After 18 months of juggling work and school, Benjamin Greer graduated from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Preparedness Directorate, FEMA and the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) with 21 of his classmates on September 24, 2021.
Graduating from the San Joaquin College of Law in Clovis, California in 2008, Greer began working as an attorney before serving as the co-chair of the statewide Human Trafficking Task Force under then Attorney General Kamala Harris with the California Department of Justice. Greer now works at the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) in the California Specialized Training Institute (CSTI) as an Emergency Management Coordinator Instructor ll, where he assists in designing and delivering California’s terrorism and human trafficking trainings.
Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) programs are typically seen as an opportunity for executive and supervisor level employees but, Greer took a different path.
“I knew this would be a great benefit to Ben and he would excel in the program, bringing back tools to update and improve our International and Domestic Terrorism Training Program,” said Alex Cabassa, Superintendent of the California Specialized Training Institute.
The program gave Greer a whole new set of tools to apply in both his steady state job of training while also helping to assist other areas he works with during activations in the State Operations Center or helping to support the State Threat Assessment Center in understanding threats of human trafficking in California.
“Because of the exposure I got to different disciplines that I wouldn’t normally get, and with all the challenges we experienced in the last 18 months with the pandemic, wildfires, earthquakes, civil unrest, we had a whole number of challenges that we were able to talk about in our courses through the lens of the different disciplines,” Said Greer.
“I want to thank OES leadership for providing me this awesome opportunity. It gave me extremely valuable insight into the different challenges through those different lenses of our emergency response professionals. I strongly encourage anyone interested in the program to do it. It’s a lot of work but 100% worth it. It absolutely gives you the skills to be a better more effective OES employee.”