Live from San Francisco, California. The Cube, covering MarkLogic World 2015. Brought to you by MarkLogic. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Okay, welcome back everyone. You are watching The Cube here live in Silicon Valley for MarkLogic World 2015. This is The Cube, it's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the simple noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Jeff Kelly, Wikibon big data analyst. Our next guest is Aaron Davis-Morris, managing director of worldwide professional service for Intel, welcome back. Yes, it's good to be back with you guys. It's been a couple years. So what's going on with services right now? Intel is huge with Cloudera, big investment, obviously a billion dollar unicorn among many now. The hype of big data has reached to crescendo, implementation, the rubber hits the road, meat in the bone, whatever it's for you to call it. There is a reality that people want to see some proof and some progress. So John, that's a, thank you for asking that question. So my whole career's been in the consulting space. My whole career's been in how do we help people take funky, messy technology and make it a reality? And we were last together a couple years ago and I had sort of just moved into this space and it has been an interesting ride over the last couple years. In fact, I remember one of the first questions you asked me about at that time was, hey, where are we at with seeing folks moving out of POC and in production? And I think to some extent we're still asking that question, especially as you move out of the US, I was just in China and when I was there, every company I was talking with was very much focused on how does Intel, how does a consulting agency, how does services teams, how do they help me make this set of products this suite a reality, right? The fact that Cloudera and other companies have made it much easier to deploy is great, but at the end of the day, moving up the stack into analytics, seeing investments in companies that are going to productize solutions to ride on top of Hadoop, that's what's really going to get value out of this real and interesting... Well, those are mission critical apps, so you mentioned that question I asked you, I'll ask you again, are the proof of concepts getting bigger? Because it seems to be in the cloud and big data world is that the milepost, if you will, for success have gotten shorter, but it's the same cycle of deployment. I mean, whether it's a three year roll out on the old days to short chunks of chunky artage, as we say, these are football analogy down the road. So is that proof of concepts just getting bigger? And then comment on that global perspective. Yeah, so sorry, I didn't mean to, it wasn't dodging your question there. Are they getting shorter? I think we sort of see kind of, at least within my group, and I have a team of consultants that do a whole bunch of different stuff for our customers and with our partners, we kind of see not quite a sort of like a wait and hurry up approach, right? When we go talk with customers, it's, how do I get data into the hub, right? Help me get all my data centralized, right? Then as soon as I get my data centralized, help me make really rapid applications. So for instance, we have a very large CPG customer that we spent the better part of six months working with architecting a solution for them, working with them to pull internal POS data, external data, social media data, all that sort of thing in. As soon as they got that to the stage where they were comfortable that it was safe and sound and secure, security was a massive issue for them, they then said, okay, let's green light some projects. And they were talking about, we want to see progress in 30, 60, 90 days, not six, nine, 12 months, which is one of the reasons why we love the partnership with Mark Logic is that their solution solves a number of problems, both in the security and governance perspective and the easy use. So to that end, yeah, we see customers starting to go, I want proof in the pudding. I'm willing to make an investment to get it up and running, but I got to see some stuff happen. So talk about the dynamics and big data right now. So you have business intelligence, data warehouse, old school market, you mean transformed into internet of things, real time, mobile device, low latency, flash memory, certainly Intel makes some good business on all these devices. So I want to get the trends there out, but I want to answer specific questions. Do you like the term data lake or data ocean better? To describe the future scenario of the big data world. Hmm, data lake or data ocean, I guess I don't, I don't know if I really like either of them. There's so many out there, data quarry, right? That maybe is a better thing because you get more of a structure to it, right? But anyway, I would go with anyone as long as people are deploying Hadoop and we're seeing pull through on our silicon. Jeff, what's your take on data lake or data ocean? Well, I actually like data ocean because it's got different currents and implies movement. And there's data, there's data, coordinated movement of data has to happen, but data buffet, data buffet, well there's a new one. Data sushi bar, it is almost lunchtime. Well EMC loves the data lake, that's what they call it. To me, I think data lake speaks well for the, I'm pooling my data and I got to go work on it, kind of like the old data warehouse market. But I mean, that business intelligence market, but when I think about like mobile computing, real time in the moment transactional, that's what customers are thinking about from a solution is whether it's retail or operationally transactional. What's your anecdotal observation in that direction? How far are companies going right now? How early are they? Toe in the water, are they moving? In terms of pulling mobile data in, the customers we've been working with in my team, I would say they're toe in the water. They're definitely not toe in the water in terms of they want a solution that can be mobily viewed. All the customers that we're work with want to be able to expose