Okay, Malama, that's the magic word, the Malama solar success story. Okay, we're going to hear from one of the founders, Rachel Asu. Hi, Rachel. Thank you for joining our show today. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So this is Energy 808, The Cutting Edge, and Marco is on travel. Marco Mangelsdorf is on travel, so we want to talk to you about your company. You know, there's a lot of installers in the state. Some of them make a lot of money, I must say. Some of them don't. And then they're always faced with the competition of the do's and the don'ts.  And so a couple of years ago, you decided to take a jump into this frothing pond of competitive commercial activity in a high-tech industry. And I want to know why. Well, that's a great question. It's been quite the journey. There's a lot of reasons of why my husband and I decided to start the company. And a lot of it was just I actually wasn't in the path of solar. I initially just wanted to be a professor. So I loved learning. I love teaching. And that was kind of the path that I wanted to take. My husband's really great at sales, so he was in sales and would travel a lot over the summers. He started selling solar after we got married. And I really loved that because solar, I've always been really passionate about sustainable energy. You know, I was born and raised here on the island. And the island being the big island. The island of Oahu. Oh, Oahu then. Okay, good, good, good. Yes, we're on Oahu. So and I've just, you know, it's really ingrained into our culture that our resources are very limited. And so when we started down the path of solar, it was just pretty interesting because there are a lot of solar companies out here. But there aren't as many who were as concerns about the experience. And I think that there were a lot of solar companies that were kind of, at least in our experience of who he's worked with, didn't care so much about the customer as much as the sale. And so that was something that we wanted to change. How have you changed that? Yeah, so it came from a couple of bad experiences with previous companies that he was with. And there were just different things that the customer wasn't informed about in the process. There were times where things weren't going the way they should have, and the customer didn't get the attention they needed. And so what we've done is we've developed a very tedious process where we're always constantly checking in with a customer. And that's ultimately what we built the company on Malama, because Malama means to care for. And so that's caring for the customer, the community, our employees, everything around. And I think that's what's been so magnetic about it is that everybody can see that and it draws people in. Yeah, we just had a show about that a couple hours ago about how the commercial world has changed to gathering data on people rather than treating them as individuals and customers. They have become in large part digital rather than people. And so I'm really happy to hear you say that. I think it's very important for any business now, especially a business that wants to make an impression on new customers. So okay, but it's a technical business. It's a business where you really have to know the latest and greatest technology and method of installation and connection. You have to know the rules, the regs, getting permits and permissions from the utility company.  So who's in charge of that, Rachel? Is it you? So I handle all of the operations. My husband handles a lot of the sales and a lot of partnerships. Fortunately here in Hawaii, if you make a good name for yourself, everybody knows each other. And so it's just a very strong network. So yeah, we've all kind of worked together closely. We have a lot of great leadership with our company and we all collaborate regularly on a weekly basis to look at certain inefficiencies and try to brainstorm and plan ahead. Can you ever talk to your competitors and ask them questions because, you know, it is the land of Aloha and it happens in various industries and sectors where you can pick up the phone and get some advice from a guy who would like to compete with you. Do you have that experience? We have not spoken directly to our competitors, but we do have a lot of people who come over from our competitors' companies over to our business just because they see the benefit in working with us. So we have a lot of sales reps who have come over just because of the experience that they've had at other places and the experience that their customers have had. Oh, interesting. So they jumped ship to join you. I like the sound of that. Yeah, we've been really fortunate. What do you offer them that attracts them? Ultimately, it's the whole package. We like to say that we have some of the best sales forces on the island. The process is constantly, our operations are constantly being worked on and improved. I mean, on a daily basis, we're constantly meeting about it. Our installers, that they know, you know, it's always quality over quantity. And Chris and I, we are very much so involved in every step of the process. So we're not the type of owners who's just going to kind of sit back and everybody knows what they should do and just kind of leave it at that. We're very much so in the trenches and involved in the process. And I think that that overall gives everybody who works within the company a better experience. Oh, yeah. So you have sales reps. And then you have installers too. So how big is the company in terms of sales reps and installers? So we have two installation crews. And then we have our sales team is about 20 to 30 people. Oh, wow. A big question, Rachel, big question is, you know, you started before, not too long before, but before COVID ever happened. And then one day in January 2020, we were in a new world. And we didn't realize that at first, maybe we were fed misinformation to think that it wasn't going to affect our lives.   Yeah, that's a great question. That's the question that we get asked a lot because a lot of businesses struggle at the hit of when COVID first hit. And we were not exempt from that. We definitely did struggle initially. And Chris and I, you know, at the beginning of COVID, we had one employee. It was just myself, Chris, and one, one other employee. And we knew that it was either sink or swim. So we had to learn how to adapt and to fit in with the time. So we started working on virtual sales so that we could still have business coming through. Try to, you know, really dig in about what we can do to make the installations safe for both the customer and the installers. And it definitely took a few months of kind of getting our traction and figuring out how to work through it. But yeah, we were, we were able to fortunately pull through that. And and because we were able to do that, we've seen phenomenal growth within the past couple of years. I think that's right. Well, that is so interesting.  But what can you give me more about that? What is it that makes people want to do solar in the middle of a pandemic? What is it? I think that a lot of people were just, most people when they know that solar is a good thing, right? So they know that they want solar. They know that in the Hawaii market, it's especially great. But I think that it was more so they didn't have the time to sit down. And it's an investment initially. And so a lot of people, you know, were concerned about that. They had a lot of unanswered questions. And I think that when they were able to take the time to be able to sit down and learn more and find out that it's not a big of an investment initially, that it can essentially just swap out to their utility bill with their solar bill, that they got the bigger, full picture of what was going on. So is there, you think, a relationship between the attention and the press and in the world on climate change and the interest of people here in Hawaii to install solar? Sorry, could you repeat that? Well, we have a lot of press lately about climate change. And we had, you know, in Scotland, in Glasgow, we had this big COP26 meeting. And it was in the newspapers for, I don't know, weeks. And everybody talking about climate change and what we need to do about it. And I just wonder if you saw an increase in interest here in Hawaii because of all the press that climate change has gotten? Yes, absolutely. I mean, I feel like Hawaii has always been a very special market. I feel like people all over the world are very concerned about the environment, but especially so here in Hawaii, because we have such a fragile ecosystem. And we heavily, we're in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, right? So if we really need to protect our natural resources because otherwise, we're relying on all of them to be shipped to us and shipping isn't always the most reliable option. And I think that there have been definitely some steps moving towards solving that problem. Do I think that we've been all in in ensuring that we're going more the sustainable path? I think that we could do more. So no, I don't think we've fully committed to that. But I definitely think it's really important. And I think there's a lot more that can be done to take that in that direction. I totally agree with you. You have any thoughts about what that extra step would be? Is it legislative? Is it regulatory? What is it? You know, just in our experience in the solar industry, we've seen a lot of bottlenecks in certain areas. A part of it is with getting the proper approvals that we need, whether it be from the utility or from HOA, you know, HOA is a lot of times meet in person and with meeting in person. What's an HOA? What is that? HOA is a homeowners association. So we need their approval. So there's been some bottlenecks there. Primarily in our state, the huge bottleneck has been with permitting. And so I think that, you know, there's a lot of things that the state and the city can do to kind of standardize the processes so that we can get these things installed a lot faster. Because it's not a matter of the company's not wanting to do it, right? It's not a matter of the customers because everybody wants to get solar. It's more so a matter of the different hoops that need to be jumped through in order to get it installed on your roof. And so I think that if everybody could get together and just collaborate, all get on the same page of what's expected, how to get certain things installed, how to accomplish the goals that we want to accomplish, it would help to significantly increase and expedite the process of moving to a more sustainable lifestyle. Yeah, I hear an echo of what you were saying in the first place.  