Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 9
concerns is that 211 has experienced a substantial overload of calls. 211 is a professional call center,
we are setting up something using city phones and volunteers. So that’s one concern; the second is
Manchester has done a similar initiative and also they become pretty overwhelmed. So we want to
make sure it is right before we set it up. So we will make sure to publicize as far as wide when we do
get it set up.
Alderwoman Lu
Thank you.
President Wilshire
Anyone else have questions for Director Bagley?
Alderman Lopez
| mean how can people help is | think a question a lot of people have on their minds, if you are making
a call center can you get like 49 volunteers to help or is there a role for the public that they can offer
something or even a way for you to receive offers of help and then screen them and then figure out
who is helpful?
Director Kates
So | will talk a little bit more about this on my section but this is going to be an all of community
response. The City Government is not going to be able to handle this, we’ve identified that the State
Government is unable to handle this and frankly, the Federal Government is also unable to handle
this. So just alone here within the City, one of the things we discussed this morning was our
organizational structure for this response. The Mayor’s Office, Cheryl has offered to take on some of
the responsibilities related to volunteers and donations management. So each City Department even if
it is sort of outside of their typical scope, they are doing some strange things that they wouldn't do day-
to-day. So that is one of the things that we are looking at for volunteers and donations management.
The ideas that we have seen that we have leveraged in previous disasters have been around having
some sort of intake form; what types of skills do you have, and then being able to triage those based
on the need that we have. We have already seen in some of these States, the use of volunteers for
everything ranging from helping to set up digital classrooms through delivering meals and those types
of activities. So it is going to be, just that alone is going to be a massive undertaking.
Director Bagley
If | may, we are also looking to recruit individuals in our medical reserve corp and also in our
Community Emergency Response Teams, so through the CERT. We also are looking at the
opportunity that we will have with some of our universities where some of the college students are right
now not in school. They can also help with some of the things that we are going to need. Just today, |
had to make a delivery to a home with food. And so we are going to need that, if our numbers
continue to go up and we have people that we are asking to stay home and isolate, we are going to
need to have that set of volunteers help with delivering food and other things that people may need if
they can’t go out into the community.
