. Okay. So, what do you mean by the word personalizing? What does the word in itself, an English word mean to personalize? Personalize. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Something in terms of your own self like personalizing means pertaining to me. Okay. Okay. Good. Personal to me. Then it matters to me more than others. That's personal. Okay. Good. Good. That's an excellent attempt. Okay. So, when you're looking at personalizing, it is trying to look at, like Avni rightly said, what, how does something appear to me? What is the meaning of a certain situation to me? How, when I say I'm personalizing it, I'm looking at the way that I am personally involved in a certain event or how do I contribute to a certain situation or an event? So, that's what, so the focus, when you're saying personalizing, the focus is coming back to you or the focus as in counseling, the focus is coming back to the counseling. That's what the word specifically means to personalize. So, let's look at it in a little bit more of detail. So, when, what is the meaning of it? So, just taking it a step before. Okay. The skill that we learned earlier on responding. When you respond empathetically, what you're doing is your, remember, we said that we enter into the frame of reference of the individual. Right? You're entering into the experience of the other person so that you can help them to explore where they are in their lives. So, when you respond to them, you are communicating your understanding of the, of the person, as well as the problem that they're going through. So, you're validating their summary and you're responding. You're kind, you're talking about what you're, remember, we spoke about responding to the feeling, responding to the meaning, responding to the content. So, we spoke about, so that's what you do in the skill above. Now, in personalizing, what you're doing is you're helping the counselor to become more aware of the fact that they are also, they also may be playing apart in the problem. They may be playing apart in the situation themselves. Okay. So, it emphasizes internalizing those experience, which they are a part of. So, in other words, in other words, what we're saying is that we internalize our understanding about our problem. And we are growing to know ourselves more in the midst of that problem. How would the counselor be reacting or responding or mediating or improving or decreasing or affecting the problem? So, that's what personalizing means.  So, that's what the word personalizing means. Now, let's look at the purpose of it. What would it mean to, when you're saying personalizing, what is it bringing about? Here, it enables the counselor to understand where they are with respect to where they want to be. For example, they are at a place A, okay, the problem that they are in. So, what you're doing, the purpose of this is to enable them to understand to move from point A to point B. I'm feeling frustrated about something. I want to feel better about it. There is discord over here. I want to make that okay. This is what I think about this over here. I want to think about this better. So, it is helping them to understand where they should be going from where they are. So, what you're doing is by personalizing, you are creating a conversation with them that facilitates their understanding of where they want to be. So, you're helping them look for themselves. Where is it that they are to where they want to be? So, it's a dialogue between where they are in their reality to where they would like to be more ideally. Okay, so they are unhappy with where they are right now, but they are hopeful that they can become more real or become a different part of maybe a more ideal situation or an ideal self. So, by personalizing this, you are helping them to bring about change. So, you are as a counselor, you become an agent of change. So, let me give you an example. So, the counselor may report that things are not going too well at my home because my wife does not understand me. So, what happens over here is, well, the counselor you find that is putting all the blame on the wife for the presence condition. Okay, but it is likely that the husband in this case may also have a part in the problem situation. So, the most effective method to improve a situation is for the counselor to acknowledge that she's playing or he's playing a part in this problem and to work out a way of lessening or improving it all together. So, we see that growth begins when blaming stops. Okay, because in conditions you see in personalizing, you're dealing with the counselor's contribution to the problem, not with the contribution of the other person. So, we're facilitating, here we facilitate what we're doing is personalized understanding when we are helping the counselor in internalizing or owning the meaning of their experiences or owning their problems or owning whatever the issues or owning their goals or whatever they want or what they need. So, that's the purpose of it is to get them to understand where they are at in the midst of their problem. How much of this is something that they can take ownership to. So, often when people do come in for counseling, it's a lot more external, right? And this may take a couple of sessions. This doesn't happen at the first time because in the first time you are giving them time to just be able to share what they're experiencing in it. So, personalizing happens only when you have grounded and responded well in their situation to help them to focus back on what may be a challenge in their lives. Okay, so that is what the purpose of personalizing is. So, to just quickly summarize, when the counselor focuses on others, they are externalizing their experiences. They almost bring about the fact that they aren't involved in any way in resolving their problem. And it almost, when you don't personalize, it's almost like they don't have any kind of a say or a contribution in working this out. But by focusing upon themselves, you are helping them internalizing, internalize their experiences. So, internalizing is making the counseling accountable for their experience or what their part of the contribution is in their cases. Okay, so let's look at, when we're looking at personalizing, we're saying it involves, first of all, formulating and communicating these individualized responses. So, you are, now this the counseling themselves may not come about to understand. Okay. In most cases, I'm not saying in all, but in most cases, they may come to a place of not of always being external focused. So, what it requires for you to do is formulating that for them or communicating what it truly would mean to them. And you do that through these four ways.  Okay, so it involves you as a counselor to be able to bring about an understanding and communicating that understanding to them through just a response. Okay, and we'll look at more detail in that for a better example. Okay, so why, so before we personalize, there's something that we need to do. And that's why the skill of personalizing comes within the skill of responding. So if you need to personalize, you should initially respond to feelings and that's why you should get the feelings in the open. Because if the feelings aren't in the open, it's stuck inside and they are not really able to see for themselves what the situation means for them. Okay, and how they need to deal with their own feelings. So the reason why you should get the feelings out in the open and that's what we've been learning throughout in the responding skills is you are helping them to learn to deal with the emotions that's coming about. They begin to, as they begin to articulate their emotions, they begin to see that they have an agency about their own emotions, the emotions are coming out from them. So the more they explore their own feelings, the more they are likely to channel them constructively. Okay, so they may say I feel so dejected, I feel so upset about this, I want to change the way that I feel. Okay, so there you've got them in some way to personalize it that, you know, they're taking the onus and saying, this is how I feel, and I want to begin to change the way that I feel. So they've begun to personalize and say, okay, you feel this way, like you may, this is how you would personalize a feeling you say, you know, you feel really dejected, but you want to feel a lot more hopeful about your situation. And that comes in only when the counselor responds and says, okay, you feel dejected, but you would like to be more hopeful about the situation, or you feel unhappy, but you really want to begin to feel a lot more constructive about this. So you see from where they were, you feel hopeless or you feel dejected to a place that they want to be. And the key point here is, which I will come into later, is where you are bringing the counselor back into the game. Okay, and that comes in in your response and I will bring that up a little later. So what are we trying to look at here is so that that's exactly why it's important to help to respond to their feelings so that they get it out. Okay, they are able to share what they've what they're feeling, so that you can help them, one, to work with it to deal with it and also to find ways of how they can move from position A to position B, and you're giving them a chance to think a little bit more with clarity. Okay, now to go through this entire personalizing skills, I'm just going to take an example, so that you know it helps us to to build on on what we're learning others it just becomes very conceptual. Okay, so here's Anita, a second pu student. Okay, so for those, for those of us who are not in India second pu student is a 12th grader. Right, so a 12th grader says, things are not going so good for me in school. I just seem to be floundering. I fake it every day but inside I'm really down, because I'm not sure of what to do, or where I want to go. This is the situation that that Anita has come to you with. Okay, so what, what do you do in a situation like this the first and foremost thing is, you, you establish a good base of communication a good therapeutic relationship. It's all that what we have learned is something that we need to do prior to getting into this place of personalizing. Okay, so before you make those personalized responses, you must establish a good base of communication. And so what would that be you make multiple responses that bring about the content, the feeling the meaning we spoke about all of that in responding skills. We did all of that and that's what you're doing. Okay. When you're when you're building a good base of communication and a relationship you're also helping.   