American Red Cross Executive Training Weekend!

This weekend I attended the American Red Cross executive training weekend at Caltech in Pasadena. We had three days of intense training in a myriad of different subjects. On Friday I attended an all day of shelter supervisor and supervising volunteers class. This gave us the opportunity to see new avenues of managing shelters and dealing with challenges with different levels of volunteers who come to work with us at shelters during disasters. Some of these are Red Cross volunteers, some are Red Cross employees and some are local people who want to lend a hand.

Understanding some of these challenges and discussing them with other managers was very helpful. I have been an active shelter manager for some time and each year things seem to get better. But also each year brings new challenges as our world keeps evolving and changing.

Saturday I was in rolled in the public affairs officer workshop. This class deals with how as a public affairs officer for the Red Cross I have to deal with creating press releases that match with the Red Cross message wants to promote. This also deals with how to handle press that show up and dealing with press conferences. We also had A discussion on protecting the Red Cross brand and what the Red Cross brand really is.

Sunday I attended the Government liaison officers training. This goes hand-in-hand with the public affairs officer but is a separate job and has different duties and responsibilities. As a government liaison I deal with different levels of government from mayors and governors, fire departments, police departments, FEMA Homeland and other organizations. This also taught us how to deal with emergency operation centers and private conferences where the different agencies can come together on how to handle a disaster.

Overall this week and was very successful we had a lot of fun, there was great food and it’s always good to connect with friends.

If you would like to be a part of the Red Cross and help You and your neighbors and people you don’t even know, please go to www.RedrossLA.org today

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