And so I think what you're saying is you, and I would say the same thing, by the way, Rachel, that you want government to do the same thing. You want government systems to be more efficient, more expeditious every day, not just we doing it this way because we always did it. We always did it this way, and if it's slow, too bad for you. Yeah, exactly. And clear communication, I think, goes along with that. A lot of times we are very particular about, okay, what is expected, this is what we submit, and then they'll change certain requirements or certain policies, and the communication is not clear on that. And so then we get that package rejected and we have to resubmit the revisions for the new requirements, and that holds up the process by several months. And so I think clear communication all around them hearing out some of the challenges from other companies that have, you know, that they work with or that applies for certain approvals, and then just all kind of collaborating together to figure out how they can still get what they need, the information that they need, but we can help to expedite and get more people set up with same energy. So when you're talking either virtually or in person with a prospect, a prospective client, what do you tell them to sell them on this? I mean, for example, if you were talking to me the day of the rainstorm a week ago, I would say, oh, yeah, I really need to get solar because all this blackout all over town, predictably, predictably blackout all over town. So I would say a solar I can save the trouble, I can not have that risk. But there's other things too. So what do you pitch to a brand new customer or prospective customer in terms of why he or she should get solar on a rooftop on a, you know, on a single family residence? Yeah. Well, majority of our installations, I would say probably about 98% of them, if not 100% of them are battery installations. So one thing that's really attractive is that we are installing batteries with every single system. So if the power goes out, they still have that power, right? And in addition to that, the power that they are receiving today is going to be at a locked in rate. And so essentially, instead of getting their power from the utility, they're getting their power from the sun. And then once, you know, as they continue to pay off their loan, instead of paying the utility, they're paying their solar loan. And that's a locked in rate. So they're always going to be paying the same amount for the term of their, for the term of their loan. Whereas if they were to be with the utility and getting their power from the utility, those rates are constantly increasing, especially as unsustainable, you know, fuel and those prices rise. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And so you could really be hit, not always, but sometimes. Okay, the other thing is, when you talk to them, you know, you have to wrap around the the notion of, of how long it's going to take to do this.  But I really want to know in general, how long it's going to take for the permitting, utility permissions and connections and all that, and the construction and installation or the connection, how long is it going to take? What do you, what do you tell them about that? Because as you said before, it's not entirely predictable. Right. It's not entirely predictable, but there are definitely some timelines that can be roughly predicted. HECO came out with a great program called Quick Connect, which essentially gives them almost instantaneous approval from the utility to get installed. So that's been great. As far as the approvals are concerned, the HECO approval has significantly increased their timelines. But unfortunately, if they're in a homeowners association, those are still the same. So if they don't have a homeowners association, they can get from the time they sign the contract to installation within less than a month with our process. And that's considering that we can get their permit online. If their permit is in a different zone, and that's where it really starts to bottleneck is with the permitting, if we have to specially walk in the permit. Those permits initially, pre-COVID, they would take about one to two months. But more recently, it's been take, it's behind, they've been backlogged by 13 weeks. And so it's been taking a significantly longer time, more recently. That's three months plus. Ooh. Right. Do they tell you why? Is it, they don't have staff or what? What slowed them down? I think that it was probably a combination of several things. One thing is they are short staffed, I think. In addition to that though, and I think probably this is the bigger driving factor. I don't want to shoot myself in the foot here, but I think that there could be a smoother system. I know that with a lot of the permits that take a long time, you walk in and you put the permit package that you've prepared and worked so hard on just in a pile. And then kind of hope they get to it. But there's no real tracking system of where the permit is, no assurance that the permit has been received and that it hasn't been lost. And so it's kind of an inefficient system that I think is a little dated. And so I think that there's a lot that can be done to help to digitalize the submission so that there's a timestamp on everything. And then you'll be able to easily track to ensure that it's been received and track the progress of the permit. I think that it would just help to make things easier for the contractors. And it could also easily help them in tracking a lot of the things that they're reviewing. Honestly, that's not rocket science. If I order a keyboard from Amazon, first I get an email saying confirming that I ordered it. Then I get an email saying when they think it's going to ship. And then I get an email saying it has shipped. And then I get a tracking number and I can track it every step along the way. And then, of course, I get delivery usually exactly the day they predicted and promised me. And then I get an email telling me that it was delivered. So all together, half a dozen emails and emails are so easy to send. It's all automated now. So I think you and I should get together and go down there and consult with them and show them. Sounds good. So Rachel, you talked about love too. Right. You talked about financing arrangements and loans and the like. What do you offer? What is popular among prospects and clients these days in terms of financing a system that will cost, I don't know, 30, 40,000? I'm not sure what an average system costs these days. But what do you offer them in terms of deferring the cost on a loan or installment contract basis or whatever? Yeah.  There are some. We work with a bank who doesn't require any payments to be made for the first 18 months. And that's a loan. We have both lease and loan options. Some of them have really great APRs. So there's a 0% APR option. There's a bunch of different options that we have available. And it's really just based on what the customer thinks is best. What's most important to them that they just paid off quickly in a short amount of time? What's in their best interest for their tax credit? Because if they don't have a lot of tax liability, then it's better for them to possibly lease than it is to get a loan because they won't see those tax credits. So there's a bunch of different things that play into what types of financing they select. And we have a variety of options to help them to decide what would be best for their particular situation. Okay. People challenge these days in terms of paying for it. A lot of people find themselves strapped. They can't buy the things they want to buy for one reason or another. But COVID is always sort of in the mix. Do you find that is a challenge for you when somebody goes south on payments? We don't see that as an option. I mean, not sorry, not as an option, but as an issue. And the reason why is because it's not the same as buying a car or other things that you want. You're going to buy energy regardless. And so if you're paying your utility bill, it's basically just stopping those payments over to your solar bill. And so we don't see so much of an issue of customers saying that they won't be able to afford it. Because once they understand that it's not in addition to their utility bill, it's just kind of substituting it out and stopping it out and paying a different source for your energy. And once they understand that, then it's not so much of an issue.  It's not a question of, this is a pun, it's not a question of whether W-E-A-T-H-E-R. But when? That's pretty funny. So the question is, what do you say to them when they ask you, is this going to hold? If we get a windstorm or bad rainstorm, whatever, extreme weather or some kind, is this going to hold or am I going to lose the whole enchilada when the weather sweeps over my house? Well, we do warrant the actual inflation of the equipment. Now, if the roof ends up blowing away, then you're going to lose the panels that are attached to the roof, unfortunately. That's not something that we can really control. But prior to installing any system, we do a very comprehensive site survey. And we ensure that the home is first suitable for solar installation and that it's going to last the life of the system. So we inspect the roof and the structure and all of the electrical. And as long as all of those boxes check off, then everything should be good to go. And if they don't, then a lot of times, depending on what the issue is, we'll help to work with them. If it's electrical issues, we'll help to work with them to get those things resolved so that they can still go ahead and get solar installed. So what would you say your biggest challenge has been over the past couple of years you've operated this business? What's the part that wakes you up at three in the morning? I know things wake me up at three in the morning. I figure they must wake you up at three in the morning, too. Oh, yeah. Or it keeps me up till three in the morning. I think it's kind of twofold. One of them is just with process with permitting. I'm a very process driven type person. So I would love to just have a standardized process and clear communication with permit. We've already kind of talked about that and some things that could be improved there. The other thing is just hiring. It's really hard to find really great qualified people that we want to join our team. We're constantly hiring. We have about one new hire every single week. And so we're constantly hiring, constantly training. And I think that with just the growth we've seen, we always want to make sure that we never have bottlenecks. And so we're constantly working on, okay, what part of the process needs more manpower and then hiring and training and perfecting. And fortunately, with a bunch of different eyes on things, they're able to identify small little inefficiencies that help to make things better overall. So. Good. Okay. Well, that's the right approach. I didn't forget that you said that you were thinking of teaching at the beginning. So I'm thinking I want to know what you were going to teach. I want to