And that's exactly why you may need to dwell on exploring a little more, rather than getting into a place of finding a solution. Because you, you want to get into the frame of reference of the of your counseling, so that you're not talking from your head you're not talking from your experience but you've done that enough to understand to explore enough so that it's almost like you have become almost like okay it's not like it is not it is but almost like you're experiencing the same struggle that they're going through. Okay, so it when you're doing that when you're building when you're doing that enough. You are helping the counseling to find out what they are willing to understand and what they're willing to tell us. So the response part of it that especially the first part the E self exploration is extremely important. And that's why you spend time to really understand it greater understand what they're feeling how what is the actual content of the problem. What is the meaning that they are given to the problem. What are the goals that they have so I hope you're able to recollect what we have done this far and the importance of doing that. Before you can get into this place of personalizing. Okay, so with Anita, this, this young girl, you have done that over and over and over again. And now you're coming to a place of actually personalizing her problem. So, in. Yeah, sorry. So, so in when you're responding what are you doing. Sorry, I'm just going to put that put that case again. So this is what she said right so when you are responding to her feelings. This is what you are probably saying you're responding to the feeling and the content. This is what we've learned. You feel discouraged because things aren't going too well for you at school. Yeah, at school. This is what happened. This is what's going on. And I feel this way. Oh, you sound really dejected about that because of what, you know, maybe your, your, your teachers have spoken about so you're actually building on that before you can get into a place of personalizing So you're responding to a feeling and content building it well enough so that you have a fair enough idea about what is going on in every realm of her, her, her thoughts, her feelings, her, her, her behavior, her, her needs, all of that seems to have come about through that initial part of just working through that. Now what are you doing in personalizing in personalizing the counseling experiences are internal internalized by introducing the counseling into the responses now what does that mean you are helping them internalize it for them so if you look at the formula it says you feel something because you All right. So remember that that word you have internalized it back to them. You feel like this, because you feel a strong need to push out of this fakery. Okay, so that's what you're doing to personalizing. Whereas look at the responding one. You're just responding to the feeling and content you haven't personalized that you're saying it's more the content you say you feel discouraged because things aren't going too well at school it's still external focused you see that it's still external focus but then you are drawing out what they feel about what is external but in personalizing you are in helping to internalize them that by introducing them into that equation. So what you're saying you feel discouraged because you feel a strong need to push out of this fakery right so it what what you you turn the course and said okay. This is not where you are at. Okay, and you feel that this is not where you want to be. Okay, or this is this is not where this is what what you you don't want to happen. So you have bought it back to the to the counseling themselves to to bring about a fairer understanding that how much as how much they are involved in in this in in the struggle or in this issue. So when you're responding meaning you're you're using that externalizing format you feel because that so it's all because of what is happening in school, but when you internalize, you're introducing the counselors responses using this format. Okay, you feel dash because you dash. Okay, and that is that is that example that's that's given over for you. Okay, so let's just go back to that example once again. Okay, so here in there is a there is another response that is given in personalizing here. Personalizing is towards the content. Okay, so you feel upset because you don't like stumbling like this in school. Okay, so it has gone back to the student it's gone back to Anita and not about what is happening in her environment. Right, so, so by these statements seem very simple and you may be wondering how would this change it for them. But you know it's amazing to see that the way that that that and for some people, they may catch on quickly but maybe for some you may really need to keep going on to really work this out. So, for example, let's say Anita didn't catch what you were saying.  How do you think you probably are contributing to what is going on or how do you think that there is a role that you may be playing in with with whatever is happening. So there it gets the person to think okay may say that and I just don't work hard or I don't do this I feel under motivated so it comes back to them you're helping them bring that connection back to where they are at. Okay, so we will move on to to looking at the next one so we said when you're personalizing your your your personalizing different things what you're doing here is your you need to also personalize the meaning of the situation. For example, you're looking at what are the effects of the situation on the counseling. What is the implication that is going on because of what is happening. So in this, you're trying to help the the counseling answer these questions. Okay, what is the effect of the situation upon them. Okay, that is, it's a personal consequence of their experience. Now because this is happening. What is the consequence that you're going through. Often they cannot or you know, may not really completely articulate information about these implications themselves they will they will not tell you you know, because of this I'm going through this I'm going through this is my future is they may not say that for them it's also external focus that they haven't got a chance to really think about its implications, or you're also looking at the personal beliefs that causing that's causing them to feel the way about the situation. What are the assumptions that they are making that they seem to be stuck in that situation. Okay, so now this is moving a little bit extra so we're saying she may be going through a lot of assumptions that you know that that that probably that she's not good enough or that she's unable to get get what she's looking for or the colleges is a bad college so there are certain assumptions that that she may be operating from so one implications that's what are the effects of this on her. And what are the assumptions that's making her stay in that situation, and it's only when we bringing about this personalizing the meaning, do these things become more, more evident. Okay, so personalizing meaning will involve identifying those common themes that they may be thinking about, or finding out what are the implications or the effects of the situation upon the counseling, or identifying what are those personal beliefs that's causing the counseling to feel this way about the situation so that's what we are attempting to work on. So, so here, the formula still remains the same you feel dash because you remember that is something that you're bringing in for example we say you feel devastated because you know you're maybe in another you feel devastated because you feel you're dependent upon upon maybe you know if she's bought about some other information dependent upon some people there. So you're, you're attempting to personalize what she may be going through. So what you're doing is you're looking for common themes in the expressions of the counseling. And these themes often relate to what the counseling is saying either about themselves, or if they're saying about others, or of the situation in itself. So the common themes are those themes that are generally intermingled in the expressions of the counseling. So if we were to look at the example again, so you look at the meaning that is bought about here, you feel upset because your future will be affected if you don't do well in college this year. So it's become a meaning now if I do all of this, your future gets affected, if you don't do well now you're bringing about that so that they take agency, they take responsibility they take onus for what is going on. So here when use when as a counselor, when you're helping in that personalizing you're bringing them back to that, the meaning of this entire problem for them, okay, and you're making them more aware that hey, yes, my future probably gets gets affected and here it's a, it's an assumption that she's probably made not an assumption it's an implication that she's made the effect of what the situation will be for her. Okay, now, as you keep moving forward, let's look at how do you personalize a problem. Now in personalizing a problem, you're looking at what is there about the counseling themselves that is contributing to the problem so you're looking into into a deeper way as to how the problem is affecting now how they are part of that problem so when you personalize a problem you're helping them to understand what is it that they are unable to do that has led them to the present experience of that they are going through. Okay, so what is there about the counseling that is contributing to them so what is probably there in their personality or in their, you know, in the way that they're doing things. So you're helping them to focus on that so by this what you're doing is you're helping them to take responsibility for things that they can control for things that they can look to themselves as maybe as a source of their problem. So it involves maybe looking at deficits that they may be having, or it looks at maybe specifying certain skills that they don't have. So that's what you would do when you're actually personalizing the problem you're getting the counseling to look at themselves for for something that doesn't seem to be changing. Now let's look at Anita's case now Anita has what about another extra information. And if you look at it she's saying I'm the school basketball team basketball teams captain and I spent two hours every evening in practice. I'm left with no time or energy to study.  All right, so here, there is something that she is contributing to so you're bringing about the problem that you're making the problem her own saying, okay, you're facing a rough time in college you're also having a basketball practice. Which gives you not enough time to study so you're kind of helping them helping her see where is the problem lying. Okay, so do you see that because you have you have responded well enough, she has given you certain additional information that probably gives you a lot more clarity about what is going on in her life. Okay, she let's say she adds in another sentence. Okay, at the end she says I should never have agreed to being the captain. She says I should have never agreed to being the captain. So how do you personalize in this one. So you can probably there's a new feeling that's coming here so you're saying you feel angry because you have taken on more than you can handle or you've taken on much more than you can show. Okay, so it gives an understanding to her that my problem is existing because of the fact that I have taken on very many things and I'm not able to prioritize my time or not able to focus on something else because my attention is on something. So when you're doing this, it really brings about a lot more clarity about where and what is it that requires that specific change. So that's that's how you focus back on personalizing a problem. Okay, now moving to the next one. How do you personalize a goal personalizing a goal is it involves you're trying to establish like we said where the client was. And where they would like to be so where the where the where the counseling wants to be in relation to where they are so they're point A to point B. So here the counseling, when you when they reach here they are demonstrating their readiness to move from discussing their problems to discussing their goals.  