that information, right? They're also starting to talk interestingly enough, I think about monetizing that, right? Being able to take the data they have in a hub and safely feed it out via secure APIs to their customers and make some money off of that. So I thought that was kind of interesting. We, other parts of Intel are working in the telco space, they would be sort of more focused on that. So you know, we size the big data market and professional services is that kind of the biggest chunk of that market. Part of that I think is because of the complexity of the systems and the data movement I was just kind of referencing earlier. Walk us through, I mean if you can say a typical engagement. But from a professional service perspective, let's drill into that a little bit more. What does that actually look like on the ground? What are the services that you're providing that are really adding value for customers? Yep, yep, yep. And so just to sort of level set here, my team is an enablement team. We're a resource that Intel has invested in to be able to help accelerate the market. It's no surprise that Intel wants to see this market move faster. That's good for Intel and for our shareholders and so anything we can do to help do that we want to do. So I have a team of guys that go out and typically an activity would look like, we go chat with a customer, right? It's usually a business lead. And they're usually confused about what are other people in my space doing, right? So we have a set of workshops, canned workshops that will come in and we'll do for customers. We do this in conjunction with our partners so like in conjunction with the MarkLogic or in conjunction with a system integrator partner to be able to help jumpstart their capabilities. We'll go in and we'll work with that customer, spend several hours working with a cross-functional team, kind of touchy-feely post it, no driven activities. I was in the big four before so kind of big four type effort there to get them thinking about what can they do, right? And once we get that information out of them, we'll come back to them with a deliverable that sort of roadmaps out. Hey, here's what we've seen other customers similar to you be successful. Here's some investments that Intel will make. Here's some investments that we're working in juncts with MarkLogic or Cloudera that they would make. And then we would move into a very rapid POC. Anytime we're engaging, we're thinking we want that customer's executive seeing something tangible, seeing a real report, a great visualization, interesting change in the business within 90 days. So POC something, that's what we did with the healthcare company I'm going to talk about this afternoon where we POC'd over the course of 90 days a seven node cluster that pulled in EMR data, it pulled in nonstandard data in terms of doctor locations, hospitals, that's not hospitals, doctors, outpatient clinics, et cetera. And it pulled in socioeconomic data using like Zillow information, real estate data as a proxy to be able to figure out, hey, merge that information together and can we predict ahead of time that a patient is going to readmit? As you guys probably know, huge financial impact if you readmit a patient, huge brand issues, morale issues, et cetera. And we wanted to help this hospital figure out ahead of time. Yep, spend more time with that person, less time with this person after the fact because there's a higher probability they're going to readmit. And we saw some significant improvements there. Six X improvements that we think can drive 50% reduction in their readmittance, which translates through to $14, $15 million a year of incremental revenue for this hospital and a ton of pain in the butt savings for them and that their people aren't treating people over and over again. Right, well there's a lot of different layers to that some of those use cases you just described. There's certainly the infrastructure level, there's the database level, then there's the science level. Where do you see the biggest gap in terms of when you go look at customers, in terms of their ability to execute on big data projects? Is it on that infrastructure? Is it standing up the systems? Is it actually doing the data science? Where's the biggest gap used to? So I say that all the customers we see have gaps at all layers, right? I think once they dig into it, it's easier from the fill that lower level gap from a PS perspective, right? When I go and look at my staffing model, I don't say to myself, I need to go hire a bunch of hadoop administrators because that's a complex thing. I can go find those in the market pretty readily. But absolutely the data science skillset and the dev skillset is still something that's very much in demand. There's a premium for it. If I was running a four-fee business, I'd be focusing on that market. And Candily, it's the real fun part of it, right? The taking the business guy's thought and having our guys figure out the math on it, which is way beyond my knowledge, it is amazing to see the stuff that those guys come up with. And then actually packaging that into some kind of application that people can actually use and consume. And that's where I see, and I think we're really starting to see a lot more of it, investments in the venture capital community towards the end of creating those package solutions. I was at Strata, I think it was in New York last year. And as I walked the floor, it really struck me that in my mind, I only saw one real application vendor there, right? Everybody else was about how do I do better visualizations, which is important. How do I do better security? How do I do better sort of enterprise enablement? But an actual true application, there was only one company called Caspita in the security space, right? And I think you'll see lots, lots more of that. And that's where I want to see stuff go is, how do we get folks doing that so that there's more easy to deploy stuff? Yeah, and then what you see, what I'm seeing is, and I think you're going to see to some extent is applications being developed internally at a lot of companies. Because if you