know what kind of graduate degrees you have that would qualify you to teach. And I would like to know how that all connects with running this business. Yeah. I love I'm a very strong advocate for higher education. And I got my graduate degree in communicology. It's the study of interpersonal communication. And I think that I have used a lot of those skills that I learned in the business, but more so than the actual content, I've actually used a lot of the work ethic skills that I've learned when I was working on getting my graduate degree, and have been able to apply those that work ethic and organizational skills that I needed for that to the business. So I think that that's helped to contribute a lot. We're super excited. We are going to be hopefully giving back to the community really in the next upcoming year. And that'll provide me another opportunity to be able to help to educate and teach members and communicate in the community about a bunch of different sustainability options out there. Oh, you mean when COVID is over? Yeah. When COVID is over, it's due in February of 2022. So in March first, no, but yeah, we've been wanting to do big sustainability events for the community just to talk about different options of farming and just all sorts of sustainability lifestyles, not just solar. So we're excited that now that things are starting to open up in the state, we'll hopefully be able to do that next year. Yeah, not good. I hope we can connect at that time so we can do a show about your event. That would be great to do that. So there's one other thing I want to go into before we run out of time, Rachel. It's this, as you guys, you and your husband, kudos to you for jumping in, starting a business, making the investment, investing the time and the risk and learning all the things you have to learn to start a small business. Kudos to you. It's admirable, honestly, and that's what we need in this state. But I want to know what you recommend to people who might consider the same kind of thing, because you are an exception to the rule. A lot of people, your age, disposition, background training would not do this, but you decided to do it, take the risk.  Tell them this is what we need to do to make Hawaii work for future generations. I like you to tell them now. Yeah, I think that it's always tempting, and I think that one of the biggest things that might impact some companies is that they're so focused on just the growth. And I think that one thing that we've really tried to do is grow at a reasonable rate for us that we can sustain. So we didn't want to just bring in a bunch of customers that we wouldn't be able to allow to have the same experience that a customer, if we just had one customer, would have. So we've always tried to grow at a reasonable rate where every single account is going to have the same attention and detail as it would if we were just a really, really small company with just a handful of customers. And so I think that I would share that same message is, it's always going to be tempting to just run head first straight in, but you really want to work on setting up the foundation first so that you have the support in order to accommodate the type of growth that you want to achieve. Tell them why they should do this. They could always get a job at McDonald's. I'm not sure they can, by the way. That's the thing. A lot of people are in a state, if you will, in a tizzy about quitting their jobs or getting a new job, or for that matter, starting a business. I mean, the people are in transition and COVID has done that for us, including in Hawaii. So what's your advice on that? About transitioning into new positions. Transitioning into new businesses. Oh, new people starting new businesses? Yeah. I mean, it's, I would think, okay, plan it out first and then multiply that work times 10. We definitely didn't anticipate having all of the work that came along with the business, but we were happy to do it and very eager to continue on. But there's definitely going to be times where you're just going to want to say, okay, no, I need sleep tonight. So I would just, I think it's great. I think that people starting new businesses is a great thing, especially in this economy. We need that, but I think that educating yourself before taking that step is always going to be beneficial, because the last thing you want to do is start something and then invest a lot of money into it and then realize that you would rather not be the entrepreneur and you rather just work your way up and work for a company and not deal with the headaches once you've got home from work. Okay, let's talk finally about Malama itself and what's the plan? Maybe you have an exit strategy. Maybe you want to sell or merge or move or expand. Who knows what, all islands, all neighborhoods, maybe. Do you have a plan or at least you have a vague plan about where you want to go and how you're going to become a multimillionaire soon? Yes, we definitely have a very specific plan, actually. So our goal for this year was to be one of the top 10 PV solar providers in the state and to expand out to Big Island. So we expanded out to Big Island in August. Our goal for next year is to expand out to Maui for 2022 and then for 2023, we plan to expand out to the mainland. So fortunately for us in the solar industry, Hawaii is one of the leaders in the market or in the industry for solar PV and a lot of customers here are doing solar installations with batteries and the mainland, they will slowly start to, the other states will start to catch on and start to do solar installations with batteries. But a lot of times in most states they're still doing the net metering program. So I think it's just a matter of time. Usually things start here in Hawaii and then start to trickle to the other states. So I think that that really gives us a competitive advantage to be able to in a couple of years expand out to the states and then we'll just be the solar PV battery installer leader, the expert in that state. Would you ever consider a merger or acquisition either upstream or downstream? What I mean is either to be acquired, to merge into a larger company or to acquire and merge with a smaller, would you ever consider that? Possibly to acquire, but we're not really looking into any of the other options to be acquired just because we want to, and I mean I can't speak for what it would be 10 years on the road, but our main concern is maintaining the integrity of our process and our responsibility and duty to the other people, to all of our customers and everyone here that we serve on this island. So I think that in order to really maintain that integrity, we do need to be in control and be able to control the process. So yeah. Right on, right on, 100%, right on. You know, you remind me of Josh Powell, he's the CEO of Revolution. A lot of the things that he says are like the things that you say. For that matter, Rachel, you remind me of Marco Mangoldstor. So these are people to observe and maybe learn from. Thank you so much for coming up to our show, coming on our show, Rachel. Thank you very much and I wish you all the best, not only for the holiday season, but in business next year. Your plans should all work out, Rachel. I'm telling you this will happen. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Aloha.


Look at all of the beautiful, just like watching comments and people rolling in. It's amazing to see everyone joining for another spirit stream. Sorry I missed a week. Last week things were a little busy over here, but today I wanted to pop in to talk about something that happens to all of us. Something that's really life, life takes you by surprise sometimes, you know? You're going along, things might be flowing in one direction, and suddenly one thing can happen and change your trajectory, put you on an entirely different course. And I wanted to talk about this because sometimes it's really difficult to handle. Sometimes it's very difficult and confusing and there's this question of like, how do you react when life gets you down? How do you be? If you identify with some sense of spirituality, there's often this idea that spiritual people don't get upset, spiritual people maintain an elevated vibration no matter what. There's always this preconceived idea of what it means to be spiritual and oftentimes that leads to a sense of toxic positivity, which you might remember we recently did a spirit science episode all about. So if you're new to that subject, definitely go and check out the toxic positivity episode of spirit science. And I wanted to talk about cycles in this spirit stream so far. I think that the nature of cycles is really significant to look at how there is a natural ebb and flow to life, like riding a wave. And just as much as when we're on the up and up and things are flowing really smoothly, so too can there be drops and dips and sometimes it happens over a long period of time. You know, over the course of a week or a few weeks or a month you just start feeling weird and not so right. And other times you're on the right, you're rising up and then you drop off of a cliff and things can take a dramatic turn. Things can go down and that's okay in that it happens.  It does. We're existing here in this sort of human dense physical dimension, this physical reality of ours and we're having to learn how to navigate it and we're having to learn, this is part of our lessons here in 3D. If we want to get to a higher D with different rules, different cosmic laws, we've got to understand how this D works, how this dimension exists and what are the rules of it. So the first thing is cycles, right? Up and down, ebb and flow, yin and yang and that's a natural thing. It's a natural part of life. And if we can learn to get into a mindset of riding the wave, of actually perceiving the cycles and not just being thrown about by them and you know, one moment you're happy and everything's great and then the next moment, you know, something happens and you're upset and you're angry or you're tired or whatever it is and you know, just going from happy to sad to angry to happy and excited and angry again and then really, you know, it's just like all over the place. Being able to perceive the cycles, being able to perceive the waves is of the utmost significance because if we can see that we're in a cycle, then it allows us to separate our higher self from our lower self, you know, like being able to perceive from more of a soul perspective and the ego's perspective.  