#SenecaProud

Pat Perdue  00:01 

Hey, I'm Pat Perdue, and I'd like to welcome you to Season Two of the Seneca Proud podcast. This is a co-production between my company Ycastr and Seneca College in Toronto. Seneca College is a really great school. And what we uncovered in season one of Seneca Proud is that there's a Seneca spirit. And that comes from the really great people that Seneca attracts. This season we'll be featuring some of those students, staff as well as faculty to not only learn what they do here, but also a little bit about who they are. So, join me on this journey of discovery, as we meet some of the people who make Seneca College, such a special place to teach, work and study. 

Welcome to Seneca Proud Season Two, where I get to introduce you to some of Seneca College's amazing family of staff, faculty, and students. So, if you haven't already, subscribe, and download and let's go meet some of the super inspiring folks here at Seneca. I'm Pat Perdue, and I'm glad you're here today.  

And welcome back to Season Two of the Seneca Proud podcast. This is Season Two, Episode Eleven and I am Pat Perdue. Welcome back. Season Two of the Seneca Proud podcast is about bringing forward stories not only of the faculty but of students and staff and highlighting their achievements both while at Seneca and outside of Seneca.

Hey, welcome back to the Seneca Proud podcast. I'm Pat Perdue, and I'm really glad you're joining us from wherever you are. I say that because you're probably not at a Seneca College campus or any other office for that matter because as I record this, the entire world is responding to the Coronavirus pandemic, which means for most of us, it's staying where we are. So, wherever you are, I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and well. 

And speaking of staying safe and well our guest today is the person whose job it is to keep Seneca students, staff, and faculty safe. Michelle Daikon is the Director of Security and Emergency Management Services at Seneca College. And as such, she and her team are overseeing the Seneca College response to COVID 19. It was great that you could join us during this very busy and intense time. So let me tell you a little bit more about Michelle Daikon as Director of Security and Emergency Management Services at Seneca Michelle is responsible for providing leadership and strategic direction with respect to ensuring the safety and security of community members across all campuses. 

As you'll hear from our conversation Michelle is really motivated and passionate not only about keeping us safe, but also about providing education on how we can be prepared for emergencies particularly active attacker and crisis situations. We touch on that in our conversation today. Michelle has tons of experience in crisis management. She led the response for organizations to several high-profile emergencies including pandemic response in a major GTA hospital, the 2013 Toronto flooding, the Ontario winter ice storm and a natural gas explosion and oil spill. What a career she has! And, as a former student of Seneca College Michelle is an active member of the Alumni Association and was Seneca’s 2013, Premier’s Award nominee. 

As you may have discovered, I often start my interviews with asking about a typical day. Well, these days are obviously not typical for Michelle. So, we get started by exploring Seneca College's response to COVID 19, both directly for students and for the wider community. Then we get into more detail about Michelle's job and a little bit of behind the scenes. I have to tell you, I edit these conversations you probably know I typically take out the umms and ahhs to make sure that everyone sounds as amazing as possible. And truth be told, I tend to say way more umms and ahhs than my guests. So, most of the editing is on me. But anyway, what I found myself saying a lot during this interview was “wow”, so I took out a lot of that out because it just got really annoying as I was listening to it back. Michelle has a really cool job, and she does it really well. And I just couldn't help but be really impressed as I'm sure you will be too. I'm super glad to be able to share this conversation with you. 

Okay, so here's the interview with the Director of Security and Emergency Management Services at Seneca College, Michelle Dakin. 

When I do these podcasts, a first question that I often ask is walk me through a typical day. But these days have not at all been typical for you, of course because of the COVID 19 situation. So, can you share with us a little bit about your response and your department's response to COVID 19 and maybe generally more of Seneca’s response to COVID-19 ?