think about the benefit of big data and analytics in terms of an application perspective, I agree with you, that's what the value is, but if everyone's using the same off-the-shelf applications, there's not a lot of differentiation happening there. Now to some of the customers we've talked to here at this show at MarkLogic, they're building out some of their own applications. Talk a little bit about Intel, your relationship with MarkLogic, how you're working with them and some of the use cases you're seeing there. Sure, so great relationship with MarkLogic, I pulled through about 50,000 Xeon servers a year. That's a very nice chunk of change. We are always looking for partners that are going to help customers and customers improve efficiencies in the data center. A big thing for us is how do we get people getting more value out of their existing spend, right? Lowering the cost of operations so that they can do more stuff. At the end of the day, if companies are getting more value out of their data center doing more things, that's going to end up being positive for Intel, right? They're going to expand the pie. And so MarkLogic's a perfect example of that. And having been in the security space for 15 years, the great stuff that they're doing in security and governance and compliance is huge. When I started at Intel in this role a couple of years ago, we were the team championing, you need security in Hadoop, right? And happily it's reached a stage where it's table stakes, right? People are saying, yeah, if you can't effectively secure my PII, right? I'm not creating what would eventually become the holy grail for a bad guy. I got to have the right security and MarkLogic's done a great job of that. Something that we love working with them on. Talk about the dynamics in the professional services business. We've seen this transformation going on with MarkLogic, among any other of their competitors, creating agile, fully integrated technology stacks to make developers really work easily with the cloud and mobile. Certainly Docker got big financing today to $95 million of containers. Docker contains a lot of work on multiple clouds. Got VMware, Google, everyone's working on clouds. So that brings up the question of the role of the outsourcer, the professional services, the big guys, CSC, Accenture and whatnot. They have to transform. What's your outlook on their business models and how do they compete in a world of integrated stacks and agile solutions and short timetables, time to value in months versus years? Yep, so we work with and we have relationships with all those key SIs, specifically Accenture and CSC. They've got a footprint that I think we want to see leveraged, right? They've got that sort of first step into the account. They're building out past type offerings and the such that we think can really help improve and customer's use of big data. How they work with like a MarkLogic and other folks that are creating integrated applications. I think like other large applications, ERP, et cetera, there's a role for them to be that glue. Right now, there's a lot of glue you need to make this work, right? Down the road, as things get better, there's still going to be a need for glue. You still need smart folks, especially industry driven folks to be able to tie things together at the last mile. We just want to see that get easier. So final question, what's your outlook on MarkLogic? What's the big value purposes for those guys? I think it's to continue driving towards helping customers get better value out of their data, right? If they can be the company that creates that hub that is allowing folks to take existing data stores and marry it with that non-conventional data, I think it's a win for them. It's a huge win for Intel. And we're excited to be part of it. And what's your outlook for the year? What are you working on? I am working on the same thing I was working on for the last six months, which is going and meeting with customers, explaining to them that there's a lot of great value, then get out of big data, and how do I help you, Mr. Customer, do that. All right, Aaron, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. This is theCUBE live, and it's looking at the value for MarkLogic World 2015. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks, guys.


Well, many pundits have said it's a fight to finish in Lagos, Bauchi, Kaduna, Gombe, Delta, Damawa, Rivers, Kanu, Eboni, Enugu, Oggun, Oyo, Sokoto, Nassarawa, as 11 governors raised for a second term. As Nigerians go to the poll again tomorrow for the governorship and state assembly elections in 28 states, this round of elections, just like the February 25 presidential and national assembly elections, will throw up more surprises, which would further question the nature of dominance of the governing all-progressive Congress APC and the People's Democratic Party PDP, the main opposition in Nigeria's political space. In tomorrow's election, 837 governorship candidates will slug it out in the 28 states, while 10,240 others will battle for 993 state assembly seats in 1,021 constituencies across the country. Of the 28 states that are due to vote for governors, 17 serving governors are departing. These are governors of Taraba, Benwe, Enugu, Eboni, Abia, Cross River, Delta, Aqaibon, Rivers, Kebi, Sokoto, Kaduna, Katsina, Kanu, Jigawa, Plateau, and of course, Niger states. However, 11 others are standing for re-election, namely Lagos, Oggun, Oyo, Quara, Zamfara, Umbi, Nassarawa, Yobi, Burnu, Adamawa, and Bauti states. This is an election circle like no other in Nigerian history, with no fewer than 20 incumbent governors failing to deliver their parties during the presidential and national assembly elections and seven incumbent governors losing their senatorial bids, unlike in 2019 when 20 former governors were elected into the ninth national assembly. While joining us to discuss this, expectations in the following or the forthcoming election is Shagun Shokwitan, a public affairs analyst. That's how I would like to leave it this evening, describing him. We'll be joined later by Reverend Father Raymond Anolie Fourada, Director