Newsletter 5 - Out of uniform

Newsletter 5 - March 2016

Progress update

We have entered the final year of the Out of Uniform project and our focus now shifts to considering the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges of different approaches for engaging with non-traditional volunteers. Since the last newsletter we have:

• Continued to undertake case studies of non-traditional volunteering, including studies of community-led preparedness and recovery, management of spontaneous volunteers, and faith-based and digital volunteering (see Case studies).
• Held a Sustainable Volunteering Workshop at RMIT University in November, which was attended by end-users, researchers and representatives of volunteering and community organisations from across Australia. The workshop provided a forum for researchers to present their work and receive feedback from end users, and for valuable discussions about research utilisation. Participants also had the opportunity to attend Professor Mary Comerio’s (University of California, Berkeley) public seminar on ‘Resilience, recovery and community renewal’.
• Begun work on a briefing paper on alternative emergency volunteering models, including a preliminary SWOT analysis, to be submitted to the CRC in June.
• Had good progress with our PhD students. Billy Haworth has completed his PhD fieldwork and has been busy writing in anticipation of submitting his thesis in August. Fiona Jennings has been busy conducting interviews in Tasmania and is now deep into data analysis. See updates from Billy and Fiona below.

INVITATION: SWOT workshops to develop a strategic decision support tool

We are currently planning ‘SWOT workshops’ as a key research utilisation activity. These will be a main focus of the project in the second half of the year. With support from the CRC, the workshops will actively engage stakeholders in a SWOT analysis (i.e. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Challenges) of alternative, research-informed strategies for engaging with non-traditional volunteers.

The purpose of the workshops is to produce a strategic decision support tool for emergency management organisations and managers that identifies multifaceted pros and cons associated with alternative engagement (or non-engagement) strategies. We’d like to invite project end-users who are interested in facilitating their organisation’s input in this process to contact us to discuss future workshops. If you are interested, please contact Blythe on blythe.mclennan@rmit.edu.au or 0406 059 510. 

Case studies

A core part of the Out of Uniform project has been undertaking case studies of non-traditional volunteering in practice. In total, six case studies are in various stages of progress:

• Community-led preparedness, Be Ready Warrandyte – The case study is completed and a final report is available

• Community-led recovery, Community On Ground Assistance (COGA) – This case study is nearly complete. Additional and follow-up interviews will be conducted over the next two weeks. A draft copy of the report will be presented to COGA participants and end users for feedback before the report is finalised

• Managing spontaneous volunteers, Volunteering Queensland’s Emergency Volunteering Community Responses to Extreme Weather (EV-CREW) service –Stage 1 of the case study (an introduction to the Queensland service) is complete and is described in a paper in the Australian Journal of Emergency Management. The case study has now been extended, with Stage 2 examining the adaptation of the EV CREW model in other jurisdictions. Interviewing with stakeholders in these other jurisdictions is currently underway.

• Faith-based volunteering – Planning is underway for a case study of faith-based volunteering following the Pinery bushfire in South Australia in November 2015. The research will involve approximately 10-15 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with representatives of faith-based volunteer groups, emergency and recovery agencies, volunteers, volunteer managers and representatives of recipient communities. The study is being undertaken in partnership with the Department of Communities and Social Inclusion. 

• Two additional case studies have also been undertaken in conjunction with this project, looking at digital volunteering for Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu and the roles of BlazeAid volunteers post-disaster. Reports on these case studies are also in preparation.

 End-user perspective from Paul Davis, Emergency Management Victortia

The research on sustainable volunteering is moving along fine, although I still see a great opportunity to consider the way we design research proposals, review them and fund them, with a sharper focus on end users (the people that should be able to use and apply the research), what their needs will be and how best to package research products to make it easier to apply and use. 

The real challenge remains in utilisation, and while we could spend time arguing that if the scope and need were right in the first place, it would all be OK, I am not sure that is the problem. Utilisation and the application of research / evidence into insights and then being used to drive solution design is not an area nor capability we have spent enough time building.

One could imagine what value we would get by stopping all new research for 12 months, using that time to collect and catalogue the existing knowledge, identify what has been done, and then use that time to build capability to use and apply the evidence and ensure it is translated in a way that can be used by the strategists planners and decision makers.

Often, in my experience, it's simply a communication or translation issue - the researchers use one construct and language while the strategists use a different one (and I heard one person recently say "and never should the two meet"). The capability that exists in many successful community and corporate businesses is an insights team or current teams with a real focus on formal insight development capability, skills and utilisation processes. 

PhD student reports

Billy Haworth – ‘Volunteered Geographic Information, Community Engagement and Bushfire Preparation in Tasmania'.

Recently I completed the last of my PhD fieldwork and am now writing, writing, and writing some more! In 2015 I interviewed emergency management (EM) professionals from across the country about how public communication and mapping practices through various technologies, such as smartphones, social media, and web-mapping, (termed “volunteered geographic information” – VGI) are impacting EM. A paper* has recently been published based on insights from the interviews, describing key opportunities and challenges of VGI in EM, and ways-forward to ensure the most effective use of VGI.

Late 2015 I completed community mapping workshops in Tasmania, where I tested the benefits to community members of contributing their own local bushfire information to maps with others. This revealed the social practice of mapping together and the local spatial awareness gained to be highly useful for engagement in bushfire preparation. Results will hopefully be published this year. I presented some of this work at the 2015 AFAC/CRC conference, and also at the Sustainable Volunteering project workshop at RMIT. I have further conference presentations planned for later this year and am working towards submitting my PhD thesis in August.

