By law, the Commonwealth of Virginia elects a new Governor every four years, and with the new executive comes a new administration needing to get up to speed quickly on managing the government. That includes the commonwealth’s Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security (PSHS), whose responsibility is to advocate for public safety in the commonwealth and understand the needs of the agencies within the secretariat and the communities they serve.
In the absence of a standard, effective onboarding process for the new PSHS secretariat, Center for Homeland Defense and Security Emergence Program alum Caitlin Barbieri saw an opportunity to leverage her CHDS Emergence Program education to improve things.
The Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM) Intergovernmental Affairs Manager (Emergence cohort 2302) used her change initiative entitled “Onboarding an Administration: Rethinking how VDEM Educates, Informs, and Integrates the Secretariat” to create a comprehensive and streamlined onboarding program.
Barbieri said her Emergence Program instruction helped her “understand where and how she could influence change” within her organization and she used that to inform her change initiative, which she said represents an important step toward improving communication between her agency and the governor’s administration.
She noted in her proposal that at the start of a new administration, the secretariat is “drinking from a firehose, taking in an enormous amount of information, familiarizing themselves with new surroundings, and understanding the role they play in the government ecosystem.”
“It is crucial,” she wrote, “that VDEM effectively educate the secretariat on the role of PSHS and the governor’s office in an emergency, create clear communication avenues, and develop a trusting relationship from day one. Disasters and emergencies can have a lasting impact on an administration, it is the responsibility of VDEM to establish a shared vision for a successful administration through reliable emergency preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation.”
Barbieri’s initiative calls for implementing the new onboarding process in four initial phases and evolving it into a long-term education and advocacy strategy with the ultimate goal to drive the development of a shared consciousness between VDEM and PSHS and lay the foundation for a productive and open relationship between the two teams.
Barbieri said she has received approval from her agency’s executive team to move ahead with her proposal and she expects it to take about a year to fully implement a final version.
She said “one of the coolest things” about creating her change initiative was the opportunity to talk to a range of different people from past Virginia governors’ staffers to other states’ representatives.
Overall, Barbieri said her CHDS education introduced her to the homeland security enterprise writ large, as well as to people her own age working in the field and helped her understand the range of available opportunities.
“It really affirmed for me that homeland security is where I want to be,” she said. “I didn’t expect to gain so much confidence in both myself and the path that I’ve chosen. Emergence really affirmed that I know what I’m doing, and I have a lot more to learn, but I’m where I should be.”