Okay, so they so even as when the counseling begins to see this they are ready to respond to their problems the way we have been attempting to do it for them. Okay, so what you what you're attempting to get them is on the focus from the external into the internal by by doing all of personalizing meaning feeling and then coming to a goal and say okay. Now you feel you cannot handle this. So what is the next step. So the basic way to personalize goal is to determine the behaviors that are opposite of the problem. Okay, so it's very simple in the sense of they want to. So she's come up to saying that I can't handle so many things. Okay, I this is the the the thing that she wants to do is I want to learn how to handle all of this. Okay, so the big the way to personalize those goals is to determine what are those behaviors or action points that are opposite of of the personalized of the problem that she's she's getting into. Okay, so what do you do here is first of all establish where they want to be. Where is it that they want to go. Okay, so maybe it starts off it probably gets in with a question. Okay, you've you've shared with me that schools been difficult.  And you really would like to change all of this or you would really need or learn want to learn how to handle this. Okay, I need to let me let me ask you a question. Where is it that you would like to be at this point of time if all of this sorted out for you. Where is it that you would like to be so you're asking a question to help to understand what does she have in her mind in the way that she would like to discuss it. I will take up questions in a few minutes once I'm done with this. Okay, so I don't fit it as stop the flow and then I'll handle those questions. So what you what you're getting to do is asking her where is it that you would like to be. Okay, now she may say, okay, I want to learn how to handle all of this together. And when you're personalizing goals, you're also helping her to look at what is contributing to resolving that problem. What is there in you that you're not able to resolve that specific problem. Okay, so this is the formula that you use you feel dash because you cannot dash and you want to dash. So if you see because you cannot handle your time and you want to learn how to manage all of this together. So you feel frustrated because you cannot handle multiple things together and you really want to get a hold of all of this in school. So you have personalized the goal you have bought about the fact that there is a problem. Okay, that she sees she's taken the responsibility of that problem and she wants to work that out. Okay. All right, so, so you have an additional thing over here that she says Anita says my dream is to become a doctor and I've taken the science stream. I did poorly in my first term exams I'm disappointed in myself for not studying enough. Okay, so what are you personalizing here you're personalizing the goals if you look at the example. You feel dejected because you cannot put in the hours required and you want to be able to do well in your exams. All right, so there's a problem here, according to this, this statement that she's made, you cannot put in the hours required, and you really want to do well in your exams. Okay, so, so here again, you've got them to own up and say, okay, you really want to do well in your exams and maybe your next question would would be. Maybe it's, do you think it would be a good idea to really brainstorm to see what is it that you can do to put in your hours of study, or what is it that you can do to help yourself well in your exams. Okay, so you've got her back in her own action and not about the school and the college and all of that that's that's going as as peripheral for her. Okay, now, now, even as you're doing that what are you doing, you're also continuously doing a feeling check with respect to her goals. Okay, so Anita may say, yeah, I really want to do well in my exam so there again, now you're bringing back a hopeful feeling so that there is a sense of, you know, a sense of hope, a sense of knowing that's that this is not as bad as she initially expressed it to be that she, once she's personalized the problem, she would be able to find ways in dealing with her issues so you feel hopeful, because you're going to figure out how you can do well in your exams right. So, maybe that that question of, you know, what would you like to do to to change the way that you study your study in your exams so she may say, yeah, maybe I should for this semester give up my basketball. I should really focus on this probably take a break in that or maybe I should time manage so she's giving you these kind of thoughts and then at the end of it. You're doing a feeling check you say oh you you seem to be really hopeful even as you're thinking about ways in which you can you are you're working out to do these exams. So that that helps them to come to a place of working through, you know, moving into the next phase of of being able to take on action. So if you look, if you looked at the entire process of it, if you go on to looking at the entire process of it, you will find that you're moving them from an external experience into an internal experience and trying to help them formulate themselves. What are what do they feel about it personally and where would they like to be what do they, what are the implications or the other consequences that they feel will happen, what are the certain assumptions that they are going through. And lastly, what is the goal that so you move them to that place in actually working this out to help themselves. Okay. All right. I think I'll take questions right now. Nisha, I think you had a question. Nisha, do you have a question. Okay, sorry. All right, all right. Okay, is, would anyone have any doubts any questions here because this is one chunk of it and any any kind of any questions any thoughts about this. You're on mute. But yeah, I'll ask my question. Go ahead, Samir. I'm not on mute. Okay, sorry. Supposed to some thinking. So, so the goal, so I'm just checking my understanding of some while I'm trying to frame my question. So the goal of personalizing is, you know, so this this generally, so it happens after a while like after you build an Apple with the Counselor, you've gained trust, you've responded, you've kind of had a good understanding of the problem and you've established some goals. And then now we are kind of trying to bring in the personalized and and it's what I understand is it's for us to help the counseling, you know, have a change in perception or even shift in perception to see like, okay, how am I playing a part in this problem and what can I do. So if that's the goal. But the point that I'm contemplating is a lot of times I think people do come in blaming themselves already a lot.  I lack discipline, or I lack motivation. I'm not motivated enough. So, so people already, you know, they're coming in with the with a personalized view of themselves like I should be working I should not be procrastinating I should be working hard enough but I just, I just can't so you know, so is it always the counseling who has something like like let's say in Anita's case, you know, what if she would have enjoyed more taking up humanities or not being like maybe, you know, she's just good in sports and, you know, just probably out of parents or peer pressure she ended up being the captain, whereas she would have enjoyed more in arts and theater, but she just couldn't like she couldn't make either the distinction or she just gave into family peer pressure. And she stuck with him and so I think the point that I'm trying to make is safe if a counselor likes the the personalized if the goal of personalizing is to make the counseling see his or her own part in the problem. But to what end, you know, like if especially if the counseling is coming already with a personalized view saying, you know, I would have enjoyed myself more than a man like let's say just the scale like I would have enjoyed my problem, taking my own case back in college. I still feel like I would have, I was more of a humanities student, but because of peer pressure bandwagon and all that stuff I just took up science and then I just, I didn't enjoy, and I just like end up floundering in college. But I knew I was in the wrong stream, but I didn't have like I just didn't like you do it is it was too much for me to change streams midway I just felt like I could just go through it. But eventually just like when I still look back it's like I could have done much better in college if I have taken a different stream. Okay, so what Okay, so I think the summit what you're saying is many a times, counseling may come in with already knowing that. Okay, you think they've personalized the problem. I don't think they I don't think that's personalizing the problem there they have come in thinking about that they have been a cause towards their own problem they've been the source of their problem. Right. And so what you're doing as a counselor there is to help them take accountability and responsibility for the fact that even, even if they have been the source of their own problem, they can also be the solution to their problem. So you're bringing them to a place where you're helping them seem like for Anita, maybe there are certain implications of wrong choices that certain consequences that has come by. Okay, or there are certain assumptions she's making about herself with regard to the course or another possibility that you said is it's absolutely it's a wrong choice and so it wasn't a well thought of decision. So what you're doing over here is getting them to come to a place where they can take onus for the wrong decision and look at ways of how they can work something out for themselves if they have another goal. So she may say something like Okay, I joined the stream. I'm really unhappy at the stream. So maybe there is a requires a little exploration to find out. Okay, you seem extremely unhappy of this. If you had a chance to do something else. What, what do you think that would be now this is why exploration is very, very important, because only if you're able to gather this kind of a data is, are you able to move forward in helping personalize. And I think it this also relates to a question that Beth asked, what about, you know, there's no change in if you cannot change a situation like for example, she says, Anita says you know I chose the stream because I like it I really want how I just don't feel motivated to do it. So there's a situation she doesn't want to change. But it could be just a, I think, I think that was the one of, yeah, she said, what if it's only an attitude, right, so you will understand that only number one if you've explored enough. Secondly, when you're able to personalize this and help them see that you know, is this an assumption. Okay, you feel this way, because, you know, you have a certain belief about it, maybe there's a certain belief about about it, it takes a