A Los Angeles-area university and a security advisory group announced a partnership on Monday aimed at enhancing education for future government leaders and improving safety on regional and national levels.
The Pepperdine School of Public Policy and the Los Angeles Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) will form an “innovative academic enterprise,” the two entities announced in a news release and at an 11 a.m. press conference. Called the Homeland Security Advisory Council at the School of Public Policy, it’s designed to educate the next generation of public officials by “harnessing the school’s unique curriculum dedicated to exploring a full range of cross-sector and IT solutions to public policy challenges,” the school and council said.
The partnering should expand the Pepperdine school’s reach; it and HSAC also said the pact will feature “transfer of all HSAC assets and intellectual property to Pepperdine,” and called it a strategic step for the university in expanding its role around crisis management issues. This includes acquisition of HSAC’s crisis and event management system SALUS - The Crisis Hub, which wields GIS to analyze data and enhance what state and municipal government can do. Among the takeaways:
• The announcement’s origins date back around a year. Pete Peterson, dean of the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, told Techwire the policy school and HSAC, a 501(c)(3), share a board member, so conversations developed around “wanting to ground the 501(c)(3) in an academic institution.” Last fall, James Featherstone, HSAC president and CEO, taught a course at the graduate school that offered the two organizations a chance to connect around education.
“From my perspective as dean, my interests are in promoting the brand of the school as being interested in what we would call ‘cross-sector leadership,’” Peterson said, indicating the school intends to do more in gov tech toward training future public-sector staffers and officials.
• Acquisition of SALUS is key. Developed by HSAC during the past “couple of years,” and founded on Esri technology, the platform will be key not only to training and education in GIS and mapping, Peterson said, “but also, how we can operationalize this mapping platform in other cities.” The dean, an adviser to OpenGov, pointed out that the company began as a nonprofit before becoming a for-profit, noting, “sometimes, these great gov tech ideas start in nonprofits and then as they begin to get taken up by government, you can begin to think differently.”
“I don’t know if the same thing will happen here with the SALUS platform, but suffice it to say, I’m very interested in that opportunity,” Peterson said.
• SALUS already has a public profile. The city’s homelessness response unit deploys it to map homeless encampments and ensure municipal services are available nearby to support the population, the dean said. Internally, SALUS serves as a common resource on the issue to the mayor’s office and 16 departments in Los Angeles’ Unified Homelessness Response Center.
• Its profile could also be helpful or influential at a state or even federal level. Officials have had conversations with FEMA; and, Peterson said, there are likely potential private-sector partners that would have interest in the SALUS mapping hub. All this could inform the hub’s future direction, in an area where natural disasters like last year’s Woolsey Fire remind leaders in Los Angeles and Ventura counties of the importance of plotting escape routes and making services available.
