Veteran's Affairs Plus W/ David L. Washington

Wesley Knight 0:00
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Music 0:42
what's going on good day

Dave Washington 0:50
Las Vegas. Good day Las Vegas. This is Veterans Affairs, plus on 91.5 jazz and more. I'm Dave Washington, your host. I got a great guest that we'll have on shortly. He is a captain with the New Orleans fire department and an EDI grad, so we'll be talking with him shortly. So hold on cap for a few minutes. Already. Sounds good. Great. Great. Once again, this is Veterans Affairs plus on 91.5 jazz and more. Today we're going to be a lot on the plus side. However, before I go to the plus side, I want to talk about Tony Marshall. He is our officer who really helps people get their benefits together. Tony has helped so many people, and he's a little bit under the weather from a medical standpoint. So continue prayers for this good brother, and we know that God will give him his strength to continue to do the great work that he's doing as our service officer Tony Marshall, great guy, all right, so I just want to kind of give you guys some indication of some of the things that EDI has been doing of late. We have a great board of directors, and I mean, these folks work hard and you know, and the crazy part that former fire chief Eugene Campbell mentioned the fact that none of us are paid, but I certainly want to acknowledge him. I'm currently the president. We have gene Campbell as the current vice president. We have birch Washington. He's our treasurer. We have Cassie Peters. He is our secretary. Then we have also working with us. Adrian Rutledge, Nourse, Wilson, Annette Nance, hot burden, art battles, Bruce Boyer, Kwame Cooper and our outstanding, formerly Interim Executive Director. We have Dr, dr Carl Holmes, daughter Carla Holmes, he is our Executive Director, doing a fine, fine job. And we have a couple of brothers on our advisory that I'm certainly hoping that they will join us at some point to give us some advice as we continue to do the work of the Carl Holmes executive development institute that is John Austin and Eddie burns. We have a golf tournament coming up in New Orleans, Louisiana. We know that people listen to our show from around the world, so I can tell you that the captain that will have on shortly is doing a great job, along with another captain, Ed Holmes. They're they're helping us to on the ground there in New Orleans to Round Round Up golfers, to help us to have a great golf event in New Orle on June 7, to raise money for our scholarship program. The next thing I want to talk about is we have a newsletter that the board has approved Marcia to do on our behalf. So that newsletter will be coming out and just kind of acknowledging a number of the many things that we're doing with the Carl Holmes executive development institute. Look, there's this movie out, you guys that if you get an opportunity to go sit out, I don't do horror movies. I never have and this one is not really a horror movie. It's more it's not really scary, but it's called sinners. You get an opportunity. It's got all sorts of messages in it that I think is important for folks, male, female, black, white, to check out so sinners is in the movies. Now. Yesterday, marsh and I, my wife, was talking about the fact that yesterday, my mother, her mother in law, my dear, Eugenia Watkins, white Washington, passed away. And who could believe that it's been 20 years since our mother, grandmother, sister, passed away, but her name is still alive, and we know that our one of our young granddaughters, Amira, has her fighting spirit, so we think she's the second coming of Eugene, our mother and grandmother, This little girl got a lot of fire and feistiness about her. So we feel again, it's the coming of my mother the second time. I also want to talk real briefly about and she's has a birthday this month, Felicia McCoy, my niece. She did something real wild. I'm assuming it must have been. Bucket list thing, I don't know, but she jumped out of an airplane the other day, and I'm like, Are you kidding me? And she looked like she was having a lot of fun. So, you know, we do what we do. So if you're having fun and there's something you got on your bucket list that you want to do, I'd advise you to get busy doing it, because life is short. And another thing I want to talk about real quickly is our wall of honor. And our wall of honor is so important to us, and the wall it's not a wall of fame. It's not about people being famous, but these folks have done significant work for EDI, the Carl homes, executive development institute. Some of those folks are ancestors. Now, nevertheless, we thought it was important to induct them with board approval into our hall, excuse me, virtual wall of honor. We honor these folks because of the commitment that they made to EDI and the work that they did. And very briefly, I'd like to say a couple things about each one of them real quickly that are going in we have duchy Bob demmons formerly chief of San Francisco Fire Department, and he was like the right hand man to Dr Carl Holmes. So certainly want to acknowledge Bob and express appreciation for the work that he's done for for this institute. And then we have a deceased brother, once again, he is an ancestor now Sherman carthon. He served as a deputy chief with the Oklahoma City Fire Department. He worked with Dr Holmes for a number of years. So that brother did tremendous work. He was a leader in in what we call public fire safety education. He did some tremendous programming him and along with his teaching partner, George Jefferson, so he'll be inducted this year. Leroy Nourse, retired fire captain Chattanooga Fire Department. He came on to the board of EDI, and he did a tremendous and Dr Holmes recruited him. He did a fine job in building EDI logistics department. So we honor this brother, and he is again an ancestor, and then we have another brother, Nourse Wilson. He retired as a deputy major with the Oklahoma City Fire Department. He was a right hand man, or main assistant, personal assistant to Dr Holmes. So we certainly express again, appreciation to these four individuals, even though, again, a couple of them are ancestors now, but we want to acknowledge the work that they did for the Carl Holmes executive development institute. With that, I'm going to acknowledge our captain with the new orlese Fire Department, Quentin Brown, what's going on? Cap,