lot of hard work to get into the stream and that's maybe something that I wasn't prepared for. Maybe that's the assumption that she's come come with. Okay, so you may say, Okay, you feel you feel this is a really hard thing because you feel hard work is something that that you didn't expect to put the hard work is not something that you expected to do. There you've personalized the problem. Now to personalize the goal. Okay, is is maybe she says you know I want to do it I really want to do it. So probably it is going back to to helping her see that it assumption that she needs to work out of, or it's something that you know she she requires to change meaning about it and saying Okay, this is what I thought about it but now, since I have reviewed meaning of it renewed meaning of it, maybe there are certain action points that I may need to do. So when they come in, like the case that you said Samuel, they think that the source of the problem, they don't feel that they are the solution to their problem themselves. And that's what you're doing in counseling is you're helping them look back at what can you do to change the situation that you're in. It may be behaviorally, it may be through your emotions, it may be just having a better meaning of it, it may be just having a better attitude to it, it may be just bringing down your expectations of it so any of this, that's what the counseling needs to do so that's why you bring them back to a place of personalizing it then remember you're not in personalizing you're not making them feel that you know you're not creating guilt because they've been the source of the problem. In fact, what you're attempting to do through that is giving them the hope that there are resources inside of you that you can bring about a change and that's what you are bringing them to. So when you personalize this for them and give them the hope that you know hey this is the goal, you know you would really like to do, like to get forward into medicine but you just feel hard work is difficult for you. But you want to look at ways that you can work on the struggle so you've brought them back to that understanding of what is their agency in working through that. I hope I answered your question. Absolutely, I'm a very important distinction. It's so much clearer now. Okay, all right, Justin and I just going to look at bets question the second question would you say there is always some point where we can take responsibility for a situation and take action. Did you mean. Okay, yeah, the counseling. Yes, in every situation. It's the counseling that needs to take action, even if the problem is on the other side, let's say there is physical abuse, okay. In a in a home that is physical abuse, and the wife comes to you and say this is what my husband's doing. What you're doing is you're helping them to take on and see how they are contributing into the problem by not doing anything. So that's what you bring them back to personalizing the situation them for them so that they move up forward to figuring out a way on how to address that problem. Right, so yes, you in every situation, it is bringing them to a point to take responsibility, even if they are not the cause of the problem or the source is not from them and it's completely external. You're still going to help them to figure out how is it that they can take agency and how is it that they can take on a role in in moving from a place of you know I don't want him to hit me to a place of I want to be safe. So what can you do about it, you know what is it I mean that's what you're moving them to so that they take the responsibility and say okay maybe I should get somebody's help or maybe I should take legal help or maybe I should be more firm or I should go discuss this with my parents. And that happens only when you're able to get them to personalize it and own that problem for themselves. Okay, I hope that was clear. Okay, all right, we're at 1055. Let's have a 10 minute break and come back at 1150 on my clock. Meet you soon.


Good morning members of the press. Good morning to St. Lucien's listening Both here in St. Lucien abroad. We would like to welcome you to our first press conference For the year and we wish you from the office of the Prime Minister a very happy new year Good health and strength and mooses from our God. I Will now like to call on the Prime Minister to deliver some remarks as you know We will be having this press conference Prime Minister will be interacting with members of the media any Questions queries that you may have can be directed to the Prime Minister and I'm hopefully you will try to take some Questions from the audience via our Facebook and YouTube pages But cognizant of the fact that today is cabinet so we will only be with you for a limited amount of time So I now would like to call on the Prime Minister honourable Philip J. Pierre to address you Thank you. Good morning Ladies and gentlemen of the press. Good morning Thank you for joining me this morning. I want to discuss with you the distressing economic and social conditions We met in St. Lucia when our party came into government six months ago The gravity makes it incumbent upon me To remind the people of them Not because we are daunted by them for we are not But because the people of St. Lucia must never forget That these are consequences of the injustices that are rigged upon our country by the male Administration of the last you the AP government under the leadership of the now leader of the opposition In an introduction message in the 2021 SLP general election manifesto I had made the following statements Since June 6 2016 The country has gone through a very trying time of mismanagement under a UWP administration Sadly this mix mismanagement has been ex-azubatel by the COVID-19 pandemic Today we are left with a huge challenge of rescuing our country from an economic and financial disaster following a five-year period of reckless borrowing and spending and an unprecedented level of corruption However On assuming office. We have discovered that the fiscal and economic situation of the country was far worse And its economic development far more badly retarded than we had imagined when we crafted the manifesto the stark reality is that we are dealing with disastrous public finances and economy damage by incompetent management and pushed into further decline by the COVID-19 pandemic a huge suffering deaths of Unpresidential levels and the enormous mess of an unfinished St. Jude Hospital and the UNO international airport redevelopment projects But we are not intimidated by the magnitude of the tasks that the people of Saint Lucia entrusted us with We're not afraid for we in this government are up to the challenge in the 2021 manifesto We said My task together if my team of able men and women is to restore St. Lucia to a level of financial stability and to create an enabling environment for wealth creation and employment particularly among the youth Therefore, we are confident in our ability to accomplish our mission We will overcome the challenges that five years of bungling and irresponsible UWP governance bequeathed us Like most patriotic and caring solutions. My government is sensitive concerned and worried about the COVID pandemic raging St. Lucia the region and the world No one can predict the future. No one is perfect This was a case before the pandemic and it will continue to be the case after the pandemic Our economy is suffering from COVID fatigue The United Workers Party government maximized the concessionary borrowing for COVID-related spending Why callously leaving behind an unfinished St. Jude Hospital and an under-resourced OKEU hospital Scientists have used the most sophisticated techniques to try predicting the behavior of the COVID-19 virus Still, they have come of short 10 weeks ago. There was no American variant only no American now American is driving of infection rates around the world at a rate not seen with any previous variant of the COVID-19 virus in In the United States nearly 800,000 cases are being reported each day double what it was two weeks ago In our region record levels of infections are being reported every day in practically every country testing resources are being challenged Even if the soaring daily infection rates Scientists believed that because most American cases are mild and not sent as many people to hospital as the Delta variant That the world might be witnessing the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 pandemic but a week ago a new variant was discovered in France that Scientists believe would be more infectious and American While the WHO has not yet declared this as a variant of concern It's an indication of how quickly things can change in our COVID-19 world With these swift and frequent changes in the behavior of the COVID-19 virus It's no surprise that our governments are struggling All governments in fact are struggling to come up with effective policies to deal with the social and economic impacts of the pandemic For governments like ours who carefully monitor the public health policies of the USA and the UK Which account for most of our visit arrivals It's impossible to keep up with the almost daily changes in these countries One day we have a change in in Isolation in the isolation period the next day it's a change in the testing window changes every day Only on Saturday even after a rise in daily infections The UK government scrapped all pre-departure and post arrival tests for fully vaccinated travelers From July the Delta variant was detected in Celusia and Immediate policy measures are implemented using evidence-based information This resulted in the transmission rates in early in early December being 0.8 and the rate of positivity 2.7 Although these statistics in December were trending in the right direction It was always anticipated globally that a fifth wave would arrive after the high risk of the December month festivities The ministry of health carried out an evaluation of the management of the fourth wave If a few to strengthen the response measures in the fifth wave However, the fifth wave was accompanied by a new variant american The following additional response measures were put in place in anticipation of the increase in infections strengthening of the public health measures Updated public service announcements were prepared to encourage the use of face masks physical distancing hand washing and living a healthy lifestyle Appeals encouraging vaccination were intensified There was a strengthening of the immunization program island-wide introduction of the one dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine in addition to AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines already available Plans to put in place for community-based vaccination Enhanced testing capacity to manage increasing cases By increasing procurement of reagents and test kits The capacity of the azure lab laboratory was strengthened with the Engagement of more human resource and new capacity to run 2000 samples for testing daily A new testing site was set up at VG multipurpose complex There were respiratory hospital improvements were made there Employment of 14 patient welfare systems Setting up of a functioning telecommunication system both internet and landline increasing of ancillary staff The setting up of a central monitoring system For 24 hour