* Haworth, B. Emergency management perspectives on volunteered geographic information: Opportunities, challenges and change. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 2016; 57: 189-198.

Fiona Jennings – ‘Community volunteering and disaster recovery; a study of community resilience in the 2013 Forcett Bushfire, Tasmania’.

The past few months have passed quickly, heading towards my mid-candidature. I conducted two field trips to Tasmania, in August and October 2015, conducting 27 interviews on community-led recovery. The forty people (22 women and 18 men) interviewed, were all involved in the 2013 Forcett Tasmania bushfire, community members, volunteers, and representatives of local and state government and non-government services. The audio recorded interviews have been transcribed and returned to interviewees for approval. 

I have been progressing the data analysis phase of the research, data coding and theory building. This phase will involve theoretical sampling in the near future, a process in grounded theory where sampling occurs till no new data emerges.  In the later part of 2015, I gained valuable experience conducting grounded theory coding for another research project. 

I was fortunate to present the progress of my research project at the Sustainable Volunteering  workshop and receive important feedback from CRC end-users. Attending the AFAC/CRC conference was valuable, presenting a poster on my research project, participating in training and a field trip, networking and keep abreast of new research. In 2016, I attended two workshops, ‘writing an article’ by SAGE and ‘presenting your research with impact’ at RMIT University.

News items

National Spontaneous Volunteering strategy available online 

The National Spontaneous Volunteering strategy was discussed at the Sustainable Volunteering workshop last year. It was endorsed by the Australia-New Zealand Emergency Management Committee on 2 October 2015 and is now available online.

The strategy draws on early work in the non-traditional volunteering project, and provides principles and suggested actions for managing spontaneous volunteers.

Social costs of disasters outweigh financial costs report finds

The Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience & Safer Communities just released a report on the social costs of natural disasters in Australia.

It found that when social costs are included, the cost of the three natural disasters examined was at least 50% greater than previous estimates.

The report estimates that the true cost of natural disasters in Australia in 2015 exceeded $9 billion, or 0.6% of GDP. This figure is expected to double by 2030 and to reach an average of $33 billion per year by 2050.

Upcoming events and presentations

• American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, 29 March-2 April
  Josh Whittaker is presenting on “Contradictions and workarounds: the challenges of citizen-led recovery in post-disaster settings”.

• National Volunteering Conference, 6-8 April 2016
  Blythe McLennan and Julie Molloy are presenting on “The changing landscape of disaster volunteering and an innovative response from Queensland”.

• AFAC Volunteer Management Technical Group, 12th April 2016
  Josh Whittaker will be providing an update on key aspects of the project to VMTG members.

• Emergency Media & Public Affairs Conference, 29-31 May 2016
  Josh Whittaker will be presenting research on ‘spontaneous’ volunteering in emergencies.

• Australian and New Zealand Disaster Management Conference, 30-31 May 2016
  Julie Molloy is a keynote speaker at the conference. She will be presenting on the importance of volunteers in disasters.

• AFAC/CRC Annual Conference, September 2015
  The non-traditional volunteering project team will once again be participating in the annual AFAC/ CRC conference. We’ve submitted two abstracts to the research forum and are awaiting a response from the organizers to confirm whether they have been accepted.

Project outputs (updated)

Journal articles

McLennan, B, Molloy, J, Whittaker, J, Handmer, JW. Centralised coordination of spontaneous emergency volunteers: the EV CREW model. Australian Journal of Emergency Management 2016; 31: 24-30.

McLennan, B. Extending into community-led preparedness and planning just enough (but not too much?). Australian Journal of Emergency Management 2016; 31: 5-6.

Haworth, B. Emergency management perspectives on volunteered geographic information: Opportunities, challenges and change. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 2016; 57: 189-198.

Whittaker J, Handmer J, and McLennan B. A review of informal volunteerism in emergencies and disasters: definition, opportunities and challenges. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015; 13: 358-368.

Haworth B, Bruce E, Middleton P. Emerging technologies for risk reduction: assessing the potential use of social media and VGI for increasing community engagement in bushfire preparation. Australian Journal of Emergency Management 2015; 30(3): 36-41.

Haworth B, Bruce E. A review of volunteered geographic information for disaster management. Geography Compass 2015; 9(5): 237-250. DOI: 10.1111/gec3.12213

Conference papers

McLennan, B, Whittaker, J, Handmer, J. The future of 'non-traditional emergency volunteering: What will it look like and how can it work? In 'Research proceedings from the 2015 Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC & AFAC conference. Adelaide'. M Rumsewicz, Editor. 2015, Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC.

Whittaker J, Handmer J, McLennan B. Building community resilience through informal emergency volunteering, in Proceedings of the Research Forum at the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC and AFAC Conference 2014, M. Rumsewicz, Editor. 2015, Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre: Wellington, New Zealand.

Reports

McLennan BJ, Whittaker J, Handmer J. Community-led bushfire preparedness in action: the case of Be Ready Warrandyte. 2015, Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC: Melbourne, Australia.

Whittaker J, Handmer J, Mclennan BJ. Informal volunteerism in emergencies and disasters: a literature review. 2015, Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC: Melbourne, Australia.

McLennan BJ, Whittaker J, Handmer J. Emergency volunteering in Australia: transforming not declining. 2015, Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC: Australia.