You can feel like you're going through the muck and the gunk and the, oh my gosh, this is so frustrating. And you can also just as well have the higher awareness and be like, oh, I see what's happening here. I was here and now I'm down here. And when you do that, it gives you a sense of ability, of responsibility that you can sort of from that soul place kind of steer yourself. You're like, yeah, OK, like from a higher awareness, you know what? I feel like I don't feel very good and OK. And let's try and do something about it, right? Instead of just being in the feeling again, feel it. Don't bury it or cover it up or toxic positivity. That, you know, because we can now use toxic positivity as a verb. But if you're if you're feeling that way, be authentically in it, but also try and observe a higher awareness of the circumstance of the situation and ask yourself from that perspective, you can give yourself a moment of self reflection like, how am I participating in? How am I creating this experience for myself? Maybe on some level, right? We've actually manifested whatever has happened. Maybe on another level, it feels like it's been done to us and and and maybe regardless of either of that, you're perpetuating the feeling. You're perpetuating the experience of feeling the way that you're feeling. And if you can identify that you are, right?  Well, like, have you been taking care of your body and how is your state of energy? How is your, how is your, yeah, how is your personal energy today? Right? Because if you can practice moving your energy, one example is like, actually, I'm way down here on the bottom of the list. I was going to talk about this at the end, but it's kind of coming up early, you know, drinking water, moving your body, meditating, talking to someone, right? Like moving the energy can help facilitate a change, right? But we have to be able to take responsibility in order to do that first. At the very least, take responsible, take, this is me when I can't talk right. Taking responsibility for our own energy and saying, OK, yeah, I feel like crap. And what can I do about it? Like, let me go and like take a shower. Let me go and like get myself cleaned up because that will allow my own personal body of consciousness to function a little bit more cleanly, a little bit more clearly with with better flow, right? So that's kind of what that's about, right? Don't play the blame game because the moment that we we ascribe all of the personal responsibility to it's his fault and her fault and their fault and the Illuminati's fault and everybody's freaking fault. And my life is terrible. The moment that you do that, you put yourself in a position where there's nothing you can do about it.  Then that makes you a victim because you are disempowered. So the question is, is like, is that a reality that you want to create? Is that who you want to be? Is of a victim floating through life, blaming everybody else for your personal energy and your attitude towards the world? And one of the best things that you can do for yourself then would be taking responsibility for your own personal energy and not blaming anybody else but yourself for how you're feeling. Because the moment that you can actually do that, you put yourself in a position of creative discovery. You can learn something new. You can create something different because you have you have the control. And one of the things that I wrote here, I wanted to speak on too, was like sometimes lack of information. Leads to fear of the unknown. And fear is the mind-killer, right? Like when you, let's say, well, OK, this one specifically is coming up for me. And I think that like I wanted to share it because it's a very personal story to what I'm going through right now because true story, I wanted to talk about this today because this is what I'm going through. And I was thinking if I could give myself some advice, like if I was separating my ego and my spirit and I could give myself some advice, this is what I would say. And I just wrote down all these notes and I got them here. And I felt like it's been a while since we did a spirit stream and this is probably a pretty good subject to get into here because this is not uncommon for everybody. So my little story has to do with a car accident that I got into about a week and a half ago or so. And turned out I had really great insurance, but it also turns out this afternoon I got a phone call from my insurance company saying, hey, listen, something's weird and we're pulling out of your policy for the most part unless we talk to you. But but the guy on the phone, he he left a voice message saying, well, but I'm but I'm leaving the office right now and we won't be able to talk till tomorrow. And I'm in this state being like, oh, my God, like what? So like I missed his phone call. I can't get in contact with them and there's no way I can collect more information. So I don't have any information. And I'm like, am I just now going to be suddenly owing like however many thousands of dollars to repair my vehicle? Maybe I really have no idea. And of course, it's all my responsibility. Anyways, I'm the one who slipped off the road because, you know, it's a very mountainous, snowy, slippery roads. And it was my bad. But the the whole thing is just like it left me in this feeling of like, oh, shit, you know, like and it like, I don't know what that phone call is going to be. Like maybe he's like, oh, I just need this document from you and you're fine. But the way that it all sounded left me in the state of like kind of fear and panic for a moment. And so with my lack of information, my mind started coming up with all sorts of stories of like, what is there? What like, like, like what's going to happen?  Like it's it's a it's a very confusing sort of circumstance. And in that moment, I just thought I have to change my energy because I noticed that I was just wasn't feel I suddenly was I just was I was like having an all right day as getting being very productive. And then suddenly just like straight down, you know.  And now I'm on to vitamin C juice, basically orange juice to just like try and like super charge my my my my energy. And I'm also going to try and go for a run after this, if it's not too dark. But here's the thing is like what I wrote here is fears the mind killer. You don't know what tomorrow will bring, but fear will make things worse because it will it will tilt your experience. It will actively facilitate you. Like just imagine, you know, it's like in this circumstance, at least for me, like I could spend the next 12 to 24 hours being completely panicked and terrified and feeling awful or just surrendering and trusting to whatever is going to be happening. Right. It's it's completely up to me to choose because I don't know. I don't have the information. I don't know what's going to happen.  I mean, it'll be fine in the grand scheme of things. It's like not like I'm dying or anything. Right. It's it's it is whatever it is. And I'll work it out no matter what. But the point being that it's just it's one of those things where I I'm still actively creating the experience that I'm about to have or that I'm currently having and experiencing. And so I wanted to like kind of convey that really for anybody who's riding the waves up and down. Sometimes, you know, it's like maybe there's like a relationship thing of like this sort of potential of a breakup or you like haven't heard from you're like seeing someone you haven't heard from them in a long time.  Right. And there's this fear of like, you really have no idea. Are you going to let it destroy you? You know, it's just another example of how this might apply in other circumstances. Same with first time. I can imagine like the first time I was thinking back to when I first applied for my first job and I like turned in resumes everywhere. If I didn't hear from any place and anywhere for like a week, then it's like nobody wants me. You know what I mean? So when this whole thing happens, when you're riding the wave and you're noticing that you're on the downswing or life takes a turn, I want to say that it's a cue for us to veer up because at the end of the day, our energy, our personality, our vibration is still creating the experience that we're having. Our choices, our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, all of it are weaving together to create the reality that we're actively experiencing. And if we can recognize that we're playing a part in our own in creating our own experience, then we can use that as like a cue, like a mental cue, a trigger for us to sort of alert ourselves to our own energy at a deeper level and veer up, you know, like just be like, Oh, we got it.  And and that's because that's really the thing is like I could get on the phone with the guy tomorrow and be like, what's the deal? And he's like, Oh, my bad, I was looking at the wrong paper. You're good. I'm like, Oh, and everything's completely fine. I, you know, sometimes we don't know. But clean up your energy, like at least for myself, that's the advice I'm giving to myself is, is, um, yes, sometimes things are really difficult and sometimes things are really challenging.  But sometimes things happen in life that are out of our control, that are very frightening, you know, like this could have been a trip to the hospital. This could have been some, you know, an accident with someone else. It wasn't, thank heavens, right? But there could have been something that was, that's very, very, um, frightening or scary or, or very difficult to go through. And, um, even in those circumstances, you know, being able to recognize your own frequency, your own energy and just working with yourself, right? That includes being gentle with yourself. Coming to this point here where once again, it's like drinking lots of water to become clear, moving your body, doing yoga or exercise, right? Meditating, taking some time to just practice some, some stillness and some, some inner love and some personal reflection time is, are all things that can be very helpful, very healing, um, very supportive. And, and of course talking to someone, just taking some time to communicate. And so with, with this circumstance, I've talked with, uh, you know, a lot of people over the last few weeks, but today, uh, my talking to someone is this, so thanks for listening, everyone. And I'm really looking forward to reading all of these comments because there's like so many things just flowing in. And I, uh, I super appreciate everything that everyone is saying. Um, and then of course there's the one person who says, this is horrible advice. And I'm like, I mean, I'm sorry if you don't want to help clean up your energy with, with all of us together. I would be very curious about what you would do. You know, what, what advice would you give? Please share it in the comments, you know, um, when you're, when you're on the up and down swing, because again, going back to that beginning concept, it is like life goes like it's, it's up and down. And, um, depending on where we've been vibrating for a really long time, we might be like permanently really low or maybe a like generally higher. Right. And I think for most people, there are just like natural swings up and down, good and bad when you're feeling, you