By Dave and Jeanne Wedekind, Co-Directors

We have entered into a partnership with Baptist Convention of Iowa to lead in Disaster Relief. We are currently the co-directors for Minnesota-Wisconsin Baptist Convention and will continue in that position. This partnership is to begin January 1, 2017, however, due to the recent occurrence of disasters we have been trying to coordinate the responses inviting Iowa volunteers to join in.

We met with Tim Lubinus and key D.R. leaders to discuss the proposed partnership with Iowa.
In June we invited volunteers from Iowa to attend our regional training in Portage, WI.
We invited four key leaders to the Region IV Disaster Relief Roundtable in Shepherdsville, KY in September. They attended breakout training sessions and we discussed future direction for D.R. Dave was elected as vice president of Region IV at this meeting.
We discussed condition and location of units and equipment.
We began credentialing and providing up to date badges for those recently trained.
We have made available our MN-WI Online Recertification Training to Iowa volunteers.
We have met and/or contacted pastors in the flooded areas in NE Iowa to determine needs for D.R. volunteers. No need was identified by them for volunteers to respond.
We participated in the Iowa VOAD conference call during the recent flooding
We are now on the contact list for Iowa VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster).
We have sent out response notices for disasters in Louisiana-Minnesota-Wisconsin-Iowa-Florida asking for volunteers to go with us.
We authorized the completion of a shower unit and the signage/lettering of the recovery unit.
We will be attending the Iowa Annual Meeting and having a display to encourage involvement in this ministry.
We are using NAMB’s Formstack software to track all the responding teams and their work.