monitoring of patients in the high dependency units Improvement at the radiology units by the installation of a new portable x-ray machine and repairs to the malfunctioning x-ray machines in the emergency room There was increased procurement of equipment and supplies The welfare of our frontline workers was prioritized by the procurement of personal protective equipment to ensure At least three months supplies were available on the island at any time And I want to give you take the opportunity to say that these frontline workers doctors nurses All all the staff porters firemen All those involved in the in the frontline or the battle against COVID The intensive care unit was restocked with needed supplies and medication Confinement hours were reviewed In spite of these measures, we encouraging sent solutions to get vaccinated And it has been proven that in most cases Vaccinated people without pre-existing conditions, even if they get infected will experience less hospitalization And the lower risk of death I believe and I continue to believe That the majority of solutions are responsible But we ask that our citizens follow the proven public health methods That will mitigate against the spread of the COVID virus and to get vaccinated COVID is a global problem And calls for shared sacrifice Discipline and cooperation from everyone I remain deeply troubled by the high incident of crime in particular violent murders We are beginning to look like a country consumed with anger and rage We already have for the month of January two murders As a country we must return quickly to having respect for life That respect comes with recognizing the rights of others And giving to every citizen what is their due Our young people cannot be setting the differences with the power of the gun There are just too many guns in the hands of citizens Who should not be carrying them My government is committed to supporting the police in the fight against crime We continue even in a time of very limited fiscal space To provide the police with the resources in that fight While the root cause of serious crime Missed them from dysfunctional social conditions There are measures that can be taken in the short term to alleviate the scourge of violent crime I am calling on the management of the police to do more And to take control of our streets and communities When crime appears to be flourishing There are legal means by which we can do that We need to get those unlicensed firearms off our streets In the coming weeks I'm expecting to see some police initiatives to bring the level of crime under control We cannot have another year of so many homicides In the meantime, my government will continue with its plans To change the social structures that drive our young people Into antisocial behavior and criminality I call on all citizens to learn support to the police in the efforts to fight in crime We all stand to gain from if violent crime is brought under control The social and economic cost of crime is becoming a heavy burden on our country We can do more The government, the police, and the citizens to correct this growing problem of violent crime To bring the crime situation under control My government will provide the resources And the police are expected to make effective use of these resources And the rest of us must learn support to the work of the police As Minister of Finance, together with the Cabinet and officials of the Ministry of Finance I am now engaged in the preparation of the 2022-2023 estimates Of expenditure and appropriation bill Constitutionally due to be laid in parliament by April 2022 These documents will chart the way towards the following Maintainance of an adequate macroeconomic policy framework Implementation of an overall economic and reform program A policy mix of revenue enhancing and expenditure containment measures To positively impact and improve fiscal and debt sustainability Policies to improve the business environment Is in doing business and increase local and foreign investment Good governance, transparency, and accountability In the management of the financing of the country Outlawing of the reckless practices of the former Minister of Finance When he sanctioned nine months ago An advance of $7 million of taxpayers' funds for vaccines That have not been received by the people of St. Lucia Education and social enhancement projects for the people of St. Lucia Implementation of the youth economy And creation of an enabling environment for the growth And expansion of small and medium-sized businesses Adoption and mitigation methods to deal with climate change The budget will seek to transform our economy and citizens In preparation for the change in global environment We are focused on improving the lives of the people of St. Lucia We are focused on restoring good governance in the management of the country affairs And we will put constitutional and other mechanisms in place To make it unthinkable for future governments To engage in the corruption and malfeasance Of the last five years of Udaipirol We will bring discipline and transparency in the unfinished Government infrastructure projects So that they do not become milestones of debt on the country And conduit for the personal gains of some members Of the former United Locust Party governments In the meantime, my government is unmoved By the shameless, provocative, and seditious utterances Of those who refuse to accept the democratic will of the people When they were voted out of office by a landslide Only six months ago Even if their bad behaviour in government Made our island a laughing stock of the world The men and women in the government of the social labour party Are undertaking their responsibilities with unfazed determination On resolved enthusiasm and unflinching commitment To put our people first As we prepare to observe the food for the food and the wish of independence Under the film Duva Assam, Celebrating Our People I call on all solutions at home and in the diaspora To join us in the exciting journey of inclusion, tolerance, Compassion, and wealth creation That will lead to transformative change for our people As we battle with the COVID pandemic As a strong determination I am confident that with the help of God, we will prevail I thank you Thank you to the media We will open the floor to any questions that you may have Based on the statement And then, perhaps, if the time permits, we can venture into other things Karim Nelson, hot 7 With regards to the radical investment vaccine issue You mentioned that EC2 million dollars had been recouped out of the 7 million My question is, why only 2 million thus far? Is that part of the arrangement with radical investment? And which agency is acting on behalf of the government In trying to recoup that money? And what efforts are being made to recoup the total balance? First of all, the first question you must ask Is why were the procurement laws in the country broken By the foreign minister of finance When he sanctioned these payments If that behavior was not that reckless There would be no reason to do that Because the procurement law states clearly In the public procurement act The percentage of money that must be spent In any emergency procurement That this percentage of money that must be given in advance The foreign minister of finance was reckless When he put the people of taxpayers Put the taxpayers of the country at risk When he spent 7 million dollars Money that could be used for computers For the young people of St. Lucia Money that could be used to buy medication in the hospitals Money that could be used to improve To extend the welfare To extend the welfare payments to the people of the country Money that could be used for the distressed fund When in his reckless behavior He spent 7 million dollars He ordered that 7 million dollars be spent for vaccines That have never arrived in St. Lucia The government is using its best efforts To return For the person who was given the money To return it to the people of St. Lucia To return it to the Treasury But our issue is first of all That behavior was uncalled for And the people of St. Lucia must never forget This act of recklessness And immaturity by the minister By the foreign minister of finance When he knew he should have known Everything he should have known That you cannot break the procurement rules And advance money So much money in a country that was in a pandemic What I can answer you is that We are using our best efforts To get that money returned to us As soon as possible Time opportunity Is it a follow-up question? Well, it's about COVID management Okay So we continue to see that the numbers In terms of vaccinated people Not increasing significantly Even at the latest press conference We realize there's an overall decline In people getting vaccinated What new methods does the government Intend on pursuing to drive those numbers up And has there been any consideration For the mandation of vaccines for the public sector As in some cases in our neighboring islands? First of all, there are only two measures You can take to create an uptake in vaccinations One, moral persuasion You can tell people for the benefits Look at the pros and look at the cons Look at the evidence And decide where they get vaccinated Or you can mandate vaccinations And make them compulsory These are only two measures you can take Mandate or tell people to be To understand their responsibility The government of St. Lucia Has not yet taken a position To mandate vaccinations But what we say is that If we find That there is no other way Where people refuse to get vaccinated We have to consider all the options available to us Riani Isidore, NBC Prime Mr Prime Minister, you've alluded just now to Instances of supposed malfeasance On the part of the former administration Former finance minister I know your government is looking into these situations But has any of them met the threshold That could trigger, say for example, a criminal probe And given the fact that you say the former finance minister Has broken procurement laws or procurement rules What options are available to your administration To sort of bring in some accountability Well, you see, Riani, all options are open The legislation for special persecutor Is not being prepared And the special persecutor will look into all matters That deserve to be looked at I am not going to make any pronouncements If I do not have, if I am not sure If I am not certain the next steps All I can tell you is the government is actively pursuing Actively pursuing these acts Where we believe that the money of the taxpayers Was incorrectly used We'll leave no stone unturned We'll use legal methods Not threats or intimidation We'll use legal methods to ensure First of all, that it never happens again And secondly, the people of Seleucia Must get some satisfaction If the money was put into either personal use Or if the money was managed by the minister I wanted to segue into something I think you touched on In your address with some sedition And even its violent rhetoric Being sort of spewed on a certain radio station Who your administration has already flagged For operating illegally My first question is one, are you surprised that That kind of rhetoric, that kind of narrative Is being promoted there? And again, this is a question That you would have been confronted with before Why is that