 

Michelle Dakin  04:47 

Sure, most of my days are spent now in our emergency operations center, which is operating currently under the President's office. I'm here daily ensuring  our response is successful from a Seneca perspective. Earlier in January, we identified a growing concern with the Coronavirus. And we implemented our incident management team at the time, a small group, to ensure that we were prepared and getting ready for the potential hit of Coronavirus. 

 

Pat Perdue  05:24 

So, you kind of saw it coming. You kind of said this thing might be a thing that's happening. 

 

Michelle Dakin  05:28 

Yeah. We started to hear about things coming out of Wuhan, Hubei province. And we're really closely connected with our health care providers. We were having initial discussions in the emergency management world about how we would ensure we're prepared for a potential pandemic, or epidemic in any capacity. We did pull together an incident management team to ensure that we were having a discussion from a Seneca level; we increased our cleaning pretty early, just to combat the flu season as well. But to ensure we were doing everything we can we started looking at our business continuity plans, and then as Coronavirus and now COVID-19 escalated and started to come into Canada, we increased our incident management team,  escalated it to ensure we had the appropriate people on board. And we opened up our Emergency Operations Center, which is a room which is now a virtual room that we use to respond to any type of emergency. 

 

Pat Perdue  06:34 

You’re physically on campus right now. What's it like on campus? Are there many people still there?

 

Michelle Dakin  06:41 

Oh no, there's not. So, it's pretty quiet. I'm enjoying the drive to work, that's for sure. 

 

Pat Perdue  06:46 

Record time I bet.

 

Michelle Dakin  06:48 

Exactly yes, it's, it's quiet. We do have designated screening stations at all of our campuses at every entrance. The security officers are ensuring only essential individuals are coming on site and that they do not have any symptoms related to COVID 19, or history of travel or close contact with someone who has been confirmed. It is quiet. We do see a few students coming in to clean out their lockers and pick up laptops so that they can continue their online learning. And then we have essential staff.

 

Pat Perdue  07:23 

What is keeping you and your team busy right now?

 

Michelle Dakin  07:27 

Keeping me busy right now is ensuring our overall response to the emergency. You know, although we are social distancing right now and we are online, we still have to remember that we are in a pandemic. We need to ensure we're planning for an increased illness amongst our staff and students and how we're going to ensure we can keep our core business operating. So that's what we're doing from an emergency operation center. From a security perspective, the buildings are still operating, we still have key people here. We need to make sure that everyone is staying safe., that they’re social distancing and that people that are on site are not sick and things like that. 

 

Pat Perdue  08:13 

We mentioned some of the things that we can do, like social distancing. And we hear that all the time. And we chatted a little bit before we started recording. And we talked about some initiatives that Seneca is involved in in order to maybe help the greater community or help students or faculty or just provide some other assistance. Can you share with us some programs that Seneca is doing? 

 

Michelle Dakin  08:38 

Sure, there's a couple of things that the teams have been working very hard on to ensure not only our employees are safe, but our students are safe and that we're assisting the community. Some of the different faculties at Seneca have donated supplies and much needed medical supplies such as n95 masks, gowns, masks, we've donated ventilators. Also, our campus services folks as our cafeterias are closed, have donated over $5,000 worth of food to various food banks in the areas to assist with that. Last week on Friday, our president sent an email out stating that we now have a COVID 19 Relief Fund for students who are facing financial hardship because of COVID-19, we have a fund in place to provide them much needed monetary funds. We're just doing a variety of different things, the faculties as well as the administrative departments in any way we can. 

From an employee perspective, we are also asking employees to really think about the current way that they're operating as we move to this new online format; to identify ways now that they're working at home, they're one to two weeks in, what are other various other ways that you can help Seneca during this time? So where could you potentially be reassigned to help other areas that have an increased need for support right now? Maybe your day-to-day job, can't be done online, are there are other things that you can think of that could potentially help us with the various things that we're doing in response to this?

