“The Times They Are A-Changin” – Bob Dylan
If you attended Oilapalooza last October you may have been introduced to the concept of adding a third stream to the OWCN Managment Team. Historically, the team was divided into two streams, Care Operations, and Field Operations. The vision of a third stream, Readiness Operations, came to fruition earlier this year and by June the Readiness stream began to evolve from a concept into a functional unit within the OWCN Managment team.

Current OWCN Management Team Structure
Soon after Danene Birtell arrived our team doubled in size when Tim Williamson, Facilities Specialist, moved over to Readiness. Finally, to round out our stream Scott Buhl transitioned from Field Operations Specialist to Responder Specialist (formerly Volunteer Coordinator). We are excited to have Scott fill this role as it aligns well with his previous experience and his passion for personnel management. Now, you’re probably asking yourself “what is readiness going to be responsible for?” Well, after a very productive visioning session we determined that there will be five functional areas in the readiness stream: Responder Management, Public Outreach, Training, Equipment & Supplies, and Network Engagement.

The Five Functional Areas of Readiness
Now that we have our areas of focus we’ve been hard at work on many projects, including pushing the limits of Excel spreadsheet size and developing a Trello board to help us track our tasks. We have even created a team new acronym, PPS, which stands for Preparation, People, and Stuff. There is a lot of work to be done, but we are READY! We look forward to interacting with many of you at some of our upcoming engagement events or a training in the near future. In the meantime, we will be blogging regularly and will keep you up to date on all the new and exciting things Readiness is working on.
Until next time,
Danene, Scott, and Tim, a.k.a. the Readiness Renegades