station? And any other station who is found wanting of the laws here Are still operating in our space? First of all, the people of Seleucia must realize The desperation of the former prime minister And his party and his acolytes The desperation July the 26th is going to be six months Since the government, since the party Was elected into office, six months Out of the six months, the former prime minister Spent four and a half months out of the island He's returned and he's forgotten That he's no longer the prime minister His first action was to increase The expenses for his office His second action was to make demands On the treasury of the country For things that he did not make available To the present leader of the opposition at the time And now his desperation has led him Not to condemn seditious statements Made on a radio station That himself has been a frequent personality And up to this morning, you heard on that station The calls to bone the country Any responsible leader would have immediately Made a statement disassociating himself From these utterances But in his desperation, in the lust and the greed for power In the lack of understanding that the democracy has prevailed And the people have elected a new government They will say nothing about it But I'll tell you something We are a government of laws A government that believes in the rule of law We believe that legal methods are the way to cause change Legal and democratic methods The session that you speak of It's been clear that it is acting illegally It's clear that it's on the airways illegally But we got generously the freedom of speech Of people in the country So we are living, we are taking all the steps They've been warned, they've been written, they've disobeyed If that continues, the full force of the law Will have to be brought upon anyone who breaks the law There is no reason why a station that is operating illegally Even when they are told that they are operating illegally to continue So something will happen But as I said before We are exercising caution and patience Before I go to my colleague, I wanted to go back to the pandemic response We are in the fifth wave It's well established And the cases are sort of higher than expected And school has reopened So is there any decision or considerations Perhaps to review the decision to allow schools to reopen? That's my last one Yeah, thanks First of all, Riyani, I want to reiterate That the decisions that we take regarding COVID Are driven by medical advice There's a press conference today Where the situation regarding schools will be properly ventilated But we understand the concern of the public But as I said, these decisions are moved These decisions are moved by scientific evidence And today there will be some announcement on the future of the opening of schools Yeah, just one small question for me The opposition leader recently made a claim that The opposition has not been involved in the COVID-19 decisions I would just like to ask how true is that statement? The opposition leader usually makes these claims The public is invited to join in the COVID response There is a COVID management committee Where we invite everyone to get involved To give advice, to give counsel What the opposition leader is busy doing? He's busy playing politics with the COVID response He's busy spreading propaganda lies and rumors about the COVID response The opposition leader must respect the will of the people of St. Lucia He was elected as the Member of Parliament for Microsoft And not Prime Minister He must understand that and continue his role as leader of his two-man opposition And stop the lies, the rumors and the propaganda that he is spreading We have COVID-19, which is the biggest problem in St. Lucia But the situation in St. Lucia is not the same as it was in the last agricultural development We have Minister Mr Prospect We have to work hard to build the development of the agriculture but we have to develop the agriculture because the situation of Covid is very difficult for us to build the country. What is the quality of the land to keep it? Mainly the agriculture development and we know the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Agriculture and the Embassy with the Minister of Agriculture he to build a alternative to construct a internships and thank you. Thank you. For more Hilfe's, people have helped give them some other money. I have no issue with chicken finding, I have no concerns about the farmer, because I have to find a place to found and up pueblo. Because government has entrusted have given enormous amounts to help with this market crisis. I'm going to go and think. Go and move from a boy to a win fresh. Go win fresh, see Plasler kicker, gain fig. You'll get a win fresh collapse. You're not going to hear about that. So farmers, they're going to do cool disabotment from flamboyant. You want fig, fig party, matinig, go for a fig farmer. You want to make a farmer, you want to make a fig matinig, and matinig a quince, and a day's a man win fresh. So farmers, say farmers, say you can gain, you depress. So we do this. We want to start a fruits market under market length. We don't want farmers to go to the agricultural ministries because they're already doing this. So that's why we do this. We want to get figs original, about a kurz past, original. We have to clean it. The pan is in the house. So we have to clean it. So that's how it's done. We have to do it. We have to do it. We have to do it. We have to do it. We have to do it. That's how we can do it. No, I'm not ready. No, I'm ready. So by saying that, we want to bring the land back. We can't do more than this. So the government has to push this. We have to push it. We have to do it to export. Cocoa, chocolate, the government has to push it again. We have to diversify. We have to do this. We have to diversify to plant in older countries to eat more local produce. The best for the health and the best for the old Israel because it's bad to eat. That's agriculture. Cream we drink, we drink, we drink, we drink. But we are Bravoque. We have a good food. For you. But by privilegizing people to eat again. We do. But we cannot others. We cannot I'm sure it's not the right thing to do. Insight is what's inside the moon. It's the right thing to do. You can't see it because it's not good.  You can't see it because it's not good. If you're a realizationist, you can't do it. A person is a person who doesn't want to do it. It's not the right thing to do. It's inside the moon because it's not good. It's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do. How can we do it? We must do it in the face of the police. To do it on the team and within the law We've been the law, and we've been the law means we live with the police, the police who serves at your café as your shema, the police patrols as your shema. We don't have the police as the law, but we don't have the police as a police law. We don't have the police patrols, we don't have the police who serve at your café as a shema. We don't have the police as a shema. We don't have the police as a police patrol, we don't have the police as a shema. We don't have the police as a shema. We don't have the police as a shema. We don't have the police as a shema. We don't have the police as a shema. We have an issue with being able to keep persons when they are arrested. The custody suits was destroyed by the last government without any foresight or without any idea where would prisoners be held when they are arrested. The bodily, the remand population of bodily is greater than the convicted population, so bodily is overpacked. So the question is, where do we place people when they are arrested in this COVID environment? Again, because of the lack of foresight and the hiss of the United Workers' Party, they destroyed the custody suits with no idea as to what are the next steps. We are going to build, even within the serious, first fiscal constraints that we have. As a matter of urgency, we started a process. Only last week, Thursday, I received from the Ministry of Planning the plans for the new custody suits. And hopefully very soon, construction on these custody suits, is an emergency, is an emergency, will begin next month, February. Hopefully, if all goes as planned. Thank you everyone for joining us. And I'm just to let you know, this week we continue our budget policy preparations as Prime Minister stated. We will be having the estimates in March. And Saint Lucia is going to look forward to the amelioration of the conditions of citizens in this country. When Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre presents his first budget to Saint Lucia in March, April. I was just informed by the Ministry of Education that they will be hosting their press conference here. So the media is invited to stay back and Saint Lucia's to also tune in as the Ministry of Education addresses the country on the way forward for school. Thank you everyone for joining us.


It's Wednesday, Wednesday afternoon, and it's Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm Mitch Ewan, your host, and our sponsor is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, and that's a program of the University of Hawaii College of Social Sciences and financial support from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. So I'm really pleased to welcome two guests today, Noel Maren and Christian Wong of the Hawaii STEM Community Care Organization, and they're going to be talking to us about air quality and trying to, I'm monitoring it with a CO2 device to reduce COVID risk. So it's really interesting technology. So Noel and Chris-Jan, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks, Mitch. Great to be here again. So Noel, I want you to give everybody an update on the STEM organization. You have a variety of projects. We've had you a couple of times. So tell us about the projects and bring us up to date on where you are so far. Yeah. Let's go with the first slide. I'll do a quick intro on the organization, essentially. So I just wanted to reintroduce Hawaii STEM Community Care. There's a coalition of Hawaii Island organizations and leaders that is dedicated to finding innovative solutions to local problems. We formed last year in response to the PPE shortage at the start of the pandemic. And we have a number of organizations involved, Hawaii Science and Technology Museum, Christian's organization, Canada Friends, Hawaii Telescope, the Success Factory, Pisces, Hawaii Space Laboratory, SodaKine, a local manufacturer, seamless productions, East Asian Observatory, UH Hilo, and also a local physician, Dr. Craig Berger, just among the individuals and organizations involved. If we go to the next slide, we'll take a look at the things that we've worked on during the past many months. As you can see, our focus has been on PPE production as well as community empowerment. We've delivered face shields, face masks, comfort bands, dispensers. These are sanitizer dispensers, hands-free. We created door openers. We built several UV mask irradiators, which we've ultimately donated to the various fire stations. And Christian here has also created misters for the decontamination of the various equipment and fire trucks, I'm sorry, the emergency vehicles that are used to transport patients. So we have created so many different devices and PPE in response to community need. In