Great. Thank you, Brian. And hello, everybody, near and far. So Chris White from Cal OES gave a highlight of these programs. And Brian asked me to go into a little bit more detail on these. So I'm going to do that now. So this is the California Earthquake Strengthening Program.

We call it, you know, like everything else, we have acronyms, so we call it ESP for short. We started the first three years working with the largest regional food banks in the state of California. And last year, we extended this to independent living centers. And this year, we're working with the senior service centers. These are all nonprofit organizations that provide critical services in their communities. And each of them, I mean, looking at food banks, as we learned from the pandemic, each of them provide critical services. And you can imagine after an earthquake, those services are going to be in even higher demand.

So the thing is to connect these critical services and service providers with resources that exist in the community and state and federally. So it's been fantastic to partner with Cal OES and FEMA on this. can't say enough about Chris and Jose and their team and that it's just, it's a great working relationship and what we've been able to do through this. So I'm going to give you some highlights here and what we've been doing, but a lot of this is working basically directly with nonprofits in the state and trying to demystify some of the federal programs. So we talk about, again, NEHERP, for instance.

But in this program, we talk about two programs, NEHERP and HMGP. And I'll explain to them how this works and how these programs are here. Everything that you're seeing through these slides is all funded through the NEHERP and Cal OES support in FEMA. But also, we're trying to direct these nonprofits to HMGP to take advantage of these funds that they are eligible for. So this is what we have been doing.

All right. So just quickly about DRB Toolkit work group. We're a nonprofit also, so we can connect with the nonprofits and explain. Our role is to connect basically the economic resiliency of these communities and reducing recovery time by what we can do at Advantage. So obviously mitigation falls right inside there. we have primarily targeted small businesses and other organizations like nonprofits and trying to connect those limited resources to help them. Everything is to make this easy for them. They are all way too busy and disaster resiliency, disasters in general are not on their radar. How do we keep this simple? So we create friendly tools and also connecting that relationship between the public and the private sector, which nonprofits are also included in that and making sure that they know what these programs are because unfortunately government doesn't always do a great job of highlighting what their resources are so we connect them to make sure they can take full advantage of them.

So believe it or not we have a lot of people that are somewhat new to California that have been working in California for a long time that may not be as aware. I mean people know about earthquakes but they haven't they haven't physically experienced them because we haven't had large events in some of these areas. So we always start with the basic basis of education. And this is the USERF map that explains that we have that 99% chance over the next 30 years that we could have a significant earthquake. But we're also through this program trying to highlight these moderate events, which can also do damage, which can also be disruptive to these organizations, operations.

So we're not just thinking worst case scenario, we're talking about these moderate events. and how to strengthen and be resilient for these other events.

So part of it is explain some of the terminology about what is hazard mitigation. Don't need to describe that to all of you, but just giving them the basis of why we're doing this. And then going into what HMGP is and how they are eligible to apply for these funds. But a lot of times what we find is that nonprofits, sometimes they have pretty advanced grant staff, sometimes they don't. And so it's also helping them to navigate the HMGP application process, which Cal OES has done a fantastic job and their hazard mitigation teams have done a great job in developing the HMGP portal.

And that has made it so much simpler. But also, again, as a non-profit, if you're not thinking about disasters, this is a little bit outside their normal scope. So help them navigate it to make this easy for them to move forward. Because the whole goal is for them to not only understand their risk, but then mitigate it. So through the ESP pilot, one is helping them to understand these hazards, you know, building on the platform of earthquakes, but also what hazards exist within their facilities, and then how to reduce those hazards.

And what we've been doing with that are by creating these earthquake risk assessments, which I'll explain in just a minute, that they can use as the basis for their HMGP applications. So with that, it facilitates their ability to apply for the funds. It gives them the budgets that they can use to develop what they need to do. And then they apply. So we are doing two different types of risk assessments, non-structural, which is everyone who participates in the ESP program gets a non-structural risk assessment.