Quinton Brown 7:35
not too much. Chief, thank you for having me. I appreciate it, believe me. Oh absolutely. Man.

Dave Washington 7:39
We know that you have a lot to offer, and you've been doing some great work in assisting us as we prepare for our annual and we haven't been been around with this tournament folks for a while due to COVID, but we're back in the swing now, so captains, Ed Holmes and Quinn Brown here, who's live on our show today, Calling in from the great city of New Orleans to talk about a few things that he has done to assist to include cap, give our listening audience a little bit about your background. Well,

Quinton Brown 8:11
you know, Chief, you've been in the frying service for a long time, and two of us, and you know, we don't, we don't tend to lean on our, you know, blowing our horns too much over over a 35 year time span, I've been in the fire service. I've done a little bit of everything. Presently, I serve basic well my you know, a lot of times we have position names and ranks, but we do so many more things right now, I'm listed as a captain and a community service advisor, but I really do the work of the liaison for the Superintendent or Chief of Staff everything that he needs. You know, I try to make happen, you know, reaching out to different departments around the city, making things a little easier for the chief, basically, and, you know, so that's kind of what I do. Also, I process all of our recruits. We have two distinctions. And before I go any further, let me apologize. I'm sitting on my back porch, so you may hear sounds of nature going on, birds going on back here, and live really close to high school, so we got a band practicing and all kinds of things. Some apologize ahead of time on that one. But it's, you know, it's one of those jobs where I get to process the new recruits coming into the department, picking up, processing them, just a little bit of everything. Man, I can't there's, there's so many things that I've done in the fire service that they call me the Swiss Army knife around. Yeah,

Dave Washington 10:01
sorry that. So tell us a little bit about your journey, because I know you did leave your department, this particular department, I should say, and then you came back,