 

Pat Perdue  10:28 

Sounds like it's an all-hands-on deck situation, for sure. And even, you know, for those of us who find ourselves at home, and the best thing we can do, is kind of nothing, right? The thing that we can do is stay home and stay home. But that feels like we're not doing enough. What guidance might you give to someone who's listening who might be looking for ways to participate in initiatives that Seneca is taking? Maybe you mentioned the relief fund, would that be the best place to go to in order to feel like we're actively making a difference? 

 

Michelle Dakin  11:06 

The relief fund is set up for students. But we're always looking for feedback in regard to various different things; our leadership and employee development under human resources is having, for example, daily online meetings for employees so that they can learn various different things through development or different physical exercises, or how to stay sane at home when your kids are running around. And you still need to do your seven and a half hours of work. They're always looking for tips or things that they can do for those meetings as well. If anyone has any ideas, of how you can communicate with your department better, or how, for example, some of the things that have come through, we've had people offering online yoga sessions for staff and students. So, there's a variety of different things. And we're really asking everyone to email through one email address, which is health@senecapolytechnic.ca

Anything COVID-19 related, any ideas that you have, any concerns that you have, anything that you think you can use to help in this response, we want you to go through there, and we have a team of communication experts that are responding and bringing it forward to our incident management team meetings and looking for a variety of ways to help out. 

 

Pat Perdue  12:25 

Wow, okay, I'll make sure I put some of those links in the show notes of today's program so folks will be able to find that. I'd love to find out a little bit more about you and your day, typically, non-COVID 19. You know, before all of this, let's cast your mind back maybe six months ago, what would be a typical day in the life of the Director of Security and Emergency Management Services?

 

Michelle Dakin  12:51 

Typical days are usually coming on to campus and making sure that I follow up on any incidents that may have happened the night before or the day before ensuring we're good to go on that front. And then it varies. A couple months ago, six months ago, we were working on our active attacker program, we were releasing our Emergency Response Program for that doing various trainings. We did a lot of focus on crisis situations training and de-escalation techniques for our frontline workers. So, it really depends on what the emergency management response is for that month, what we're focusing on a variety of different training opportunities and ensuring we have a safe place where people come every day.

 

Pat Perdue  13:45 

On behalf of everybody who comes to this place and stays safe, thank you and your team very much. We really, really appreciate the work that you do. And I remember as a faculty member myself, I guess about a year ago, I attended some active attacker training where the potential of an active shooter was presented  and discussed in different classrooms. Share with us a little bit about that initiative because personally, I found that both really interesting and also reassuring simply because it was talked about and it felt like okay, so now we kind of have a game plan, if somebody does show up on campus wanting to do harm. 

 

Michelle Dakin  14:27 

We retooled our active attacker program, we used to call it locked down and we used to talk about locking down in various classrooms, but now we know that with active attacker situations we are at risk of potentially having them here in the college environment. We're considered a soft target. People can walk in our doors and potentially harm other individuals here, so we wanted to focus on redoing our active attacker program, and really giving our employees and students the tools that they need to respond if this were to happen. We talked about ‘get out, hide and fight’, providing various options for individuals at the college in any type of situation that you are in to protect yourself and get out of harm's way. We've actually been doing a lot of in person training. The training tool talks to you about what an active attacker can potentially look like, what are some signs for you to potentially identify them? Who do you notify if something is happening? Who notifies you and then the options for what you can do if this were to occur. So really empowering the employees and students to take initiative to ensure their safety and the safety of others. We've been really focusing on that. We've put out a 12-minute video, we have a dedicated webpage under our Security Services web page for it, and we're getting a lot of positive feedback about it. Because this is something that you need to think about in any type of environment. We see that these incidents can happen anywhere, not just in a college setting, when you're out shopping at the mall, or the grocery store, or you're in the Christmas market, whatever it may be. These are things that could occur. We want to really empower staff to be able to utilize these tools no matter where they go. 

 

Pat Perdue  16:24 

I know, for me, I felt empowered. And that was typically the response that folks have been providing you said, you know, you're getting a really positive response. Is it because people can answer the question? Okay, so this could happen, what am I going to do? 

