New Orleans Foundations Training

This session establishes the foundational insight that event operations & emergency response utilize identical infrastructure and skills, deployed under different circumstances. Participants will learn to apply the four pillars of event resilience to their planning and explore the value of mapping existing emergency management frameworks to organizational operations. By the end of the session, participants will be able to assess their organization’s existing event operations using the four pillars framework and begin identifying where their operations already or could function as emergency response infrastructure.

Icebreaker Activity: Four Pillars Roses & Thorns

You’ll assess your own organizations or past events through the Four Pillars lens, identifying strengths and gaps, then share patterns across institution types to recognize common challenges and opportunities.

This panel brings together practitioners who have managed real events and emergencies at scale — from citywide disaster response and active-threat incidents to the daily security calculus of venues hosting tens of thousands of visitors to coordinating planning for Mardi Gras and hundreds of other events every year. Panelists will draw on that operational depth to discuss where event infrastructure and emergency response already converge in practice, what the last two decades of hard lessons in New Orleans reveal about preparedness, and where they see the greatest untapped potential for cultural venues and emergency management to work from shared systems.

Jon Barnwell — Associate Vice President of Safety & Security, The National WWII Museum, host of the IFCPP 2026 Conference

Joseph Frank — Chief of Public Safety, Caesars Superdome and Smoothie King Center

Richard Chatman — Deputy Director of the New Orleans Office of Coordination and Emergency Management (NOCEM)

Michael Ince — Director of the Office of Nighttime Economy, City of New Orleans

This session provides hands-on training in three of the operational systems critical in both events and emergencies: power, radio, and audio/PA. Rotating through stations in groups, participants will learn to operate essential equipment and recognize when to coordinate with specialists versus make informed decisions independently. By the end of the session, participants will be able to perform basic capacity calculations for water and power systems, operate radio and PA equipment using proper protocols, and assess operational decisions through the four pillars framework.

If you’ve signed up for the ReadyWhen Foundations certificate, you’ll find a learning module dedicated to our fourth major operational system– food, water, and sanitation– via the ReadyWhen online course shell, going live on Sunday 4/19.

Put your knowledge from this morning to the test in a group game of Jeopardy! There’s also time for questions before we dive into our afternoon sessions.

Mike Hoss — Journalist and voice of the New Orleans Saints

The resources, partners, and collaborators that could strengthen your organization’s readiness for both event operations and emergency scenarios are often already around you. This session introduces asset-based network mapping as a practical tool for reframing relationships you already have and identifying opportunities to build new ones.

We’ll kick off by hearing from practitioners whose work is already situated within a longer horizon, planning for legacy, continuity, and stewardship in ways that require thinking beyond their own organization. Participants will then begin mapping their own stakeholder ecosystem from the perspective of the four pillars of mass gathering resilience, shifting from an organizational view to an ecosystem-level perspective to start to build a clearer picture of who’s in their network, who should be, and how to make those relationships legible across their team and to outside partners.

This session builds competency in communication protocols and strategic message design across operational contexts—from routine staff briefings to crisis communications. Participants will learn to distinguish between internal and external communication needs, design accessible communications for diverse audiences, structure effective briefings adapted to different contexts, and apply ICS communication principles to emergency action plans. By the end of the session, participants will be able to deliver a clear pre-event staff briefing and evaluate emergency communication protocols for accessibility and strategic effectiveness.

How people enter, move through, and exit a building isn’t just a user experience question, it’s a life-safety question. This expeditionary tour of the National WWII Museum examines key pressure points up close where questions of safety, accessibility, and guest experience intersect: screening protocols and security infrastructure at the main entrance, the Voice of God PA system and other emergency communications tools, back-of-house systems that keep operations running under stress, and accessibility features that shape how a facility functions across normal operations, emergency evacuation, and beyond.

Jon Barnwell — Associate Vice President of Safety & Security, The National WWII Museum; Host of the IFCPP 2026 Conference

Norris Yarbrough — Senior Security Manager, Armed Division, WWII Museum

We’ll close out the day with a quick reflection, giving an opportunity to crystallize our insights from the day and our next steps to keep the momentum moving forward! We’ll also briefly cover logistics for participants who’d like to test out for their formal ReadyWhen certificate.