Quinton Brown 10:10
right. So, graduated from EDI in 2020

Dave Washington 10:17
I'm sorry

Quinton Brown 10:20
for Hurricane Katrina, you know that that experience for me, and I know you'll probably get to that, but EDI prepared me so well for moving ahead. So in 2005 hurricane Katrina hit the city of New orlese, found myself actually, before that, trying to, you know, decide which direction I wanted to go in with my with my career I was going to EDI and trying to, trying to make a decision what route to take. So when, when Katrina hit, there was a little bit of frustration about the things that was going on here in the city in the 2006 I was offered a position, and I got to thank the brothers from Dallas, Dallas firefighters, who recognized the skills that I had and suggested that I post for that position and the city, small city north of Dallas, called Denton, and they needed recruit. And so I applied for the position, got it and, and I can really directly say that EDI was a cause of that, because a lot of things that I brought to that interview prepared me from directly from EDI and it, you know, it really came in handy, and I didn't understand, you know, a lot of times, God puts you in places, man, where you just don't know, I mean, you don't know what's going to happen. He's preparing you for things that you don't know it's coming, but he knows, right? So when, when he put me in that position, he actually put me some place where I could actually flourish. I was African American to work in that department. African American, male, whoever. And although it was a challenging, you know, again, God doesn't make any mistakes. He prepared me for that. He put me there. I spent 10 years there, learned a lot. The people there invested a lot of energy into me. However they did, it didn't fulfill the promise that they made initially. So an opportunity came about that came back home. So I spent 10 years in dent and came back here in 2015 I'm sorry, 2016 and then back here doing the work. And you know, it's I didn't realize that they had prepared me to be I was, I was doing the work of a deputy chief handling budget. And, you know, just everything from the administrative piece, I had already had the operational piece. And that's what EDI it's not just about running in the building and putting out fires, doing medicals. You need to learn that administrative part. And they prepared me

Dave Washington 13:00
for that excellent point. Once again, this is Veterans Affairs, plus on 91.5 jazz and more. I'm Dave Washington, your host, and we have a good brother out of the New Orleans Fire Department, Captain Quinton Brown, who's just kind of expressing some of the things that he learned from the Carl Holmes executive development institute. So tell us more about that experience. Because, you know, a lot of people listen to this show, and a lot of them out there are firefighters who have not heard or have not been to the Carl homes executive development institute, known very well as EDI.

Quinton Brown 13:33
So what I found at EDI is that the atmosphere of acceptance and being around like minded people and those possibly weren't quite sure why they were there, but found out quite quickly what it was about. It's about professional about achieving goals and wanting to be better. I've always wanted to make a situation better, when I left it right, then I found it so, you know, being that that individual who have, who's always kind of, you know, I kind of, you know, from having leadership and understanding leadership classes and understanding how leadership works, natural leaderships. And I believe in natural leaders, however, they need to be taught. They need to be guided. And EDI taught me that, even after graduating from EDI, I did the six year program as well after Katrina, who did it at Atlanta. And since then, when I was in Denny, I also went to the Texas fire chiefs camp, and realized that it was kind of a one off media. It was a lot of the things that I had already learned, right? So, you know, it was, for me, it was, it was a little not surprising, and I won't say surprising, because. Yes, you know, there's some things that counterparts and other people do that that copy, and, you know, try to try to emulate the things that are that are working. And I feel that my experience at EDI kind of put me over the top with a lot of things you know, that were that were coming down the pipes, that you know, that were that were that wasn't really expected, but I was, I was ready for

Dave Washington 15:21
Okay, so how would you go about it? What would you say in terms of encouraging others who are out there once again, who listen to the program Veterans Affairs, plus to give consideration to attending EDI? Okay,

Quinton Brown 15:34
so, so I also teach classes here in New Orleans for firefighters. Uh, fire, fire curriculum in the in the local college. And what I what I typically do is, you know, we got a different brand of human being running around in our society right now. So what I do is, I encourage them to take stock in yourself. That's right. I paid my own way to go to, you know, it was, you know, here in New orlese, we don't make a lot of money. Well, you know, we didn't at the time, and you know, since then, with this new mayor, we got some pretty good raises, but we didn't make a lot of money, right? It was a struggle. It was a struggle trying to do that. But I had to invest in myself and you know, I encourage people all the time, don't expect your department to pay for your training. You know, don't expect if you have you know, things that you want to do in your career, take that, take that, bite that bullet, do what you have to do for yourself. It's about you, and you know what you want. You know the apartment may not want to do that, right? If you know what, go ahead and make the sacrifice pay for your own training, education, so forth. Do that because it's invaluable. Yeah, put me in a place where, you know, it was, like I was alluding to earlier. It was a area that was nurturing, like, and I understand why they put in the HBCU, because that's what they do. You know, it's a nurturing environment, right? And just meeting all these brothers and sisters from around the country, you know, when you're in that little pod in your own department, in your own fire station, you don't really get to get that outside experience. And just coming to EDI and meeting brothers and sisters from London, you know, around you know, it was, it was so, it was so wonderful to me. And you know, I'm, you know, I was also the president of our local organization, and, you know, it's, it's so, it's fulfilling to see all the positive, the positive attributes and the things that that surround you in that environment.

