,
19
March
2019
|
15:20 PM
America/Chicago

NESA Spreads Its Wings: New Mobile Team Expanding Program

Civil Air Patrol’s National Emergency Services Academy is spreading its wings.

At least that’s the intent of a new expansion effort known as the NESA Mobile Training Team program, which will soon be capable of supporting each of CAP’s eight regions.

“Our purpose behind the NESA-MTT program is to institute an outreach capability to all regions, while still providing the same level of professional instruction, and fidelity in curriculum excellence, at a much lower cost to the CAP members,” said Lt. Col. Bob Ditch, the retired U.S. Air Force colonel heading up the new program.

“Many of the courses are approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for CAP delivery, and all the course leaders are NESA- and/or FEMA-qualified instructors.”

NESA was founded in 1996 as a means for increasing the knowledge and professionalism of CAP members in incident management and emergency/disaster response. The first two years all the classes were held in Virginia. By 1998, the program had moved to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, and it has resided there ever since — providing unsurpassed emergency services professional development in multiple incident management, public information, communications, aircrew, chaplain and other disciplines.

Since its fledging days, the curriculums at Camp Atterbury have grown from two two-week classes to now nearly 30 separate course deliveries during the main summer school, as well as several courses as needed during the year like small unmanned aircraft system (small UAS) training.

“Now the program has taken a big step out of its nest in Indiana, spread its wings, and is now flying to all points of the compass,” Ditch said.

“The proof of concept for this MTT program was conducted through the delivery of incident management and public information officer courses in Arizona, Texas and New Jersey,” said Ditch, who serves as CAP’s liaison to the International Association of Emergency Managers and the FEMA-Emergency Management Institute.

This May and August, “the Northeast Region will host NESA-MTTs, providing ICS 300 and 400 for it and the Middle East Region,” Ditch said.

Future deliveries should be requested through the regions through the operations directorate at CAP National Headquarters. For more information on the NESA-MTT program, and how to request regional deliveries, contact Ditch at rditch@cap.gov or 480-298-2603.