know, the different things that you feel. And so I think like, um, for, for this advice that I have today or this, these thoughts that I have today on them, you know, both reflecting for myself and things that I wanted to share is surrender to the mystery, like surrender to the unknown, let go and trust. This is something that has, I've learned a great deal, uh, in my plant medicine ceremonies, uh, such as at Rhythmia and, uh, and, and just with, you know, plant medicine in general is that there is so much in the universe, in life that we don't know. There's so much that we are unaware of and so much that, that is moving through us, that we're so that are like subconscious to us or unconscious to us are these thoughts and feelings that are steering our lives that we're not even really aware of. Dr. Bruce Lipton, actually, uh, one of the, the, the foundational and pioneering scientists behind the biology of belief, uh, has demonstrated some, some amazing things about how our subconscious and unconscious beliefs that we've been programmed with since we were kids are often these like foundational belief systems that are steering our lives so much more than we can possibly realize. We've been programmed and we don't even know it. And if we can reprogram these root programs, these base, you know, ways of identifying ourselves and with the world, then it puts us into a position of being able to actually change, uh, everything about our lives. This is even like we have a course inside of Spirit Ministries called Spiritual Money Mastery, which is really about changing your relationship with money. And from my personal experience, I can say that this is absolutely true. It's, it's not about like making more money is not about just doing something to make it, but changing the inside first, changing how you feel, changing why you, how you think, how you perceive the energy, the, the, the substance that is money, you know, and that's why we made the Spiritual Money movie. And so, um, there, there has to be some level and some sense of letting go and trusting that happens as well as we go through life and as we go through, um, the experiences that we're having, you know, like sometimes things happen for a bigger reason than we can comprehend. For me, even like having the accident in the first place, there was this big cue of seeing that part of the which and way I was, the way in which I was living was just a little bit out of alignment that there, there was a higher resonance that I can strive for. But what I was doing wasn't really working and, and that's okay. I was pushing myself too hard in some ways that, uh, that I was out of balance, basically. And so, um, there's, there's a hidden lesson. There's sometimes hidden lessons and we can ask ourselves too, what is the hidden message when, you know, when stuff happens as you're going up and down, both on the upswing and the downswing, what is the wisdom that is hiding for you? And if we can just, if we can approach life from that perspective, like, like striving to learn even in the face of chaos and craziness and, uh, or upset and dismay, if we can approach it with a question mark, then sometimes there's a hidden gem in there for us and something that will profoundly change our lives in a beautiful way. If we can work with it, if we can take those seeds and take that wisdom and that information and do something with it, you know, take it into ourselves, transmute it, play with it, learn from it and grow as a person, excuse me. And so that pretty much brings us here to the end of everything that I had written. And, um, it seems, it seems like there's so much, I mean, there's so many comments here and I'm just like always in awe of everything that's, that's being shared and all of the comments. Again, I, there's, I've pretty much given up on for, for the sake of these particular, uh, live streams, there's no way that I can possibly respond to every single one. So it's easier for me afterwards to kind of go through and respond individually to messages and see what people are saying.  And it's called esoteric emotional mastery. And you'll find a link to that in the comments at the top of this, uh, this live stream. So if that's something that you're interested in, I would definitely recommend, please go and check out, uh, just go and click on the thing, watch the video and see if that's something that resonates with you because it, it really is looking at where we are in the world today.  It churned around so much stuff. It churned up everything for everyone. Life, I don't think you can, I mean, for, for like, probably a good 90% of civilization on, and life on this planet, life is different than it was today, than it was pre 2020. In a, in a bigger jump than most years before that, like the way that we live, the way that we work, the kinds of jobs that we do, how we show up in society is different because we're not showing up in society as much. We're not going outside as much. We're, we're, we're staying inside and we're wearing masks. What is this? What's happening? Right. And so we're in a, a, I mean, Jerry from Rhythmia called it the, the decade of the shift pre pandemic and he called it. He so called it. And, and this is now we're, we're 10, we're 10% of the way there, right? We're, we're the first year in, in the decade of the shift and already it's shaping up to be a very transformational period of time for us as a species. And we are invited, really, this is an invitation for us to grow, to shift, to change with the times. And we have to evolve the way that humanity was going before was like a buff, a herd of buffalo running towards a cliff. And the pandemic for good, for better or for worse has mixed up the trajectory of that herd. But we don't really have a direction yet. And we're still trying to find a direction. Of course, there's all this conspiracy and we've talked about that in our conspiracy theory of everything of where our species is going. But if we take the advice of the wisdom teachers and the sages of history, that in order to change the world, we have to change ourselves, then this is an opportunity for us to be the change that we want to see in the world. And in order to do that, we have to look within. We have to take responsibility for our vibration. We have to ask ourselves, what is my soul calling me to do? And if we are finding ourselves in the position of needing additional support with our emotional states with our minds with getting our hearts balanced, if we're finding our energy is super erratic, check out esoteric emotional mastery, because this is what this was designed to do to help you take all of this, that's your this is of your vibration going all over the place and harmonize it within yourself so that you become a balanced, more ascended being and more capable of bringing your love, your light, your truth and your service to this world. So thank you. Thank you very much for watching. I am so looking forward to reading all of these comments. There's so many of them. It's crazy. And in with that, please be blessed. Thank you so much for watching. And I'll see you next time on the Spirit Stream. Toodles.


introduce you to your host, Jessica Unger, from the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. Go ahead, Jessica. Hello. Thank you so much, Mike, for that introduction. And thank you to everyone for joining us for today's program on how to protect against risks to tribal cultural heritage. This program is made possible with generous support from the Department of the Interior. My name is Jessica Unger, and I'm the Emergency Programs Coordinator at the Foundation of the American Institute of Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. FAIC undertakes and underwrites programs and initiatives to advance the conservation profession nationally and internationally in all its facets and applies the expertise of the profession in addressing global artistic, cultural, and historic preservation priorities. FAIC promotes the preservation of cultural heritage as a means towards a deeper understanding of our shared humanity, the need to express ourselves through creative achievement in the arts, humanities, and sciences. We honor the history and integrity of these achievements through the preservation of cultural materials for future generations. Today's program is the first in a series of three webinars that will discuss the risks that can potentially affect the cultural resources of tribes. Cultural resources are defined as the aspects of a cultural system that are valued by or significantly representative of a culture, or that contain significant information about a culture. A cultural resource may be a tangible entity or a cultural practice. Tangible cultural resources are characterized as structures, archaeological resources, cultural landscapes, museum collections, archival documents and photographs, sacred sites, and ethnographic resources. So as you might expect, the series will primarily address those tangible cultural resources and how to best protect them. Today our program will focus on risk assessment. It's often a scary prospect to consider the risks that we face. But fortunately we have tools at our disposal that help guide us through the process of considering and sizing up the risk to our cultural resources. Tomorrow we will continue the series by discussing how to collaborate with emergency professionals in order to learn about their processes and share information with them. On Thursday we will learn how to relay all of this information into a preparedness plan. All of these programs are designed with tribal communities in mind to highlight the unique needs of these groups and emergencies. For today's program we're fortunate to be joined by Robert, or Rob Waller. Robert is president and senior risk analyst with Protect Heritage Corporation, a firm dedicated to helping institutions and organizations improve heritage management. His career included 33 years with the Canadian Museum of Nature. He holds a PhD in cultural property risk analysis from Gothenburg University. Robert Waller maintains appointments as research associate, Canadian Museum of Nature, and adjunct professor, Queens University. And has taught, lectured, and served as a consultant at museums and universities throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He is professionally accredited by the Canadian Association of Professional Conservators, a professional associate of the American Institute of Conservation, and a fellow of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Work. With that, I'd like to hand the presentation over to Rob Waller. Oh, and Mike, can you help us with getting the correct pod set up here? Thank you. Okay. Okay, looks good. Great. Thank you very much, Jessica and Mike, for getting us going. And, oh, looks like we have another participant popping in. So, not so many.  