And we explain what non-structural is. Obviously, it's all the contents, but also the facility systems, HVAC, the piping, sprinkler systems, all of that. And that's what we're targeting. And then for the structural, it's more obvious.

It's floor, ceiling, walls, port columns, the things that, and these are pictures from warehouse facilities where we get most of the food banks in. But even some of our other facilities and some of these other nonprofits are using facilities that were once for another purpose, and they're now managing their operations out of one of these facilities.

So these assessments right now, this year, we're doing 15 senior service centers. We'll get those non-structural risk assessments. And then we're doing six structural risk assessments that cover ASCE level one and level two. And again, that becomes a great tool for them, helps them to understand their vulnerabilities within their facilities, and then they can use it for the HMGP process.

So with these NEOHR funds that are funding DRB, we cover that project scoping piece. In California, we have an NOI that's actually, it's evolved to be much more fleshed out. We actually provide a cost benefit analysis in the NOI phase because California wants to make sure that anyone who's applying for these HMGP funds actually meets the threshold. So we will help these non-profits with developing the NOI and doing their cost benefit analysis.

And if they get approved, which all of our applicants who have gone to the NOI process have been approved, we will help them in developing their application. So the cost benefit and, you know, helping them complete it. And obviously they provide their facility specific information, their budget and those sorts of things. So we've worked in great partnership with our nonprofit partners.

So again, we cover that structural and non-structural, those elements. And then we basically help them to take the next stage. Obviously we can't, for funny reasons, the structural risk assessments are a lot more costly. We have an engineering firm that goes in great detail, as you can imagine, but we have a limited number that we can do. And again, we're covering those six this year.

We explained that there's a few ways that they could approach the HMGP. Again, they are eligible for these funds. They could just hire or do it themselves or hire, but that underneath, we can actually help facilitate this process. And that is something that as we've moved on to the next phase of the ESP programs, for instance, last year with independent living centers, we actually had a nonprofit who wanted to put their application together.

So we actually included that. So sometimes it takes a little while for these nonprofits to decide they want to move forward. So we will include that with the next year. And then explain how there's a potential for reimbursement of their pre-application costs, which they have never heard of that in other grants that they've gone after. So we will do the NOIs, those notice of intents, cost benefit, application development.

And again, we're just facilitating making this as easy as possible because we all want them to mitigate these risks. So it's, again, a really essential and really a fantastic partnership of all of the agencies we've been working with and the nonprofits on top of it.

Our next steps that we always give them is they need to include the board. It's something that it takes a little while for the funds to become available. If they get that approval, it can be upwards of 18 months. But it's also something where if they're going to be doing lighting upgrades, they can actually do mitigation at the same time. So we basically work with them to help them be cost essential in that they can do another project at the same time or basically don't replace the lights and then do mitigation work. Let's do the mitigation work. And while you're up in the ceilings, then you can do your lighting upgrade, something like that. So there's as part of their capital improvement project, they can, you know, double up and be cost effective. I already mentioned the reimbursement, but also the other thing we explain is the federal share and nonprofit share, because that's something that when they see that is like, oh, you know, nonprofits run on a very limited budget, but explain how the nonprofit share, it can be in kind, donations, volunteer time, there's a lot of ways they can cover it.

And usually the stress level goes much farther down when we get to that point. But it's also to explain that when we get to that point, they're not surprised by their share that they have to include in that.

So that is the earthquake strengthening program overall. Again, we cover NEHERP and HMGP. I'm going to have my information in here. I'm going to jump ahead. If you have questions about that, I'll leave time at the end. but I want to talk about the other one since I have a little bit of time here. So keep your questions handy and we'll get back to this in just a second. Our other program that we have with Cal OES is our,

I'm emailing myself. I didn't want to do that.

Sorry.

Strategic placement of the,

okay, I don't want to open it. That's right. Okay. Let's see if I can go on to the next slide. There we go. Is our resilient workplace training. And it's working with small business and nonprofits. And you can see there's, there's, you know, well-designed overlap in these programs.