 

Michelle Dakin  16:39 

Yeah, and I think some of the things that people worry about are things like, well, I can't lock my door, I don't have a lock on my classroom door. Or I'm in a fully glass building, such as Magna Hall, how am I supposed to hide? We really provide examples of various different doors that you can hide from or block or restrict access to, and then really let people know what the mentality is of someone who is actively attacking and how you can use that mentality to ensure your safety. Some of the feedback that we get is like, oh, well, I didn't know that I could potentially fight someone who is actively attacking. And well, sometimes that's your only option. And you need to do what you need to do to get home at night. So really letting people know that they are responsible for making the decision in this type of incident and providing them the necessary tools so that if it ever happens, they can run through in their mind and know exactly what they're going to do. We've seen some pretty positive feedback from it. You know, we're a performance review type of organization. I hand out the reviews after and they've been coming back pretty positive, people want to know that they're going to be notified appropriately, and that there are supports for them. People are more comfortable when they hear that our security officers are mass casualty trained. We have mass casualty kits on site if this were to ever happen. And we've been running through these scenarios quite frequently. It makes people more comfortable. 

 

Pat Perdue  18:13 

Well, and again, on behalf of everybody. Thank you, for all you do. And you know, it occurs to me as we're talking about this, you spend a lot of your time thinking what's the terrible thing that could happen? And how are we going to respond to that? Is that sort of where your mind is at all the time? 

 

Michelle Dakin  18:32 

Yes. It is part of my job to ensure I'm assessing risk in any type of way at any type of time. We're continuously doing risk assessments and hazard identification, and what are the various different things that can potentially happen to us? And how can we make sure that we're safe if they do happen? And it's a variety of different things, not even from an emergency management perspective on an active attacker or infrastructure loss or failure if a tornado hits or things like that, we also look at the way our facilities are set up. Are we appropriately preventing crime through the designs that we have or are the guards patrolling in various areas to ensure we're deterring crime in there? We're always looking from whether it's a security perspective or an emergency management perspective. What could potentially happen and how can we mitigate against that? 

 

Pat Perdue  19:25 

And your perspective takes into account all four campuses? Is that correct? 

 

Michelle Dakin  19:29 

Correct five, including Peterborough. 

 

Pat Perdue  19:32 

Thank you. Yes, so each campus, I'm guessing would represent a slightly different set of variables in terms of risk assessment and also potentially resources and response and all that kind of thing. 

 

Michelle Dakin  19:45 

Correct. Because all of our campuses are different. For example, our campus has a lot of landscape that has itself its own risks. Our Peterborough campus when you bring planes onto the campus and fly that’s a different risk.  Seneca York, we have the risk of York University and a different type of community there as well. We look at the risk for each campus based off their geographical area, we look at the type of programs. We know the different faculties and the different programs bring different risks. We're always trying to assess what could go wrong. 

 

Pat Perdue  20:23 

As you describe that, I'm thinking I would never be able to sleep. Because you're always not really worrying, but you're strategizing and maybe worrying, but wondering where the gaps are wondering what you can change, wondering what you can improve. Is that a correct statement? In terms of like, I guess my question is, how can you be so calm? 

 

Michelle Dakin  20:51 

A lot of training, it takes a lot of training. And I don't know if it's my competitive nature, that I just thrive in this type of environment. But it does definitely take a lot of training, a lot of communication, and also just looking on the positive side of things. For example, pandemic planning can be very tedious. But it also can be very concerning when you start looking at 30 to 35%, illness rates, and you're planning for your staff to go down or you're planning for the inevitable illness or potential death. But you have to look on the positive side of things and look at all the different various things that we're doing to ensure people are safe. Putting in the screening stations, increasing our cleaning protocols, making sure we focus on high touch surfaces and common areas, making a positive environment for people to work from home, making sure supervisors are checking in on their staff. We look at the positive type of things that even from an active attacker perspective, we walk away from that training, asking people to walk into their areas and say, “What can I use as a potential weapon in here? What could potentially be used to attack me? How would I lock down this door?” And we're changing the mentality of the way people think. But we also just say, well, this is to protect you. It's unfortunately the environment that we live in. But by thinking of these things, we're going to ensure the safety of others. 