of Justice, Development and Peace Center, JDPC, Lagos. And also, we have Moe Oyo standing by also, who is a technology executive. Thank you so much, Mr. Shokwitan, for joining us on the show. Thanks for having me. And Oyo, thank you for being there for us this evening. Thank you, Yamgo. Okay. Now, a lot of people are saying that the credibility of the elections can be traced to the fact that so many governors lost their states to the opposition and so many people that are incumbent lost their seats. The senators and the National House of Assembly members. And that's what they're using to say that the election was good enough. What do you say? That will be a grievous mistake. If you are trying to assess the success or otherwise of a process, you don't look at the outcome. Because if you look at the outcome, you might miss the lessons in the process. And so, to say that, for example, that because legal states was lost to the Labor Party in the presidential elections would be an evidence that the elections were credible and free and fair, belittles the enormity of the challenges that we faced during that election. So I don't agree with that point of view. I think that we have to leave the outcome and focus on the process. And if you do that, then you have to ask INEC very, very fundamental questions with regards.  It's even in court as we speak with regards to their failing to follow the provisions of their guidelines. Those guidelines were drafted in accordance with the provisions of the Electoral Act 2022, which empowered them to draft them. Now, having drafted those guidelines, I've heard those arguments that say, well, INEC is a liberty to use electronic transmission or to use the beavers or not. But I beg to disagree, you know, because the guidelines were drafted in accordance to a law and therefore draws their powers from that law and therefore become law in themselves.  I know that they claim that, you know, those changes happened as a result of some glitches and some technical difficulties they might have had, you know, with transmission of results and uploading to IREV and all of that. But that's neither, that's, it's for them to prove right now. As far as Nigerians are concerned, they did not follow the guidelines. They themselves laid out and that calls to question the credibility of the entire process, especially when you realize that those things that were omitted or skipped were the very safeguards that guaranteed the credibility of the process and the outcome. So if you've skipped the guarantees and the safeguards, then how can we know that this process was credible? Well, tomorrow is another election and there's a lot to talk about. Let me come to you, OO. You are the technology expert, INEC, and the NCC, that is the Nigerian Communications Commission, has claimed that more than nine million hacks were tried on the servers, especially on election day, we had more than six million people trying to hack, or there were six, more than six million attempts to hack the server of INEC. And some experts have come out to say that is a blatant lie, that it couldn't have happened that way. But whenever we talk to INEC or talk about INEC and their failure from the point of view of a lot of Nigerians, their failure to deliver on election day, they always complain that it is the technological factor that caused it. It couldn't have been that they wanted to do that. So tell us how far, how much this technology could have worked, and the likely glitches that were supposed to happen or could have happened on that day to make them not able to upload, especially the presidential results, because the National Assembly results were uploaded in most places, but the presidential results are the ones that we are quarreling about. A lot of people are quarreling about. So these things they are talking about, hacking their system or trying to hack their system up to more than six million in one day, is that a possibility? And how far can an instrument like that, a machine like that, work in an election day or under pressure? Yes, it's easy to throw statistics around. It's actually laughable. But I don't want to seem like I'm being antagonistic. So I don't think I would like to comment so much to say that it's not feasible. If it was, if it happened, then it would have broken all the records in the world. The reality is this, transparency is key. And that's what technology helps. Technology cannot replace human intent. Technology is there to optimize efficiency of a process. The reality is for whatever reason, coincidentally, like you pointed out, only the presidential elections seem to have challenges and issues. And they were not forthcoming on why or what happened. The beavers, which people think is a, there are two systems. There's the beavers, which worked very perfectly. The beavers was for the accreditation. However, the IRF had one job, upload images, like millions and billions of people upload pictures on Instagram, weekly, monthly, yearly, Facebook. So the technology to upload is as old as the internet in itself, right? So the excuses they gave, they're not, I wouldn't say they're business less, but they're very highly unlikely. The challenge we have is challenge of transparency. We do not know the organizations. We do not know the process through which the organizations who were handling these systems were selected. Are they competent? Remember, the IRF technology is as basic as it can be. It's just to upload. It had one single job, and it failed at it. But curiously, I voted in the Southeast past of Nigeria. And they didn't have internet on the devices. I don't think the hackers wiped their data plans. Some of them didn't have SIM cards or were not ready. They were not built to do the job or the task they were meant to do. So if there was an audit of what happened and they came out to be transparent about it, they would be able to fix it. But if there's no honesty, then there's no technology that can deal with that. OK, let me just stay with you a moment now. Before tomorrow, before now, there was an outcry. And the opposition was saying that they should not temper