The nonprofits that we're working with in the ESP program can also benefit from the resilient workplace program. So this is where we have created tools and training that can be used by these businesses and nonprofits to take advantage of. We've done it through developing tools such as the DRB toolkit as a way for them to be educated as to what business continuity is. We took all the terminology out, tried to keep it simple, and some other tools that we've developed with Cal OES to make this really simple. The toolkit specifically, I'm going to show you a couple of quick slides.

And you're going to get all these slides, so I'm not going to cover everything in great detail, but I just wanted you to see what was in here. But to make it really simple, we use tools and videos. Again, took the terminology out. There's a glossary. But again, we want to simplify so that these organizations who are very busy running their operations, dealing with customers or what have you, that they can come back to this at any point because they don't have a lot of time. It will keep track of everything for them.

And they don't have to have any disaster experience whatsoever. It will keep tabs of their process and progress. And in the end, they'll end up with a business continuity plan. We have other tools that we've developed. One is a mobile app. It's a DRB guide. And they end up with a recovery blueprint that will be really easy for them to use. If something does happen, if they're disrupted, it will help them because they've already figured out their priorities to recover.

So we explain the basis of, you know, disasters, but we want to use the tools basically to go beyond just a basic checklist. As I said, all of this will track the progress. It helps them meet regulatory requirements that they have them. But again, just make it easy. That's the main goal here. If they come, we want to give them that basic understanding of what business continuity is.

but we just talk about the simple terms, you know, what a disaster is, a disruption, and how to move forward. We've got this broken down into nine chapters, how to organize, how to understand their hazards, what their priorities are within their operations.

Then we give them solution chapters, what they do before, during, and after, and we give them strategies looking at good, better, and best practices, and they decide what they want to use. And then they develop their plan. That's basically being done throughout that whole process.

Then we have an exercise chapter. And then how do you keep it updated? Because if it's not updated, it's not going to serve anybody. So it's a very step-by-step process. Learn as you go. And everything is captured as they go. We have a lot of information and examples. We have our ABC coffee company that has already completed this process. So it gives them ideas of how they can fill it out.

And then they check the box at the bottom, which keeps track of their progress. And again, I mentioned the info examples. And every chapter has an index checklist so that they can see where they are. And they can always go back into the tool by using the checklist. And it's easily navigable. They can move around very quickly in it. And then our mobile tool is the other piece that, again, looks at the recovery. But it's all the things they need to do in advance to make those decisions. We want to highlight the resources that exist to help them.

We'll cover the Earthquake Country Alliance and ShakeOut. We'll cover other tools such as QuakeSmart. Again, trying to, through the process of these workshops, explain very simply of the great resources that exist out there and the great partners that want to help them and how they can connect and how this can actually be a part of a larger program for them. But it's all, again, it's all connected that they're an important part of our communities and we want to make sure that they're going to be up and running afterwards. So that's our second program.

Through the NICR program, we have this is in Spanish, English, Tagalog.

Let's see, I'm missing one.

Chinese, and we're right now doing Farsi, Armenian, Korean, and I'm missing one. There's another one. I'll remember in a minute. So again, all of these tools are in multiple languages that we can reach out that have been prioritized in the state of California. So anyone through those language communities and our partners, we push it out there so they can attend one of these workshops.

But in a nutshell, that is our two approaches to helping California communities are really essential service community providers, as well as businesses, and how they can take advantage of these programs to mitigate their risks through the resources that exist. and get themselves better prepared and really on track with resilience. And we couldn't do any of this without our fantastic partners at Cal OES and FEMA. Can't say enough about what a tremendous partnership effort this has been. And we're just really happy to be working with them.

And all of these are programs that could be easily exported to any state.

And again, it's great to work with good partners. And if there's something here of interest, you can contact me and reach out and we can show you what we've been doing. Maybe might inspire you or this might be something that you'd like to start doing as well. So we'd be happy to work with you. So I tried to get through as much as I could. Hopefully,

if there are any questions, I can take those as well.