Women in 911: Leading in a Now-gen Era
Course Length: 1 Hour
Meet your Instructor
Melissa Alterio, Karima Holmes, Roxy Vangundy, & Tina Buneta
Expertise:
Melissa has recently transitioned to a new role as Director of Emergency Communications for Cobb County 911 after serving for 5 1⁄2 years as 911 Director for the City of Roswell Police Department - both agencies in Metro Atlanta, GA. Her duties include all aspects of management, direction, coordination, training and quality control of the 145-person staffed PSAP. Prior to these positions, Melissa worked at Orange County Emergency Services (NY) where she spent the majority of her career in the Training Division. She is also an Adjunct Instructor with APCO International for the last several years. Her passion is teaching dispatchers how to improve their performance; focusing specifically on topics like Active Shooter Incidents, Crisis Negotiations and the core telecommunicator classes. Melissa has also presented at various national dispatch conferences around the Country, speaking on a variety of leadership principles.
Melissa is a graduate of Marist College (NY) with a BS in Psychology, and has just completed her MS in Criminal Justice/Public Safety Leadership from Mercer University. She has recently completed two intensive executive leadership programs with APCO, receiving the professional designations of Registered Public Safety Leader (RPL) and Certified Public Safety Executive (CPE). Her focus and priority is to be a mentor, coach, leader and positive role model to members of the 911 community. Melissa also serves on the Board of Directors for the Georgia Association of Women in Public Safety and as the Vice President for the GA 911 Directors Association – Metro Region. She is an experienced instructor, conference coordinator and participant in various public safety areas.
Melissa is also serving on the NENA Wellness Acute Stress Standard Workgroup, APCO Professional Developments and Events Committee, Awards Committee, and the Peer Support/CISM Division Head of APCO’s new Health and Wellness Committee.
Karima Holmes is a seasoned public safety professional and a recognized emergency communications industry leader. Over the past two decades, she has served as executive director at emergency communications centers (ECC) across the U.S., where she overhauled their technical infrastructure and critical public safety programs. Holmes also leveraged her industry experience to establish partnerships with local and federal law enforcement and homeland security agencies in every jurisdiction in which she served. Highly notable is her oversight of Washington, DC’s sole ECC for multiple National Special Security Events, State of the Union Addresses, and the 2017 and 2020 Presidential Inaugurations. In fact, Ms. Holmes was at the helm of the Office of Unified Communications in the nation’s capital throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the ongoing civil unrest of 2020, and the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In October 2019, she was appointed to the FirstNet Authority Board by the U.S. Commerce Secretary and currently serves. More recently Ms. Holmes was invited to join the 911der Women Inc. Board as a board member and as the organization’s treasurer. In 2021, Karima was named Chair of working group three with the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) 911 Strike Force completing and submitting a vital report to Congress. The Strike Force was a federal advisory committee dedicated to studying and making recommendations to Congress for addressing 911 fee diversion.
Ms. Holmes has a B.A. in Criminal Justice and a Master of Public Administration with a concentration in Homeland Security. She also holds a National Emergency Number Association's ENP certification and is a Registered Public Safety Leader (RPL) with the Association of Public Safety Communication Officials (APCO). In addition, she recently graduated with cohort 20-02 at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security's (CHDS) Executive Leaders Program, and Karima is a certified P.O.S.T instructor for the State of California.
Roxy Van Gundy is an experienced dispatcher with a career spanning back to 2005. She began at the Emporia Police Department in Kansas, where she served as a community outreach officer and training officer. Roxy later moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, joining the Alaska State Troopers as a dispatcher, eventually becoming a supervisor in 2012.
In 2014, Roxy returned to Kansas and her home center at the Emporia Police Department, which later merged into the Lyon County Emergency Communications center. In August 2018, she took on the role of director, where she remains dedicated to advocating for her employees and fostering a supportive work environment for the dispatchers she admires.
Tina Buneta, ENP, CPE, RPL currently serves as the Director of Aurora911 in Colorado. She joined the Aurora team in December of 2019 and has served beside her team through the entirety of the COVID pandemic, as well a turbulent summer of civil unrest in 2020.
Tina began her public safety career in 1999 as a front line telecommunicator for the Colorado State Patrol, and ultimately served the CSP for twenty years and in four communication centers as a Communications Training Officer, Communications Supervisor, and Regional Center Manager. Additionally, Tina has over a decades’ experience in organizational strategic planning and cultural development. Her experience is diversified between urban and rural centers, large and small. She has served her industry on a larger scale as an RPL and Occupational Analysis facilitator for APCO, an Executive Board member of Colorado NENA-APCO, and as a leadership-focused presenter at national and state-level conferences. Tina’s passion is the cultivation, preparation and empowerment of new leaders, which is achieved through the practice of people-first, strength-based leadership.
The Aurora911 team receives nearly 600,000 calls annually, and serves the third largest city in Colorado, with a population of 400,000 and growing.