Dave Washington 17:40
Well, Said, let me say this, you know, to your point about, you know, investing in yourself. I encourage that all the time. In fact, I recall when I was going for a position. It was called a fire science chief. It was a battalion level staff officer position I know anything about, you know, writing or developing specifications for anything. And the National Fire Academy had a weekend course down in San Diego, two day course, and the department said, we can't afford to send you. I said, Okay, no problem. I said, I'm gonna pay for myself. Because the class was free. They all they had to do is just give me per diem to eat, provide me with room. I'll drive my own personal vehicle down some gas, but they said they couldn't afford it, so I did it myself, and lo and behold, I was able to get that position because of what I learned from taking this two day course that had to do with putting together specifications. It was more of like a logistics type position, and I learned so much in those two days that really helped propel me to to jump right into that particular position with some knowledge, even though it was theory from, you know, from, from the classroom setting, I had no real, real, you know, work experience in doing that particular job. So no, your point is well taken, and people should never and another thing, a lot of people, oh, EDI, that's too expensive for the amount of money. And they don't like us talking about dollars, amounts on, you know, on public radio station. But I will tell you this, look it up, Carl, Holmes, edi.org, and see what we charge. And I can tell you this, there's other folks who do this private and otherwise, who do classes, and they will charge you much more than us, and I'm talking about for like, a two to three day experience, no room and board. And of course, with EDI, similar to others, you have to pay your own transportation there, but at EDI, for your tuition, you get six days of square meals and six days of rooming. You can't get that for what we charge. So your point is well taken with respect to we have to invest in ourselves. One of the things that I always tell people that I admire about gene and Burt and and I had on the show last week, and I know you know chief Gerald Simon, he talked about punching your ticket and Gene and Burt, unlike myself, they had, they have so many different. Certifications. And when you get those various certifications, it increases your value, not only to your internal department, but anywhere else that you may pursue to going to it as a as a fire service professional. So I endorse what you said about being willing to put some dollars into yourself. You got to do that. Got to do

Quinton Brown 20:19
it. You do? Yes, you do so. So

Dave Washington 20:23
tell us. I know that you are actively involved, and it's something that, in fact, let me run past this real quick. Cap EDI, in our strategic plan, we have seven initiatives, strategic initiatives. We call them. One is establishing curricular alignment, which is a plan to develop an action plan to enhance our curriculum content and consistency. We want to be consistent with our curriculum, securing accreditation and certifications, identify organizations for potential organizational and coursework accreditation. That's something that we've been working on for a while, and it's a very expensive process that you go through, enhance recruitment and retention. That's another one that we have problems with in this particular business, as it relates to African Americans in particular. So that's something that we think is extremely important streamline staffing, logistics and operations, evaluate our efficiencies, identify redundancies and opportunities for enhancement. These are things that we know that we need to work on. Also develop an integrated marketing plan commitment to develop a marketing initiative to generate awareness and raise the visibility of EDI, the Carl homes, executive development institute. Another one is improve collaboration and professional and community groups. These are things that we know that are important. In fact, through your help, we'll be meeting with the IAB, the International Association of Black professional firefighters, and BCo see the black chief officers. We'll be meeting with them some of our board members, as well as some of theirs. When we come to New Orleans this year, and this is our 34th year in the business, and 24 years, believe it or not, at Dillard University. And we're so pleased with that. And then the final one, this is what I want you to excuse me, talk a little bit about, yeah, and that is our community outreach. The will to establish an outreach program that will work with people within our community. And I know you've been an integral part of that group that's working on doing some stuff as in terms of outreach to student bodies there in the city of New Orleans. So could you give us some our our listening audience, some background on that and what what your role is? And we got about five more minutes. So just take your time and go through that, if you will. Okay, well,

