This week we are talking to Jerusha Kasch from Rice University about the role of the emergency manager and were they belong in the organization chart. This is one of the key parts to increasing the professional standards of the field of emergency management.

Guest Bio
Jerusha Kasch began her Emergency Management career as a young girl in a house hold that had a serious preparedness focus. Her family maintained a 1 year food/necessities storage process for 10 people. Once, for Christmas, she and all her siblings were asked what item they wanted to contribute to the food storage for a year as their Christmas gift. You will have to ask her what she chose.

Jerusha has officially worked as an emergency manager for over 10 years, but she pulls strongly on her other response backgrounds to support her emergency management role. Prior to her emergency management years, she has 18 years’ experience in multiple other response systems including, EMS, Law Enforcement, Hospital and clinical care. Jerusha has filled nearly all ICS command and general staff roles and has been extremely blessed over the years to consistently be in the right place at the right time, to be trained by skilled individuals. While Jerusha has attended several colleges and universities, she eventually finished her undergraduate and graduate studies at Portland State University, in Portland Oregon. Two of the universities she attended had mottos that were service based. “Enter to learn, go forth to serve” and “Let knowledge serve the city” are words that she has adopted in her life as a public servant. She takes them very seriously (with a splash of fun and humor, of course).

A great deal of Jerusha’s time is spent training others for emergency management roles. Jerusha has been a CPD certified ICS instructor for 10 years and during that time has taught many (too many to count) ICS course curricula in multiple states (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Texas) at the basic and advanced level. She was one of the first Master level PIOs in the nation and continues to teach advanced PIO courses for FEMA and Wiland & Associates.

Jerusha has been a member of several Incident Management Teams and has successfully built 4 Type III IMTs over the last 10 years.

Jerusha is originally from Alabama and is a HUGE University of Alabama (ROLL TIDE) fan. She is married to a super cool husband, mother to a blended family of 5 and a grandmother of 3. She loves adrenaline sports of all kinds and has a bucket list a mile long.



Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerusha-kasch-a00333160/
Website: https://emergency.rice.edu/

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