addition, we've invested quite a bit of time with Kiki Heroes. I think we've talked about this in a past program as well, where we've essentially come up with so many different messages of empowerment for Kiki and family, and I've been distributing that material across the island. Actually we're making it across the state as well. So it's been a very busy several months, and we have made great progress in terms of distributing these devices and equipment across the island. At the moment, I'm sorry, go ahead. Have you also had students involved in designing and manufacturing some of these devices? Yes, yes. Actually with the STEM focus, we have involved students, different age groups, in the creation of some of these devices, and also the program Kiki Heroes. So yes, they have been involved. We've made it a point to engage the youth so that in addition to delivering the value to our community, we're also exposing our youth to the processes that are being used to come up with these solutions. So they're aware of the design process, they're aware of the various iterations that are required to come up with some of these solutions. Now today, I would like to, I'm sorry, Mitch, did you have any other question? I just want to talk about your funding for the overall group, because this is all donations, correct? Yes, absolutely. Hawaii STEM Community Care is an all volunteer organization, so a number of us have just been contributing our time, but we've also been dependent on donations, grants from other organizations to keep our operation going. And we continue to appreciate and need these donations. So if anyone's interested, you can go to icemcare.org. We have a donate button on the website, and that would be an avenue for contributions. Great. Yeah, so today I'd like to share something that we've been working on since last November, and Christian's been the lead on this. It's essentially what we'd like to do, share information about how a simple piece of equipment can be used to optimize indoor air quality. And we'll talk briefly about why that's important. If we go to the next slide, we are essentially focused on enhancing or creating the awareness of the importance of indoor air quality. And this is really important because COVID-19, I think we all know now, can be spread through aerosols, essentially tiny particles that people exhale. And these tiny particles can actually linger in the air for up to three hours. And if there's someone infectious who has exhale these aerosols, it's possible for someone to be infected. So it's really important for us to be aware of the fact that indoor air quality is important to maintain. And one way to do that is to ensure that there's proper ventilation. If there's an infectious person who's walked into a space and there are infectious particles in the air, if there's proper ventilation, that can be quickly dissipated and diluted and reduce its potential impact to others. Now, the question is, how do we measure? How do we determine if air within a space is insufficiently ventilated? One way to do that is to measure CO2 and CO2 concentration in the air. And with that, I'd like to transition it up to Christian, who's been the lead for this particular project. Hi, thanks a lot, Noel. Thanks very much for having us today, Mitch. We really appreciate it. So yeah, basically how this started is... So I'm the director of the Hawaii Science and Technology Museum, we're a 501c3 STEM education nonprofit on Galina, Hawaii. And in addition to that, until just recently, I was also a member of the Hawaii Fire Department. I recently retired in December. But for my last year in my career, I served on the county's COVID-19 training and education passports. And what our primary role in that was helping all these different businesses and organizations develop their COVID intervention so that they continue to stay open and serve the public and continue to drive our economy forward, while also at the same time protecting their employees and protecting their customers and the community in general. And so through the course of that work, I came across this one particular article about a gym in the mainland that had hired an HVAC engineer to assist them with their COVID interventions. So as you can imagine, a gym is potentially could be a really bad breeding ground for COVID just because it's enclosed. You have a lot of people exhaling quite a bit, typically not good air ventilation in one of those places. So they hired this engineer to help them develop those interventions. And part of that was monitoring for carbon dioxide. And as basically a marker to kind of tell them if the air in their facility was fresh, if their ventilation was good enough, because if you have a bunch of people enclosed in a room and they're all exhaling carbon dioxide, then naturally you would see the levels go up. And if you have good ventilation and fresh air coming in, then you wouldn't see that. We would expect to see the carbon dioxide levels to be about what you would see outside. So what happened in their case is one of their trainers ended up getting COVID and tested positive. And this trainer unfortunately had been in contact with about 50 of their members. But fortunately because of all the interventions they had in place, including the carbon dioxide monitoring, no one else got sick, no one else got COVID. So they felt that they attributed that to making sure that they had good ventilation in their facility. So we have that article as well as a bunch of other articles about the importance of air quality monitoring. We just put it up on our two social media accounts on Twitter and Instagram for Hawaii Science and Technology Museum. You can go read through those articles because they're really useful. I think we're really onto something with this as far as it being one of the best interventions that we have right now to protect ourselves, to protect our community, in addition of course to the vaccines that are coming out. So basically to kind of talk you through it, I brought one of the detectors right here with me today. You know, it's a pretty fairly simple technology but so normally when you're out and about outside you expect the carbon dioxide PPM to be, you know, between four and 500 depending where you are. And so what the HVAC engineer was using was a reading of 800 or less, I think maybe up to 1,000 or less as a good indication that you have enough, your ventilation is good enough that hopefully no one will get sick. I do wanna definitely point out that this is by no means a COVID detector. I mean, that's not where you're doing what you're doing is basically you're looking for a marker that is telling you if you have good ventilation. But that being said, hopefully that it's getting any germs including COVID out of your facility to keep people from getting sick. So it's been a very successful project. Thus far we have 30 units all around Hawaii Island. Mostly we put them in schools. We felt that that would be the priority because a lot of schools are trying to bring students back now. We recognize that the students need to have that social interaction that needs to have the face-to-face time with their teachers. So for us at Hawaii Science and Tech Museum and as a member of Hawaii STEM community care, we wanna try and help our community by making that process safe, as safe for the schools as we possibly can. And with this being one of the main interventions. So as you mentioned to funding, I mean, we're very, very happy and grateful. Hawaii Community Foundation has been so, so supportive of our organization throughout this pandemic through their Hawaii Island strong fund, which paid for a lot of the equipment that we've been putting out into the community. So many thanks to Hawaii Community Foundation and all your donors. We really appreciate it. Did you have any other questions? Yeah, I have several questions. So first of all, how much do one of these detectors cost? Yeah, so they run about $100. It's not a super, super precise instrument, at least the one that we're giving out into the community. And we're giving these out again, thanks to our donors. But you can get them on Amazon. I mean, I'm normally not a big proponent of, for me it's all about buying local, but I don't know if any stores that are selling these locally, but we bought ours off Amazon about a hundred bucks. Like I said, they're not super precise. You wouldn't wanna use it on a hazmat bar or anything like that, but it will get you in the ballpark closing up that you can get a relative measurement that tells you, yes, my ventilation is good or no, it's not. So I'll give you a good example on Black Friday, when I was still with the department, I went out to several facilities and it was really, really crowded. And you could right away, you could notice there was a big difference between outside readings and the readings that I was getting in particular facilities. So it is accurate and it gives it to you in real time. As you can see, my numbers here are moving right now. So I'm just in this room by myself, so the level's fairly low. But they're not prohibitively expensive. Most organizations should be able to buy at least one and then you can take it around and take readings throughout your facility. Well, the other question I have is, where do you actually install it? I mean, do you put it up high, low, or like in the middle of a room, how do you, what's the best spot and how many per room would you need? Is one enough for one room or do you need several of these monitors? I think one is good enough, I guess depending on the size of the room, I mean, if you're talking about a large warehouse and you probably want more than one, but they are portable, you don't have to mount them so you can walk around and like I said, take readings in real time. What I would caution is not to put them low to the ground because carbon dioxide is heavier than air, so it'll give you an artificially inflated reading if you put it really low. Typically, I recommend people put it, maybe waist high level. Again, that's just anecdotally, and again, I do want to emphasize that this is not a COVID detector, we're not making any guarantees, but think of it as a tool that will help you understand if your ventilation is good, which then should greatly reduce the possibility of having infections within your facility.  