Quinton Brown 22:41
the particular program that you're speaking about, I have kind of limited access to, but I know what's going on. I know that

the local chapter here, in conjunction with the President, and

I think ani is a I'm not sure if she's secretary or whatever, but she is deeply entrenched into that, because I come from a a recruiting background. So that that we spoke the last time I spoke on the call with them, they wanted to to have a certain amount of young ladies. They wanted to get their their their efforts toward getting more interest in African American young ladies and to start the program and kind of kind of build from there. So I know that we were in contact with some of the local schools here, and the organization bad off is, is kind of spearheading that. My portion of that is to set up the fire department. Aspect of it providing apparatus demonstration, and whatever else the department can can do logistically, of course, it'll be at Dillards campus. And, you know, we're kind of working, we're kind of working in a support vein, and, you know, to support the organization to bring everything to fruition.

Dave Washington 24:17
Well, I can tell you, I think that's very, very important, because I haven't looked at the statistics lately, but I can tell you that, and we all know that the number of women in the fire service still hasn't hit a peak that we know richly deserves to have them in our business. Because one thing I know about women men, they generally have a plan. They're hard chargers, and I know that they are committed once they go into something that's, that's a broad, general statement. I don't want people Oh, he's Oh, women aren't like that. I know that, but I'll tell you this, the ones that I've been around, and because I ran a women preparatory training program, I know I took heat from the blacks, the whites, even so. Some women, why are you trying to help them? Look, I didn't promise them a job. All I did is with this program that ran, I think, 810, weeks, whatever it was, they were paid a little stipend, and it helped to prepare them to be more successful in the program, in terms of preparing them for the exam process, to do their best to enter the fire service. And unfortunately, one of the women sued me said that I had promised her a job and and then when they pull out the contract, and the attorney saw that, it said that we guarantee you will be more prepared and be more successful in exam process, but there, we cannot guarantee you a job. We can't because, you know, you still got to go through the entire process. And another wild thing is that, you know, the psychological profiles, if the psychiatrist say, don't hire a person, we don't hire them because there is something in their background that the psychiatrist say they will not be good. They will not be able to handle the pressure once pressure hits. Because, you know, we go into some critical situations, and if you're not prepared to do that from a mental standpoint, you can break down and cause a lot of issues for department. But we are certainly pleased that whatever offer you have made to that group, even though you're you're working from from a perspective of of just kind of assisting, we know that with your background, as you've already pointed out to our community, will be instrumental in helping to grow this particular program. And from what I do know, but it is a pilot program that ultimately, young men will be involved in it as well. But you got to start somewhere. So I admire what you're doing to assist our folks in developing and enhancing that program, absolutely, absolutely,

Quinton Brown 26:42
you know, it's always, it's always a challenge, you know, the process, you know, we we have a little more control of the process. In the past, we did it, and there was some, some issues with, you know, racism and sexism, what kind of isms right? A lot more control of it. We have more control of how things are set up. Mm, hmm, especially here. And, you know, we work hand in hand with civil service. And, you know, a buddy that was interested in in, you know, joining the department will put the best foot forward. All you do is pass the process, alright. Well, she says you're done absolutely

Dave Washington 27:20
Well, we appreciate it once again. This is Veterans Affairs, plus on 91.5 jazz and more. We just had a good brother from the city of New Orleans Fire Department, Captain Quinton Brown. And we appreciate you, my friend, and we will talk to you again soon, and look forward to meeting with you. And again, he will be assisting us with the golf tournament that will be on June 7, there in the city of New Orleans. Thanks a lot, camp. Thank

Quinton Brown 27:44
you, Chief. I appreciate you. Hey,

Music 28:00
oh, all the smoke in the air till they hate when they stare, all the pain that we bear.