For more than 30 years, the Brown County EMT Association has trained first responders and hosted a free Thanksgiving dinner for the community.
Last month, it was announced that the association was dissolving.
The plan is to use the organization’s remaining funds to keep hosting a community Thanksgiving dinner for at least five years, and for a new organization, the Brown County Public Safety Training Institute, to take over the trainer role.
The EMT association also put on Operation Prom, a simulated accident scene that showed high-schoolers why they shouldn’t drink and drive. That event will be taken over by the Brown County Fire Association.
Commissioner Diana Biddle read a letter from the association at the Aug. 1 commissioners meeting announcing the dissolution. The letter said it was due to changes in the emergency services in Brown County and a desire to not duplicate.
The association was formed in 1984 to train first responders and EMTs. Then, the association discovered there was a gap in rescue services, and members decided to start doing auto extractions and heavy-duty rescues in the county, because the fire departments had the ability to do so at the time, association treasurer Chris Henderson said at the meeting.
Earlier this year, the Brown County Public Safety Training Institute was created to provide basic life-saving training to public safety agencies, which includes a basic EMT course. Eleven firefighters from five of the six volunteer fire departments in the county are currently in that EMT course, which will wrap up in December. The sixth fire department did not have a person available to it this time around, but plans to participate in the future, said Brown County Emergency Management Director Susan Armstrong.
Armstrong and Brown County Emergency Preparedness Manager Corey Frost are co-administrators of the institute, and an oversight board soon will be created.
The county received around $49,000 from the Indiana State Department of Health to fund a mass causality response unit, and part of that project included creating the training institute.
“The idea was to be able to bring in several volunteer firefighters in the county, get them trained and certified to the EMT basic level, and that would help our capabilities of being able to respond to a mass causality incident if we ever had one here locally. Without a hospital, that just seemed like a very important capability to be able to take care of,” Frost said.
Henderson said Aug. 1 that volunteer fire departments now have emergency extraction equipment, too. He said with the training institute in place, there isn’t much use for the Brown County EMT Association now.
However, keeping the Thanksgiving dinner going is important to Henderson.
About $10,000 will be transferred from the association’s account to the Thanksgiving dinner fund to cover advertising, insurance and buying food that isn’t donated each year.
Biddle suggested creating a committee to help run the dinner, and Henderson said he’s still willing for the next five years.
“My kids have been part of it. That’s the only thing we’ve known about Thanksgiving for quite a while,” he said.
Henderson said he would like to see more churches attend the dinner and bring in families. “Families with young kids, we’re not getting them into the dinner,” he said.
Henderson said mostly senior citizens attend, and there’s been a major increase in meal deliveries since some in that population now can’t drive.
“That’s where I would like to see some of the churches get involved and help bring that dinner as more of a community dinner,” he said. “We get plenty of volunteers; it’s just having the people to serve (food to).”
Any remaining money left in the association’s account after its equipment is sold or scrapped will be given to the training institute or to create scholarships for people to attend classes through the institute, Henderson said.
Costs are associated with the classes, but they vary on the class type. “We try to keep the costs at a minimum to individuals and (volunteer fire) departments,” Armstrong said.
Each year, the commissioners give $10,300 to the EMT Association. In their letter announcing the dissolution, the association requested that that money be given to the training institute in the future as a “continuous funding source.”
“That $10,000 is going to go a long way to helping get EMS training, law enforcement training, anything else that falls outside of that original grant project, that initial funding that we got,” Armstrong said.
“Now that we have sustainability money, we can move forward and just knock the 40-some trainings that people have requested since we started this idea off the board. Then nobody has to worry how we’re going to fund it. … The fire departments know that the training institute is going to be able to take care of that for them.”
Armstrong said this grant and the training institute align with a public safety goal of being better prepared to respond to events such as active shooters and mass causalities.
Community members will be able to get involved with some training sessions, but most will be specific and will require pre-requisites, Frost said.
Some possible community training sessions include CPR and first aid classes, “(or) some of those awareness level classes of ‘see something, say something’ … just to get the community a little bit more aware of their surroundings, what’s going on,” Armstrong added.
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For more information, search for “Brown County Public Safety Training Institute” on Facebook.
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