 

Pat Perdue  22:17 

And thematically throughout all of what you've just said, feels like it's empowerment. You know, we feel strong through our own sense of, we can respond, what's our response to this? One thing you also mentioned is a big product of your ability to thrive in this role is your training. And you're a former Seneca student.

 

Michelle Dakin  22:39 

I am! I did my graduate program here and then Advanced Investigations and Enforcement. I went to school here at the King campus and made a lot of relationships and met a lot of great faculty members. And they were instrumental in helping me get into emergency management and get into this field. I graduated from Seneca and went straight into health care as an emergency manager and have experience with pandemics because my first real emergency response was H1N1 pandemic response in a healthcare setting. I was very thankful for my time at Seneca.  

 

Pat Perdue  23:19

I think it's so great that you could study at Seneca and then you're giving back to Seneca and really, really contributing. So that's super cool. 

As we consider life past COVID-19. And folks are starting to get back into whatever normal will look like at that time, what's going to be your response and helping faculty staff and students reintegrate into the physical workplaces and places of study that are Seneca College? 

 

Michelle Dakin  23:52 

Even though we're still in our response mode as part of our emergency operation center, under our planning section, we already are talking about our demobilization of our EOC. We mean people back onto the campus and what that's going to look like. So even though we don't know when that will be, we announced on Friday that our Summer semester will be online, we want to ensure that when people come back to campus, they come back to a safe environment. It looks exactly like it did when they left. We have ensured our cleaning protocols are in place so that  they're coming back to a safe campus from a cleanliness perspective. And then just making sure that we bring people back - we're not going to say the doors are open, everyone needs to come back immediately. What are doing is we're really focusing on looking at our essential services and what we need for those essential services to thrive not only in an online environment, but when we do open our campuses again. So, all that planning is currently underway. Not exactly sure what it looks like, but we will really focus on essential services, bringing them back one at a time, making sure we're not overwhelming the system. And also, not shocking the guards who are now used to a very quiet environment, bringing 20,000 people on our campuses. We're planning for that now, it’s part of our overall business continuity planning. We're planning for an increased rate of illness, but we're also planning for the demobilization of people returning back. 

 

Pat Perdue  25:35 

Got it? Well, Michelle Dakin, I know you're super busy and I really want to thank you both for setting aside the time to talk to us today. And I know I've said it, but it's worth saying, again, thank you, and your team of heroes for keeping us as well as we can be kept during this very, very unique and challenging time and also keeping our best interests at heart and our wellness and safety at heart even when things are normal. Thank you so much.

And that was my conversation with the Director of Security and Emergency Management Services at Seneca College, Michelle Dakin. Super interesting job, right. It's her whole job to think of the bad things that could happen, and then come up with plans and strategies to minimize the risk and ensure that we're as prepared as possible. And she seems so cool about it. It almost sounds easy, but if you think about it Michelle is the person who runs toward the fire or toward the gunshots. Michelle and her team are the heroes. So, to Michelle, and to all the security team at Seneca College, thank you for the work that you do every day. 

And Michelle mentioned an email address to send any ideas to the central planning team. I've put that address in the show notes. And to you for listening, thank you. I always appreciate your support and I love hearing from you, especially during these COVID-19 days. Make sure you're taking a moment to check up on your loved ones. Doesn't matter if you drop them a text, DM them, Zoom them, WhatsApp them, but check up on them. Let's get through this together. Okay, until next time, I'm Pat Perdue. Stay proud Seneca.

 

NOTES

health@senecapolytechnic.ca