So, we are in fact going to have some little interactive bits through this presentation, but I'm very happy that you're with us today. Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are. And although the subject of risk to property can be exceedingly boring at times, we really will try to make it as interesting as possible to you. So, we are going to be talking about risks and your collections, and bringing it on behalf of the foundation of the American Institute for Conservation. And as Jessica mentioned, my name is Robert Waller. I'm with Protect Heritage, and we're on the right day, which is good. Make sure I hit the right button here. We all take risks every day. It's something we're all familiar with. This may be a risk of workload avalanche. I know I am sometimes. Sometimes we actually voluntarily take risks, like this person bungee jumping off a bridge. It's not something you'd catch me doing, but we all have different risk tolerances and even different risk appetites. Some people really like to take big risks for the adrenaline rush involved in it. And sometimes we just get ourselves into risky situations, perhaps by not being as aware as we might be of potential problems. And that's one of the issues that we'll be addressing today in this webinar, how we can avoid that as best we can. We manage risks in many ways by providing warnings like this one, caution the content of this coffee mug is extremely hot. Sometimes those are more or less useful. Another example is a crossing guard for young children. I think that's one of the most useful risk management techniques we take. And it's not even just humans, actually all animals of all sorts will take risks. It's very much in their benefit. This little fish might take a risk to find a much bigger pond to jump into. But actually all animals, even insects, will take different amounts of risk. Some of them will travel far away to see if they can find a better place. Many of those don't make it, but some of them will survive and end up with the colony growing quite a lot. And we can take measures to help protect us from risks. As this little mouse is, as he dons his helmet to see if he can get it, that little piece of cheese. So we're all familiar with risks. We just do it all the time from whether we touch a pot handle, not sure if it's hot, or how many cups we juggle as we put our dishes away, all those sorts of things. We're constantly doing that. Now we want to think about our risk awareness. And we all have varying degrees of risk awareness. One is just to watch out and be careful all the time. One is to employ checklists to remind us of what the risks might be and to be aware of them. Or we can do what's called scored checklists. I'll go through each of these in turn. This is just the sort of outline of the next four slides. Or we can actually do a quantitative risk analysis and figure out really how big is that risk. Well, let's start thinking about risk or watch out and be careful as a means of risk awareness. Now this is certainly a case for some industries like ordinance workers. These are people who make bombs, even worse than fireworks manufacturers. And they have what they call the ABCs of risk awareness. That is always be careful. Then it certainly makes sense for them. One of the troubles with this watch out and be careful is we can really get bombarded with too many messages about risks. And some of them can get quite silly, like that warning on the coffee mug or this sign. This sign has sharp edges. Do not touch the edge of this sign. We can really get overwhelmed with precautionary messages about risk. And that becomes a problem. So on the next, if you'll excuse me just a moment, I'm going to turn off that sound and come back to you now. Sorry about that. The higher degree of risk awareness would be to use basic checklist. And checklist can be really useful and important. I know every time that I take an airplane trip, I'm really glad to know that the pilot and co-pilot are going through a basic checklist to say, is there fuel in the tank? Are the tires inflated? And all those sorts of things. They can be really important for our museums or heritage institutions. Checklists are also extremely important for ensuring that routine maintenance is done on things like fire suppression and alarm systems, on roofs, on all kinds of features that protect our collection. We want checklists that the maintenance is being done. But moving a little further along, we can have something called scored checklists. And in this case, we have a list of risks that we're concerned about. But we put some priorities on them, usually by considering how likely is this risk event to occur and how severe might the damage be if it does occur. And that can lead to these things that I'm sure you've seen at some point, these kind of risk matrices where they consider likelihood or probability and severity or impact as it says here. And then we consider things that are high probability and high impact to be high risk. This is the kind of thing that we'll be talking about today. Going a little bit further in our sophistication, then we can go through to full quantitative risk analysis. And this shows an example of what we did at our Canadian Museum of Nature to assess 22 generic risks to 19 collection units. And it's very complex, but we're not going to be going that far today and we don't need to go that far today. We're doing a real initial screening of what might be the most significant risk that you need to make sure that you're addressing at your institution. And we don't have to go to this level of complexity to do that. Risks, what are they? As risks are departures from a goal. And let's explore that in terms of managing a collection. Let's consider this collection of 25 objects. There's five ceramics, five etchings or works on paper, five textiles, five natural history objects, and five paintings. So 25 objects in a collection. And let's consider this collection not today because today we're all busy. We're attending a webinar. When we're done that, we're probably going to have a pile of emails to deal with and there might be a leak somewhere that needs attention or somebody wants to borrow something we need to respond yesterday. We're all very busy. So let's give ourselves a little bit of time and think about the risks that might start occurring to our collections even a year or two from now, a bit of breathing time. Now our goal is to consider carrying this collection of 25 objects forward in time. And we choose 100 years as a sensible kind of time goal to think we want our collections to last very well for 100 years. So we define that as our goal. But as we know, reality is what happens while we're making other plans and it can be different. In this case, our collection of 25 objects, we may find that two of the objects simply disappear over the next 100 years. We may not be sure whether they were stolen or simply misplaced or sent out on loan and not returned, but evidently they are gone. They've disappeared from our collection after 100 years. It may be that a big part of our collection is put on exhibit. In this case, we put maybe a third of our collection on exhibit under fairly strong lighting and over time those items fade out and lose their color. Well, that represents a departure from our goal of carrying the collection forward without any loss or damage. So that would be another risk. And finally, we might have just a chance of a catastrophic risk occurring. In this case, fire might destroy the entire collection with just a chance of occurring over the next 100 years. But absolutely that would be a departure from our goal of carrying the collection forward in time by 100 years. And that is what we define as preservation. It's our goal. Any departures from that goal, we define as risks. Now, to identify risks comprehensively, we consider 10 agents of change or sometimes called agents of deterioration. These are physical forces, which could be an earthquake, could be dropping something, could be something warping because it's not well supported. Fire, whether it's a small local fire easily put out or a fire that consumes the whole building. Water, which could be a flood, a leaking pipe or a rising damp. Criminals, again, could be big events or just taking single small objects. Pass, whether they're rodents, birds, insects, contaminants as pollutants that can come from the outside or may be present in the objects themselves or in storage materials. Light and ultraviolet radiation can do damage to our collections. Occasionally adverse temperature and certainly sometimes adverse relative humidity can be damaging. And the final agent is dissociation or that is the loss of information from objects. All our objects will tend to have some provenance information some other research related information. If we lose the connection between that information and the object, then we lose value in our collections. So we must guard against that as well. Now for these 10 agents of change, as I mentioned for physical forces, they may occur as either rare but severe events, something like an earthquake. This would be like this risk one on this chart. Could be very high severity but tends to be very low frequency. Does not happen very often. At the other extreme, we might have this R2 or risk two fairly low severity but perhaps a high frequency. Now the problem with this kind of graph is it always appears that risk one is higher than risk two because it's higher up. But we could actually tilt this whole chart over onto its corner and then we can see that in fact the rare and severe risk may actually be about the same magnitude as the very common but persistent gradual change. Risk one may equal risk two. We could actually draw this shading of colors to show in the red area, we'd have a high risk, yellow area is a moderate risk and green area is a low risk. And we can put in some examples of this. This picture depicts the earthquake in Haiti about five years ago, absolutely devastating for their cultural heritage. Buildings, collections of all sorts were severely damaged or lost. At the other extreme, we could have continual processes like the wear of the spine of a book that's used quite a lot. Each incident of damage by wear is very tiny but because it's continual it can actually add up over time to be as severe as something like an earthquake. And in the middle of these we have sporadic events. In this instance a visitor is taking a picture of one vase while his bum knocks the plinth of another vase and knocks it onto the floor causing damage. Now this kind of thing should not be happening continually in our museums but sadly it's not even so much of a rare event. It's the kind of thing that might happen every few decades or something like that. Now we can reduce a risk by reducing the frequency at which it occurs or by reducing the severity of a risk incident or by doing both and reducing both