with the BVAS, because the data in it might be tempered with. But they wanted to reconfigure it so that they can use it for the governorship election. And when we try to say, OK, why did you have to go that way? You should have maybe postponed the elections until the inspection of these materials was done and all that. They say there's no cause for alarm. Is that true? Or there's a possibility that information on the BVAS machine could be tampered with in trying to reconfigure this for the tomorrow election? What has been lost is trust, right? And technology can solve for that. The BVAS machine they talk about is just an Android tablet or the IRF machine. It's just an Android tablet with a fancy name. And an Android tablet, as you know, can store, depending on the size of the storage, can store thousands and thousands of images, talk less of text. The BVAS takes, authenticates your identity and places a number on it. So it stores digits. Even your Nokia 310 could store thousands of digits. So storage-wise, you do not need to wipe out previous numbers. So a polling unit that has a complete computer that is storing the value 110 can store literally millions of that type of three-digit numbers. So you do not need to reconfigure it. However, there might be technical reasons why they would like to reformat the device before utilizing it for the second time. In that case, they should be backed up. However, like I said, trust has been lost. So the ability for something to be done doesn't translate to the willingness for the thing to be done. So as it were, everyone would be suspicious of what would happen. Would you say that the millions of hacks have wiped out the records? So as a result of that, people would not trust that they would keep the system as authentic as it should be. So that's the challenge. I think that's the main issue we are looking at, a lack of trust, not a lack of technology capacity. OK, thank you. We'll come back to you in due course. And I'm still here with Che Gueaux-Chocqueton. But we'll take a short break. And when we return, we'll continue this discussion. We're really focusing on tomorrow's election and how much is going to be successful and how much confidence that people have in the process. Stay with us.


You're tuned in to the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm your host, Autumn Lab A-Reno, and today is Tuesday, April 14th. We're sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. My guests today are Michael Bish, Executive Director for the Yolo Food Bank, and Karen Larson, Director of Yolo County's Health and Human Services Agency. The show airs live at noon on Tuesdays and Fridays, and repeats at 5 p.m. both days and at noon on Sundays, and you can also listen online at KDRT.org. The news yesterday of a tragic outbreak of the COVID-19 virus at a nursing home facility in Woodland came just as governors on both sides of the country formed a regional alliance to map out a gradual and strategic return to business as usual. At a pace, no surprise, that's at odds with the Trump administration. This week, the CDC reports total cases of 554,849 and total deaths inching towards 22,000, making the United States the global epicenter of the pandemic. The California Department of Public Health reports 22,348 positive cases, 687 deaths, and Yolo County Public Health reports 101 cases and four deaths. As a reminder, you can visit yolocounty.org and click on the COVID-19 dashboard there for a wealth of information. And now I feel a need to share something uplifting after those statistics, so let's try this.  Each features a QR code. Scan that and you'll end up at a YouTube music video that's intended to empathize, connect, or just generally relate to what we're all going through right now. The concept originated with area teacher Kyle Monholland and is continually updated and driven by community participation. The project was recognized this week by Inquirer ED, an inquiry-driven, standards-based online curriculum resource used by schools all over the country that asks, how can we support and encourage our community during difficult times? Kyle is a friend and someone I've co-organized many benefits with, so I send out my congratulations and appreciation.  Today, we're going to shine a light on one of the largest nonprofits in Yolo County, the Yolo Food Bank, and we'll have that interview in just a few minutes. I'd like to share a few of the resources available to nonprofits right now. As nonprofits, and Davis Media Access is one, we are mission driven, working to address specific problems and provide specific services in our communities, and that is all good, but it also means we tend to operate on slim margins and rely on funding sources that may be there one year and not the next. So today at 2 p.m. the Yolo Nonprofit Leaders Alliance, which is a partnership between the Yolo Community Foundation, the Yolo County Library, and the Impact Foundry offers a webinar. They have a, if you can't make, if you're a non-profit and you can't make today's, they're offering another one on April 20th about fundraising and challenging times. PS, we're there. Today's is creating financial certainty and uncertain times. Let's build your action plan together and it's a free Zoom webinar that features local CPA, Megan Likes of Likes Accounting, and she'll show, share how nonprofits should take action now to understand and improve their cash flow, assess options for the next few months, and make a plan for long-term survival, including considering how to best connect with donors. The invitation I received included a web link, but I believe if you are a non-profit in Yolo County, you can get there simply by calling the Yolo Community Foundation at<PHONE_NUMBER> and requesting a link. And I also wanted to mention, because we had him on recently, Congressman John Garamendi is holding a telephone-based Town Hall Forum on April 16th at 2.30 p.m. for his constituents. The number to call in is<PHONE_NUMBER>, and he is going to have with him a panel of health and employment experts. And again,<PHONE_NUMBER>. And we'll get set up for our first call here. We are