Good afternoon everybody.  We’re going to go ahead and get started.  I want to thank everybody for joining us by VTC and by Webcast for all of you watching this at home.  I’m shortly going to turn the program over to Craig and to Rich to share with you the news of our new FEMA Corps launch today.  We’re going to be doing this kind of in a different format by Webcast and I have a running stream of questions coming in from those of you at home.  So what we’re going to do, we’ve got some folks up on the VTC and others who are typing in questions to us.  So we’re going to sort of take turns.  I’m going to read some of them by e-mail and then turn it over to the screen in front of us and take some of the questions from those who are joining us by VTC.  But in the meantime I’m going to turn it over to Craig.

Well good afternoon, everybody and today the Secretary announced a memorandum that we have signed with the National Corporation for Community Service establishing what we’re calling FEMA Corps.  It is a program which we will provide funding to the National Corporation to build up to ultimately 1,600 AmeriCorps members that will be recruited and trained to support our operations in response and recovery across the country.  Now, this is generating angst, questions and a whole lot of issues.  So first let me be clear on why we did this.  Our observations of numerous disasters have been states and local governments had been using and integrating AmeriCorps successfully in many of their operations.  And the thing that really was attractive to us was the diversity and the opportunity to recruit people into FEMA that have oftentimes never even heard of us until disaster struck their communities.  And we looked at if we’re going to be a workforce that is more reflective of the country and communities that we serve, we’ve got to do a better job of recruiting and getting people engaged early when they are still forming what is their long-term career path.  If you’re familiar with AmeriCorps, these are people out of high school or college that have an opportunity to serve.  They get stipends but they are in a service role and for those stipends at the end of their successful completion they become eligible for various benefits including forgiveness for student loans or college opportunities.  So they serve their country, they get a stipend, their opportunity is an exposure to what we do but it also supports them in furthering their career paths.  They learn skill sets from us and capabilities that they can apply both to college and to future careers.  Many of these folks that go through AmeriCorps do not ultimately stay in the programs they work in but they take those experiences forward.  So to me this is an opportunity to take folks that quite honestly are not always represented in our workforce or a much different demographics than we have traditionally been able to recruit for emergency management.  It gives us the opportunity to bring that different group into FEMA in a way that adds value to what we do.  I’ve heard a lot of other questions.  We’ll probably get this and then I’ll wait ‘til we get the questions.  But as I’ve seen when we do something different and it creates concerns, we seem to find more questions to actually drive the question why this won’t work instead of looking at this as an opportunity to build a workforce for the future and a way that we would not be able otherwise to have done it.  And again, the work it out there.  We look at what it would take to respond to large catastrophic events.  This is one more tool in building a larger capability with the resources we have.  And so this is about ultimately growing future generations of emergency managers; not just for FEMA but for everybody as a whole.  But also looking at growing a more diverse workforce so it’s more reflective of the communities that oftentimes we respond to but oftentimes are not represented in the ranks of the people coming to help.  So that was one of the most attractive parts of this.  But the person that really gets the credit for this -- because we were actually down in Joplin and it was kind of like the light bulb goes off as we’re talking to some folks and we actually -- Andrew this is your fault because it was actually one of your folks from Region Five.  We had all these AmeriCorps folks down there and we had a FEMA person and started asking and he says, yeah, I actually started out in AmeriCorps and he developed a career path into FEMA.  And we saw all of this work being done and all the support and Rich kind of took the idea and said, you know, this might be a different way to grow FEMA to not replace but to augment the team.  And so Rich took this and ultimately I had an opportunity to brief about ways of doing things more effectively with our tax dollars.  There was a surprise visitor to that meeting and when the President heard this, he goes, this is something that I’m excited about.  And I’m going to turn it over to Rich because if there’s anybody that gets credit for going all the way through to execute, it’s Rich and his team.  Because it’s not been an easy path.  But it all starts with seeing something working and going how do we bring it to FEMA?  All the way up to the President of the United States saying this is exciting.  Rich?

Well thanks, Craig and I think that there’s a lot of people in this room and on the VTC and over in NCCC that really  helped make this happen.  And a couple of them are here and that’s Bob Fenton and Brad Kaisman and Kate Rafferty from NCCC that -- as well as a lot of other folks that really pushed this through in many long nights, weekends, to make this happen.  Although it’s just the beginning.  The training that they’re going to get is going to be at the campuses of AmeriCorps.  They have five campuses and they’re going to start with two of them.  And then the training will then be supplemented with some of the training that we have FQS in very specific job categories, eight to be specific that they’ll be getting.  And as we go through this, this is going to be an opportunity for young folks to look at emergency management as a career.  You know, it was in Joplin, it was also a visit down to Bastrop and Austin and talking to some of the AmeriCorps volunteers in Bastrop with Brad and then also one of Tony’s folks that was also in AmeriCorps member and then came to FEMA.  And it’s something that to me just made sense as to why we can do this.  It makes sense in service.  It makes service in the ethos, it makes sense in service to the survivors and it’s something that we can do and it was a matter of just let’s figure out how to do it.  There were a lot of questions.  There are going to be a lot of questions, yeah.  Are there some questions with the reservists and I said at the press conference earlier today that the FEMA Corps members are going to be there to support the reservists and our FTEs and our current employees at the scene of disasters, whether it’s in a DRC, whether it’s doing CR work but they’re going to be there to support them.  They’re going to be there as trainees.  There’s been a lot of questions you know when we went around to the town halls there were some and now that it’s been announced there’s been a lot more questions.  So you know we just want to have a conversation and let people know what the facts are, where we see this going and hopefully put some people at ease.  I’ve also heard from a number of reservists already who think it’s a great idea and they’re thinking, please can I get my kids or my friends’ kids to be involved?  They’ve been looking for an opportunity to get involved and yes.  We’re looking for people 18 to 24 to join, to be part of this FEMA Corps.  I think it’s going to be an exciting opportunity and I think it’s also going to give professional reservists as well as our full-time emergency mangers an opportunity to work with them and to supervise them and to guide them to be part of the team.  With that, Brad, Bob, questions?  Kathy?  We can just open it up to questions.