the frequency and severity. Ideally we do both if we can but we tend to do whichever is most effective, most cost effective and so on. Oh, now I'm sorry, I think yes I did also label these. The type one is often thought of as a potential disaster and we define it as expecting just one less than one event over the next 100 years. Type two we think of as incidents and they might be a few per decade or just a few per century. And finally type three are the continual processes or at least one event per year. Now moving on, when we can consider both agents of change and types of risk it gives us this framework for thinking about identifying risks. We know we're going to want to think about physical forces type one, issues like earthquake, sinkholes, these very rare events that might impact on us. For water it could be a 200 year flood from a river. Burst water main could be type one risks, really just a chance over the next 100 years. For type two risks for water we might have roof leaks, plumbing leaks, that sort of thing. If you're unfortunate in your location though you might have sheet flooding from rain, those sorts of things we'll want to think about is type two risks. As we go through our set of agents of change we want to think about each type of risk at least for this emergency preparedness we want to think about type one and type two risks and then we want to identify them and define them clearly. I'll just show a few examples here of some specific risks that we'd consider. Whoops, I just got ahead of myself a bit. For this physical force type one risk we might consider earthquake leading to a shelf collapse, leading to breakage. We define risks in terms of the source, the path, and the effect whenever it's possible to use all three. Our second specific risk might be the earthquake causes toppling objects, leading to breakage. Moving on but still a type one risk, snow loading could lead to roof collapse, could lead to breakage in the collection. Now let's consider a type two risk. Handling during use through an accident dropping might lead to physical damage. And finally a couple of type three physical force risks. Gravity acting on a poorly supported, say a woven basket that's poorly supported might distort over time gradually by gravity or accessing the collection through crowded storage might lead to physical damage. So these are examples of specific risks that are well enough defined that it becomes fairly easy to think about how severe they are, how big their magnitude is. Now the heritage preservation and now managed and maintained by the foundation of the American Institute for Conservation came up with some terrific emergency preparedness tools within their risk evaluation and planning program. And one of these is their risk prioritization worksheet. Oh, I don't know what quite happened with some of the texts there is a little bit hard to read. It seems to have copied over onto itself and apologize for that. But these are available readily on the internet. I've put down the link there and Jessica can make sure that we all get that. And here we list a number of hazards and then consider the likelihood of occurrence and the severity of damage. But I was going to say we can see but it's actually a little bit hard to see but risk 1A is simply defined as an earthquake and I'll show you that I'd like us to think a little bit more clearly about exactly what kind of risk that is. The next is flooding due to flooding from a river or a high water table, then a flash flood, then hail and so on. But let's look at how we might modify these to be a little bit better defined so that we can think more clearly about how big the risk is. So earthquake just as an example I split up into a number of particular risks. If we consider earthquake we'd want to consider is the building stable against an earthquake or is there a chance that the building might collapse? Now these sorts of things you're not going to be able to judge for yourself although there are some helpful kind of tools out there but you're much more apt to want to go to your FEMA representative and ask them for some guidance on interpreting the stability of your building or ask them for directing you to somebody who can provide you some guidance. These things are becoming easier to get hold of all of the time. I see now as we kind of loaded this up we must have had a problem with the fonts selected but the second risk, the 1.1.2 would have been earthquake causes suspended objects in the room to fall and those could be ceiling tiles that fall down and strike parts of the collection or even worse would be suspended lights or projectors or speakers anything that's suspended up there that might shake loose and fall on the collection. Earthquake causing shelving collapse would be another one and you want to consider how stable your shelving and cabinets are or might they move in an earthquake or a couple of other ones would include earthquake causing objects to topple over or shelving units to topple over or to kind of jiggle and walk to the end of edge of a shelf and then fall over. So these are all examples of specific risks related to an earthquake and if we want to think about how important they are to our collection we need to become fairly clear in our minds exactly what scenario we're considering. So that's something I really encourage as we look at a risk, sorry, a list of risks that we're considering to actually think them through is to so if this risk event occurs how might it play out in our museum or our institution? What might happen to the objects that we're concerned about? Now just to read this is now I apologize again there's one animation there that doesn't seem to be quite working but what it intended to say was to simply repeat this idea that we want to define a risk by thinking of the source of the risk which could be earthquake, it could be a sinkhole, it could be somebody dropping something those would all be a source of a risk the path that we get from the source to the items in our collection and then the impact on the items to our collection. So to help us with this I wanted to change a couple of things within this worksheet and I've been talking with Jessica about this I can pass to Jessica a kind of revised worksheet that takes this severity of damage which the initial worksheet just asked us to evaluate using a scale of one to five and thinking in some more detail to consider how much of the collection might be affected how much value could be lost to that part that will be affected and then using those two numbers to calculate a severity of damage and I'm going to walk us through a couple of examples with of this so whoops and the scale that I'm using for this how much of the collection is one would indicate we expect less than 10% of the collection to be affected two we'd enter if we expect just the mid-range somewhere between 10 and 90% of the collection might be affected and a three if virtually all of the collection or more than 90% might be affected now let's look at a few examples where we could see how we'd use these numbers and this is the collection I want to offer us so it's a whole set of little shapes of different colors there's some O pyramids some spheres they're a little hard to see because they're so small now some cylinders and that sort of thing and a diversity of colors and let's put them inside a building because I don't think they last very long outside I'm sure some crows or something would come along and pick them up and further let's put our building so that it has a basement and then two elevated floors and let's consider now if there's a flood that comes along and floods our basement now the question that I'd like to put to you is considering our set of one, two, or three how much of the collection would we say we expect to be affected by this risk event now I notice we have a few participants if you're ready and you're able would you mind popping into the chat whether you think we should consider this a one or less than 10% of the collection affected or just put down a two if you think it's 10 to 90% of the collection or enter a three if you think it's more than 90% of the collection I'm hoping we might be able to get some people to pop in a number in their chat just to see if we're all on the same page but I do recognize that some of you may not be ready to or familiar with how to put that information into the chat so I'll just wait for a moment or two I hope a number or two will pop up for us but if they don't I'll offer my suggestion okay well I would think that looking at this collection distributed on the three floors of the building and expecting that it's really the basement that's going to be exposed to this flood I would think that that must correspond to about a third of the collection being affected or in this case we'd call that a two 10 to 90% of the collection might be affected now considering just that part of the collection that's affected how much value loss might be realized in that part of the collection and now let's imagine not so much that it is all these little pyramid spheres and cylinders but it's actually the kind of collection you hold in your institution whether that's ceramics or garments or tools or whatever how much value might be lost if the storage in the basement gets flooded to considerable depth do you expect that you'd lose 10% of the value of that material 10 to 90% or more than 90% of the value of that material and again I notice we have a new participant in so I'm asking for a bit of involvement here if you could feed back through the chat box in this situation where the collection in your institution a part of it's stored in the basement and we anticipate flooding to maximum depth in that basement so we think that the full third of the collection held in the basement is going to become wet I'm asking if you the participants could type in your chat box do you think that that part of the collection that's wetted thoroughly will lose 10% of its value somewhere in the middle between 10 and 90% or more than 90% of its value so I'll give you a moment if you can enter a value in your chat box one two or three I'll be quiet for a moment and let you think but again not noting a lot of chat happening I'll offer my suggestion which is well actually it really depends on the situation it depends on how well prepared you are for this kind of event do you have arrangements that you can get pumps to rapidly get rid of the water to bring in some teams that can respond to all the wet objects whether that is installing fans moving some of the items out either into the open if we're not anticipating rain or into another sheltered space where we can dry them in your next couple of webinars you're going to be dealing with those kind of questions and issues considerably but I would suggest that for many kinds of collections certainly for things like stone tools or ceramics the