While the term "Public Safety Member" covers a lot of ground...

I won't be able to operate on a CERT team in real life - my professional duties will take precedence. If there are functional CERT teams available to me, I expect I'll use them if they can be of assistance in a relatively large scale or wide spread incident.

From a professional standpoint, finding out first hand what training CERT gives and how they see them selves is part of why I'm participating in the training right now. I have other reasons, two of which are:

1) Scouts. I want to determine if this is useful for older Scouts on a number of levels.

2) I fight the "somebody else take care of my problems for me" attitude every day - I don't just gripe about it, I do something about it. If CERT looks useful at helping combat that attitude, I have a very good chance of influencing the right local agencies to promote CERT training for groups of average already-organized citizens.

Whether it's an attitude adjustment operation or the development of a practical supplement to other "professional" public safety resources remains to be seen. (or both)

Apparently we're not the only ones wondering these things. The local session before this one had a number of "public safety members" attend for reasons reportedly similar to mine. There are a couple of Paramedics in this class, although I'm not clear as to why just yet.

I have no comment on the training so far, but the concepts of use/utility/capabilities being taught etc. is not what I expected. There's some serious humility coming from the front of the room - all "public safety members" teaching, BTW. I don't believe this is going to turn out a corps of Walter Mitty type folks. Actually, I'm kinda irritated right now that there are not more folks involved, even if merely out of curiosity...

The "technical" stuff has been very boring to me - nothing new to me so far, and I'm paying REAL close attention. I am learning a heck of a lot about CERT, which is my real objective. OTOH, my very capable wife is learning a lot of new and useful stuff, as are many other folks in the audience with us.

But I really have not formed any overall opinions of CERT institutionally yet.