Yeah, Mitch, I just like to expand on that last point about where it's actually placed to take the measurement and as Christian mentioned, you can actually walk around and take measurements within a space, right? Now, I think like, and this would apply to classrooms or any occupied space or restaurant, a bar, for example, you'd want to do it when it's occupied. So you can get a sense for what that risk is like when the facility, the room, the space is actually occupied. And Christian, you might want to just give an example like for that facility that, without naming names, the facility that you visited, when you said it was really high, what was that reading relative to what would be normal? Yeah, throughout the store, I got 1,700 per square million and it never got lower than that. So it's significantly elevated. And sure enough, you can kind of tell to when you're walking around a place, if it feels really hot and muggy in there and there's a lot of people packed in a place, sure enough, you're going to get high readings in there. And I've used this, oh gosh, probably over a hundred times in many different facilities and classrooms and that sort of thing. And I can tell you that the readings match up to what you expect based on the number of people in there. The other cool thing that I like about it too is that it gives you so much data from just one reading. So for example, with some of the schools, you may have eight students in a classroom sitting down and doing their homework and working together. If you take those same eight students in the same classroom, but maybe they do a PE class and they're exercising and exhaling quite a bit, it's gonna significantly increase the CO2 reading. So it tells you right off the bat that for that particular activity, that space may be too small for that amount of people. So it's more than just telling you how many people you can put in there. It also gives you a guideline of what type of activities you can do with that particular number of people. So does the device have an alarm? Like, can you set a level and then it'll beep or do something or do you, so you don't have to constantly look at it? No, this particular one doesn't have an alarm. So some of them do though. Yeah, if you get a more expensive one, you probably could. Yeah, a number of these have alerts, right? So if it goes over a certain threshold, you would get an audible alarm. The other thing that is interesting is some of these also have data loggers. So you can actually have it placed in a space, like in a classroom during the course of the day and you can actually, at the end of the day, take a look at the data, how it changes over time so you can get a sense for what the impact is of certain types of usage of the classroom on the actual concentration of CO2 within the space. So you, in a previous show, you were telling us about some of your air conditioning or air filtration equipment that you were also purchasing for classrooms to kind of filter the air, in this case, air filters. So how would this tie in with one of those air filter units? Can you buy air filter units that have a sensor like this built into them? So because they're always sucking air in. And if you put the sensor at the inlet, you can trigger it when the thing goes on off. Yeah, you're highlighting a, hopefully an innovation or a feature that some of the ventilation fan manufacturers or HVAC folks could produce. And Christian, just for context, I came on this show with, I think it was Richard, right, Richard Ha, to talk about, we talked about air purifiers and the role of air purifiers in helping to increase the safety of a space. And maybe the connection there, Mitch, might be more of, what do you do when you see an elevated reading, right? What are the interventions that one must do? So there's one thing, which is you get the monitor, you monitor the space and then you realize, wait a minute, this is too high, this is not ideal. So the question then is, what do you do? And there is a slide on slide four, which just summarizes some of these things, right? So one of the things would be, a simple things to do would be to open the doors and windows, allow air to flow through. The use of ventilation fans. Now you see this in bathrooms, you see this in certain facilities, but having one placed in a room that allows for air to be exhausted from the room, if it's necessary, it would be another idea. And then also moving activities outdoors and some schools and some facilities have done this, right? Some restaurants have outdoor dining spaces, for example, moving certain activities from indoor spaces to outdoor spaces would be yet another way to mitigate the challenge. Limiting occupancy is another one. Now, what you mentioned about air purifiers is interesting because in some spaces, you can't open the windows, right? Like some of the air conditioned spaces, you've got these split units where the AC just circulates the air, it cools it down, it takes away the moisture, but it just recirculates the air. If CO2 readings are high there, then the use of an air purifier, good air purifier would be warranted, right? To reduce the risk. So it's like, there's not one solution. I think it's just a combination of different things taken together, but the important thing is being aware that there's an issue. And if you're not measuring, you will not know, right? To take action. So how many air purifiers have you deployed? We have 30 out in the community, mostly there are schools. The schools are making really good use of them. They've used them, we've got a lot of really good feedback from them, they've used them to guide, as a way of telling if their interventions were working well or not. A lot of the problem was that teachers would, open their windows or open the door, but they don't know if what they're doing is enough. There, you know, a lot of them would say, oh, well, should I put a fan also? Do I need two fans? What direction should I face them? By having a tool like this, it allows them to get a reading. So it gives them feedback if their intervention is working or not. So yeah, throughout 30 throughout the island, most of the schools, we also did give to the other members of the COVID-19 training education passport to help them when they go out to guide the other facilities as well that they visit. Very useful, very useful stuff. You know, I think this is really going to be key to protecting our community is understanding the role of air quality monitoring as another intervention to protect us from COVID, especially, you know, it looks like, you know, there's these other really highly transmissible variants that are going around the island. So I think this would be very useful. One thing that I always tell people is kind of the Swiss cheese model, where you have all these different interventions and none of them are perfect, you know, you wash your hands, you wear your mask, you monitor your air quality, you take your vaccine, none of them are 100% foolproof, right? They all have holes in them. But if you slap all those pieces of Swiss cheese together, eventually you have a pretty nice barrier that hopefully greatly reduces the chance of you becoming infected and the community spreading it.  You're out there deploying this stuff, you're getting data now. And okay, so I'm going to ask my question, what's wrong with the Department of Health and Department of Education? They got millions of dollars stashed away in their bank accounts that they're not using. And they have a lot of this earmark for COVID. So what does it take to get them to unlock the treasure chest and start deploying these things in mass? I mean, you guys have proven it's worked, you've got to deploy, the teacher's know how to use it. Like, what does it take to get off the dime and get this stuff rolling? No, that's a great question. You always throw out these challenging questions, Mitch. I think that there, you know, there are obviously many different approaches to addressing that issue as well.  And I think there's also this bottoms up, you know, approach, which is raise awareness for the, you know, of the solutions that are out there, get it in practice and just continue to put the spotlight on it, right? As a way to raise awareness and run it up the chain. So that's at least one, that's our approach, which is to, you know, tackle it at the grassroots level and do things like this, right? Getting on this program, sharing it with, you know, an audience who hopefully will take note and pay attention and act is one way to accomplish it. There are obviously other ways that need to be addressed here from the top down, but I think that's above my pay grade.  Your pay grade is like the highest level there. So maybe you guys should put on a Zoom workshop and invite all the high level decision makers and Department of Health and Department of Education to react and all spend two hours together to talk story and ask these hard questions to them. What was it take to get this done? We got the schools shut down. Everybody's like afraid. And these seem like low cost, low, but highly effective ways to address this and we're not doing it. We're just loafing along. Business as usual. Nobody's taking initiative except you guys and the powers of me are like asleep at the switch. We need to wake them up. Yeah, I agree with Noel. You know, it's, I think maybe what the problem has just been is maybe just a lack of awareness of this as a potential intervention. And so, yeah, you know, that's why we're so appreciative that you guys let us come on here and talk about it because the more we can get the word out, the better. Like for us, one of the next steps we're gonna do is work with UH Hilo microbiology and see if there's a correlation between CO2 levels and an actual probability of you becoming infected based on the variance that we have now. One thing I would ask your viewers, you know, whoever's on here or if anyone comes and reads the articles on our social media, if you think that this is a good intervention, call your elected officials and say, hey, I just saw this on Think Tech Hawaii. Have you guys looked into this as a possible way to protect our community?  The more we can get the word out, the better. You know, like I said, I think it's gonna be really important going forward to protect our community. So we really appreciate you guys having us on here to kind of amplify this message. Well, I highly recommend you guys send this to all the elected representatives, both at the state and county level. And I have to get the word out and they're all gonna hear me ranting. So maybe that'll have an effect on them. I mean, they're all good people. They're all trying to do the right thing. And here's a pretty expensive thing to do when you look at all the millions of dollars we're throwing at this stuff. Just to set aside a few million dollars to put air purifiers in individual classrooms and other public buildings. It seems to me like a really low tech, high result plan. And this is not rocket science. I agree with you 100%. That's the beauty of this particular intervention is that the technology already exists and it has been used in this sort of application in the past. It's not like, you know, trying to develop a brand new vaccine. Obviously that would be the superior intervention but this is something that we can do right now. Again, it's just a matter of getting the word out to the decision makers, like you're saying. Okay, I'd like to... Oh, go ahead. Mitch, I know we're almost out of time but just a real quick note. So the vaccine is out, we all know that. We also know that kids can't get vaccinated and it's gonna be a long while before kids get vaccinated. The other thing we know is that, at least in the US, it's a quarter of the population. And if we're talking about herd immunity needing 90 plus percent immunization, it's gonna be a while, right? Therefore we have to be vigilant. We have to continue doing what we're doing. And this is just one intervention, as Christian mentioned, that can help keep us safe. So with that, I turn it to you. Okay, well, we've got to sign off 30 minutes this blue vial like it normally does. So Noel and Christian, thank you so much for what you're doing for the community and trying to keep us safe despite ourselves. And this is Mitch Ewan signing off for Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Aloha.