Hello @us-hosted - we got a few questions rolling in yesterday about the forum discussion activity that was scheduled to begin on Monday, so figured it was best to send an update to everyone at once.
Due to the extreme weather conditions and continued power outages in Texas, Jessica has been intermittently without electricity and unable to get online since Monday. I imagine our colleagues in the UT - Austin cohort may very well have been experiencing similar conditions. Our priority is making sure our team is safe and sound before continuing with our planned pilot activities. To that end, we are pushing back the start of the forum discussion at least a week, to next Monday the 22nd. The rest of the SPN pilot timeline will be adjusted accordingly. We’ll update you all again when that’s settled and available.
For clarity’s sake, our “forum discussion” activities will take place here - on the Community Forum. Jessica or I will start a new thread/topic with prompt questions based on your collated responses to the first couple of guided activities (thank you so much to everyone for your terrific work and responses so far!) There is no Zoom call or synchronous meeting for forum discussions - since we are so spread out geographically, we hope using the Community Forum will allow for a lively asynchronous discussion (when the time comes, we do encourage you to read and respond not only to our prompts/questions, but to each other!!!) The next meeting scheduled is the EaaSI Network monthly call on March 2nd, which I know will be the first such call for many of you, and we’ll also follow up to make sure everyone has the time and links and details of that as soon as possible.
Thanks all for your patience. If you have the means and opportunity, this seems to be a pretty good rundown of mutual aid funds and local organizations working to help folks in Texas with no or inadequate shelter. If anyone is aware of other, trusted resources on the ground, please share here.
Be well!