back and the current crisis has done a brilliant job of highlighting some of the weaknesses in our social fabric, whether that's lack of access to broadband or the prevalence of food insecurity. Here to tell us how the Yolo Food Bank is managing during the COVID-19 crisis is Michael Bish, the organization's executive director. Michael, thanks for joining us today. Hello, how are you? I'm doing well. How about yourself? You are a busy man. Yes, yes, I'm busy sheltering at home here today. Good. Everywhere I look these days I see references to the food bank and I am aware that you all have stepped up your game just incredibly during this crisis. So I'm hoping you'll walk us through some of the changes you've had to make over the last month and tell us about who some of the helpers are. Well, fortunately for us and fortunately for the community, we were pretty well positioned to address some of these concerns before COVID-19 even came on to the community's awareness. So we are an emergency service provider and this of course is a very unprecedented emergency that we're now in. And so some of the things that we've had to do is we've had to dramatically increase the amount of food that we distribute that we distribute from our from our ongoing distributions because there are so many more individuals that are now food insecure. We've also started a free home delivery service for all of these seniors and residents with underlying health conditions that have been ordered to remain at home without food. They have no way to stay in their homes. They would have to emerge from their homes and go to a supermarket and expose themselves to the coronavirus. So in that way we've definitely been helping to to flatten the curve. So right now we're feeding close to 5,000 individuals directly at their doorsteps. So we we have an army of volunteer drivers who pick up the food and then deliver it to the doorsteps of these individuals and then leave without ever having any direct contact with those individuals so that we don't expose them to the virus. And we've also started a new program in concert with the county, the cities, and YoloBus to provide full meal service for the homeless individuals that these jurisdictions have sequestered in motel rooms. So I think it's close to 200 such individuals now. And so they get three meals a day from from Yolo Food Bank seven days a week. So we've really had to ramp up the services that we've been providing all the while having to institute all these social distancing measures among our among our staff. So that complicates the work that we're doing, right? You can imagine how difficult it is to maintain six foot distance in a grocery store where the aisles aren't moving about, right? They're all in a static position, but in an outdoor distribution it's much much harder to to enforce these social distancing measures plus our warehouse is just super super full with volunteers working to put these food boxes together and then they're having to do all that while keeping a six and ideally a nine foot distance from one another. So it's been a very challenging time, but unfortunately we have terrific partners to help us out the county, the city, general community members. I think we're going to be hearing from Karen Larson a little bit later if we've been working very collaboratively with with her department. Oh good, I'll be sure to ask her about that. Yeah, by the way that was a brilliant repurposing of Yolo Bus drivers to to be delivering the food. I love seeing the kinds of partnerships and the creativity that's emerging around this. Now you are you are delivering to a number of communities. I've seen posts that you're out in West SAC that you're delivering to winters. So how many different places are you delivering on a daily basis? We deliver to every single community in Yolo County, so that's all the way north and done again south to Clarksburg from K-Pay Valley to West Sacramento and everywhere in between. We have over a we have over 120 distributions every single mountain spread around the county. So who are some of your, I'd love to hear the stories about who the helpers are. I'm channeling Mr. Rogers here. Who are some of the folks who are really making this possible in addition to your wonderful staff? Well we have some super interesting individuals that have been helping out. So Rob Davis, former mayor of Davis, very early on signaled that he wanted to help out in this unprecedented crisis. So we requested the university to allow him to leave his job until the end of April, his job on campus until the end of April, and he's been coordinating the entire home delivery program which we started from scratch right when this crisis started. So that's one example. As the current mayor of Davis, Brett, who works for FarmFresh to you, he helped coordinate the use of two of the FarmFresh delivery vehicles along with two drivers to help with these home delivery distributions. And then we have many many more examples of folks that have just really stepped up to help those in need by helping the food bank get food out. So are you in need of volunteers? I'm going to make a blanket statement here before I have you answer that. Because we're a non-commercial station the one thing we can't do is you know tell people go donate to this place or do that. We don't do that here but I will make a blanket statement that every non-profit who provides social services in this town needs people's health help and the big day of giving is coming up on May 7th and there are ways to you know contribute on your website and things like that. So I'm just going to leave that there because I know that help is is needed. How are you doing on volunteers and are there other ways that that people can help you out get involved? I'm not sure what your needs are these days but I'd like to find out. Right now we have about 500 volunteers helping out whether it's with distributions or with delivering food with their personal vehicles or with packing food in the warehouse or with helping maintain social distancing protocols at our distribution. But the need is just continues to rise dramatically