loss in value is probably going to be quite small less than 10% they can probably be cleaned and recovered fairly well for the most part for some items it may be very high maybe much more than 90% certainly if there's any water soluble pigments that are important then that's going to be lost absolutely if you have no alarms that are going to alert you to the situation and response plan that will get you in there working with the collection and drying it out quickly then you're going to have more than 90% loss if you do have some reasonable emergency preparedness plans you're probably in the middle there you're going to expect some loss probably more than 10% for a mixed collection but probably less than 90% so these would be 2 and 2 for how much of the collection how much of the value lost now let's consider our same collection in the same building but a different situation in this case let's imagine that there's a fire nearby and that it blows smoke into and through the building and now you notice our collections lost its colors it has a soot deposit over pretty much all of the collection now saying all of the collection I've probably given a little hint to this first part how much of the collection do we think could be affected by this smoke infiltrating our building would it be the one, two, or three less than 10% intermediate or more than 90% again I'll wait for just a moment see if we have any chat pop-ups for but I think I kind of gave this one away actually when I said all of the collection I think here we would agree that it really is it's more than 90% of the collection it's pretty much all of this collection is going to be affected but now let's consider how much loss in value for this collection that went from a fairly nice colored pristine state to something that's covered with some kind of soot and smoke residue and that sort of thing again of course it's going to depend on the kind of collection that you have if you have a lot of leather and feathers and that sort of thing then the damage really will be quite severe they're very hard to clean hard to rectify again if you have stone tools and ceramics probably not so much in this case it really can be highly variable I offered here a one assuming that well maybe it's not going to be the deposition of soot is not going to be much much greater than the deposition of dust that we get over 10 or 20 years and that a practice of routine cleaning might might reverse a lot of that accumulation but this is a situation where you really need to think about the contents of your collection and how they will be affected as we do this actually we often find it helpful to take some examples of the kind of material and I'm not saying something out of your collection but say something out of your gift shop that mimics the kind of object that you have in your collection and maybe even sprinkling it with something like some black poster paint and then thinking about well how much damage has that caused to this object this example object again not from the collection but from the gift shop or from antique shop or something just mimic the kind of damage and estimate how much value loss has occurred now I wanted to look at one more example where again we'll go back to our collection as we had it oh dear and this one isn't going to work after we loaded this after we loaded this power point we tried some of the animations but we didn't try all of them and I'm kind of sorry we didn't get this one what I had was a fire sweeping through the building and eventually reducing it all to ashes so we missed the fire part sorry about that but we do get the ashes now we'd ask how much of the collection might be affected and in this case we went from that whole building to this little pile of ashes so we'd say yes all of the collection could be affected by a fire that consumes the whole building how much value loss now again here I think this is almost no-brainer that all of the value of our collection has been lost so this is an example of all of the collection has lost all of its value now I'll just oh I'll just again pulling up this kind of chart that we have we've now put in these values for how much of the collection for flooding it was a mid part of the collection and a mid part of value loss would lead to a severity of damage of 2 or a risk rating of 9 for the second one the smoke we considered how much of the collection all of it but not so much loss in value again the severity is 2 for the fire all of the collection will lose all of its value or a severity level of 5 now that looked it I could have run those to show those three things that deal with the severity of the damage but now let's consider the likelihood of occurrence and in this risk evaluation planning document there is guidance on how you rank these 1,2,3,4 and 5 from extremely unlikely to expected with near certainty for 1 to 5 1 being extremely unlikely 5 almost certainty in fact almost all natural events cover a vast vast range meteorite showers we expect several per year whereas massive asteroid impacts into our planet are fortunately much less common so a nice meteorite shower comes by 3 or 4 times a year usually whereas a massive asteroid impact might affect the earth once every 100 million years now as a rule there's what we call a rule of thumb is that any natural risk event is that is 10 times as severe will probably be 10 times less likely so whatever happens to you typically in a year what will happen in 10 years is probably 10 times as severe what will happen in 100 years might be 100 times as severe and this is important for us to reflect on and think about because as we just call on what we believe our experience has been over the past 10 or 20 years that is not at all a reliable indicator of what we should anticipate over the next 100 years so if we have experienced small earthquakes over 10 or 20 years we have to consider something almost 10 times as massive an event over the next 100 years or so it's something to keep in mind as we're thinking about these extreme events that we want to be prepared for because like the flood in the basement how much damage it causes our collections really depends on how well prepared we are okay almost done now I think how well protected is your collection I think this is about my final slide I hope I've helped you to have a better sense of how you come to know what to expect how we can use a set of 10 agents of change and 3 types of risk to identify a broad set of particular risks that can affect our collections and we can use some very simple estimators to actually assess those risks to at least rank order them in terms of risks that we really anticipate are very unlikely to be a concern say meteorite striking your museum well it's could happen but it's really very unlikely so planning for that as a priority is not going to be very great interestingly the Society for Risk Analysis in just last month's journal had a paper on the global risk of meteorite impacts and doing a careful analysis of that in terms of helping us plan is very interesting but for any particular spot on earth it's not something we need to be greatly concerned about however if you're in California or Alaska or some place like that or even if you're in some other places as Washington recently found out earthquakes can actually do significant damage to our collections how much of the collection is at risk we thought of a way of thinking about that and just in closing here I wanted to remind you of some of the benefits of things like good cabinets well good cabinets can provide a lot of protection from water from leaks coming down from dust and pollutants infiltrating from the outside good cabinets can be such a terrific solution not just to ongoing storage issues but actually to protection from emergency events similarly keeping collections off the floor even just six inches off the floor to protect against damage from occasional sheet flooding how much value loss again being prepared having an effective emergency plan can be the difference between losing an entire collection or really just losing a small fraction of the value of a collection should all your precautions fail and worst event kind of happens similarly having your emergency supplies and the next couple of webinars will be going into those issues in considerable detail but they will feed back into your evaluation of your risk because when you judge how much of your collection value might be lost it will be highly dependent on how well prepared you are how good your plan is how practiced your plan is and how available your supplies are so with that that's the time that we had for this and I'm going to say thank you for your attention and I guess turn it back to Jessica to see if we have any questions I'd love if we could get a little bit of dialogue going that would be great but show you take us over Jessica great thank you so much Rob really wonderful presentation I think it was very helpful for everyone to get an understanding of some of the principles behind risk assessments and to sort of walk us through ways of thinking about the risks faced by our cultural institutions again if you have any questions or comments please do feel free to make use of the chat box on the left hand side of the page Rob has been very generous in providing his email address on this final slide so do feel free to reach out with any follow up questions and of course I will be adding my email as well to the chat box so I'm more than happy to field questions that come up after the fact again this program is a part of a series that we hope in combination will be a useful resource for thinking about how to build the most robust preparedness plan and I'm seeing Amanda Harpool writing in thank you guys for taking the time to present today thank you Amanda for being on the program I guess I will go ahead and take the opportunity now to thank Mike Learning Times for being a wonderful host and great technological support and of course a big thank you to Rob Waller for taking the time to share his words of wisdom about risk assessments today we hope that tomorrow you will be able to join us for a program same time, same place we will be joined by a representative from the Bureau of Indian Affairs who works with the Tribal Assistance Coordination Group discussing some of the resources that are available for tribes during emergency situations and specifically addressing how emergency professionals think about responding to disasters and how cultural institutions can best work with them in order to develop strong relationships and to build the best preparedness plan moving forward so with that again I want to thank Mike and Rob and everyone who joined us today again the recording of this presentation will be available on AIC's YouTube channel which is AI Conservation is the channel name thank you to everyone and have a great rest of your morning or afternoon