I spent the past three years pursuing the professional certification “CEM” from the International Association of Emergency Managers. The CEM is a certified emergency manager and is the highest and most distinguished certification available to emergency managers.

Even though OMB has recently concluded that FEMA is unable to measure regional collaboration on homeland security, we saw regional collaboration first hand during our COOP for Non-Profits presentation at the Faces of Leadership conference in Charleston, WV. Xani and I were giving a stripped down version of the full COOP course to a small but engaged group of folks that represented non-profit organizations and state agencies in West Virginia. We also had three representatives from local emergency management in two counties in the class.