week by week so we need to continue to recruit new community members to help volunteer. So we along with all the other non-profit social service providers are absolutely in need of community members to step up. So who do they call? How do they get in touch with you? How do they get involved? The best way to get involved is to go to our website at www.yolofoodbank.org. Okay. What else would you like us to know about what you're doing right now? First of all I do want to stop and just say thank you and you know I've worked a lot with Joy Cohen and Jodi Liederman and other folks on your staff over the years and you all are wonderful and you are doing incredible service for for humanity right now really in our county. So thank you for that. Well thank you for that for that plug out. We really appreciate it and it's that kind of raising a community awareness that all of the social service providers need right now. We need to shine a spotlight on what the needs are in the community and the entities that are that are meeting those needs so that we can direct the resources to them because there are many individuals that that want to help out but they can't help out unless unless they have that info. So this show in itself is a it's a great opportunity to do just I'm sure your chat with Karen Larson will will do the same. Yeah great well we appreciate you taking time out from your busy schedule to visit with us today and www.yolofoodbank.org folks and you can go there and and find out how to get involved how to give back and Michael Bish thank you so much. Thank you Autumn. All right you take care. It really is true I have seen Michael mentioned former Davis mayor Rob Davis and I have seen Rob all over on on Facebook looking for translators who can help me get this information to a client in Russian or or you know some other language and the great thing is that people have really stepped up. We are expecting a call from Karen Larson at 1220. I have a few other announcements to read so we will get to her call in just a few minutes. I want to remind people as I often do about the COVID-19 YOLO community response page on Facebook. Early on in the show I interviewed one of the founders Kate Mellon Anibaba and had talked about how the group had grown rapidly grown from a couple of dozen people to I think it's well upwards of four thousand now and it continues to be an incredible source for information and support and you can find it on Facebook. Folks I see that someone is trying to call in and and we are not taking calls on the show except from our guests so sorry about that but it is a half-hour show and there's only so much we can do and we will be talking with Karen Larson at 1220. Okay I want to talk again briefly about Davis Media Access's YOLO County Community Diary project we have going on and you can go to davismedia.org forward slash diary and find information about that. Basically if you think about every important moment or movement in this country historians look not only at events but at how people responded to them so letters, diaries, newspapers, other forms of documentation do as much to shape the record of an event as the event itself and in this spirit we invite you to help document the history we're making right now during this pandemic you can do that by participating in a collaborative virtual storytelling project and you basically just do a short video we recommend two minutes or less with your cell phone and upload it to the the website at davismedia.org slash diary and we'll collect those into different short programs that reflect areas of emphasis, nonprofits, businesses, kids, what's it like to be out of school right now I can only imagine for you parents with young kids. All right I am going to read a poem and I'm doing this for a specific reason I like this poem and yet I think it's going to set up how well let me just read it it's called pandemic by Catherine Omira and the people stayed home and read books and listened and rested and exercised and made art and played games and learned new ways of being and were still and listened more deeply some meditated some prayed some danced some met their shadows and the people began to think differently and the people healed and in the absence of people living in ignorant dangerous mindless and heartless ways the earth began to heal and when the danger passed and the people joined together again they they grieve their losses and they made new choices and dreamed new images and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully as they had been healed now what I want to say is well I think that is a very nice poem and I am encouraged about the things that are going on in terms of let me say I'm inspired by watching the global pollution indices drop every day that the the quarantine goes on I do think that there are a lot of people who are put at risk by the isolation and by being at home so we're going to take just a minute for music and then we'll be back with Karen Larson to talk about that a bit more all right so as I was saying I think the the shelter-in-place order may be particularly taxing for many among us and I wanted to know more about that so I reached out to Karen Larson the director of Yellow County's Health and Human Services Agency and she's with us here today welcome Karen thank you thanks for having me and thanks for being willing to have an open conversation about mental health it's so nice and refreshing to have some of the stigma lifted off this topic and now more than ever it's something we really need to be paying attention to this moment in our history is truly remarkable and for people that are already struggling with mental health issues it's exceedingly difficult and even for those of us who may not have mental health issues there are increased feelings of isolation and depression yes I think the extroverts among us are struggling a bit yeah yeah I'm missing giving hugs to people it's very difficult definitely and you know I think we're seeing increased substance use and and domestic violence and child abuse and all those kinds of things that happen when you have people kind of stuck together for long periods of time and so none of those things help with your mental health and wellness so yeah it's definitely a difficult time definitely an important topic for us to be talking about today right so what are you seeing in terms of you know our community and I also want to make sure we make time to talk about what resources are available through your agency well what we're seeing it's interesting because with the the stay-at-home orders while mental health treatment is considered an essential service a service many of those services have to be provided now virtually or telephonically and so that poses some issues as well so I we haven't seen a dramatic increase in you know calls to our crisis lines or visits to the hospital for mental health issues it's definitely triggering for people that have specific conditions that where things like this are more likely to trigger their symptom but we haven't seen a dramatic increase I'm more worried about those people like I spoke to that are kind of in a home environment where they don't have helpers around them and are really struggling in silence and so I did want to take a few moments to talk about some of the kind of strategies that we can all avail ourselves of even if we don't have access to a therapist or our helpers great let's do that so I think that the key concepts are really supportive relationships good physical health exercising sleeping nutrition getting your behavioral health your mental and behavioral health support needs met in other ways and and then mindfulness you know meditation and and those kinds of practices so I can kind of give some examples of some of those you know supportive relationships a lot of us are feeling isolated and and I know for me my parents are elderly and so they're especially isolated right now so getting them on zoom and face time and those kinds of things has been really helpful connecting with people that we that are supportive of us now for some of our residents that's not always a family member it might be someone else a mentor or someone that they have in their life that they feel like they can rely on so I think those supportive relationships are really important I will say that the news casters are not considered supportive relationships so turn off the news yeah taking breaks from the news and media is especially helpful I've noticed especially for our low-income populations those struggling with job loss and and additional stressors on top of just being at home the news can really trigger bad coping strategies and unhealthy coping strategies so finding ways to have embrace one another virtually however possible in a way that fills our tank is really important the physical health portion can't be overstated I think exercising daily is really important getting in at least 60 minutes a day whatever that looks like depending on your age and ability level even if it's you know walking around the block or doing a little dance party in your house with your kids or you know whatever the case may be just getting your heart rate up getting up and moving and not being so sedentary because it's our body sedentary often our mind goes to dark places healthy sleep is really hard I I know that sleep is a struggle for a lot of people right now because there's so much weighing on them and you know we're all anxious and worried and my dreams have become rather apocalyptic in nature so but trying our best to get go to bed at the same time every day get up at the same time every day avoid screens again right before you go to bed and avoid too much caffeine and also avoiding too much alcohol or other substances will really help with your sleep yeah nutrition I think I'm always struck by the things that are out in the grocery store I notice everybody's baking because there's no flour and everybody's baking yes which is is just own self-care tool but but we also need to remember to eat healthy you know we should be avoiding those refined carbohydrates and high fat high sugar kind of foods because they really don't help our mind to buffer itself against the stress yeah so a really really common thread I've heard from a lot of people lately is that everyone acknowledges they're drinking more yeah I think alcohol sales are up 50% or something like that and it's really I understand it I don't personally drink I've been sober for a very long time but I do understand that coping strategy when you just want to escape I will say after years of doing substance abuse treatment it is not a healthy coping strategy and it doesn't get us to a better place in the long run so whatever we can do to fill our tank in other ways is probably healthier right we're down to our last couple of minutes this goes really fast so so let's get in the last critical information you want to share that's perfect so taking care of our mental and behavioral health is really important we have some resources available locally hopefully nobody we don't see the increased suicide prevention calls but if we if somebody needs that service we do have the local suicide prevention of Yolo County their number is<PHONE_NUMBER> we also have for the county the mental health crisis and access line that number is<PHONE_NUMBER> and there's a variety of apps and online support groups and those kinds of things so anybody that is technologically savvy at all can go online and look up support groups for whatever the issue is right now and and get some additional support and generally for free there's apps like Headspace and Calm and those kinds of things that really help with those practices and taking care of our inside right you provide so many important services for our county and our various communities so I want to thank you for taking time to talk with us today thank you for providing me all right you take care all right you too that was Karen Larson of Yolo Health and Human Services the director there thank you Karen once again you have been listening to the COVID-19 community report this is episode 9 hard to believe I'm Autumn Lab-A-Reno and this has been live from the KDRT studio thanks so much for tuning in I'll be back on Friday