Sustainable volunteering - how can we do it differently?

This article first appeared in the Spring 2014 edition of Fire Australia magazine. By David Bruce.

New research is focused on retaining active emergency services volunteers, and better engaging untrained ‘informal’ volunteers who offer to help when incidents and natural disasters happen.

A familiar sight at the scene of a natural hazard emergency is the arrival of highly motivated individuals ready to assist in whatever way they can. There is nothing new in that—our volunteer fire and emergency service organisations were founded in communities of local volunteers.

Over many decades, as the official emergency service agencies have become more professional, accredited and organised, the role of the unofficial and informal volunteer has sat uneasily with the official response.

Project on informal volunteers

A project in the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC will develop new approaches to dealing with the reality of volunteering today—integrating the formal and the informal volunteer into the full spectrum of incident prevention, preparation, response and recovery.

Project leader Professor John Handmer, of RMIT University, says that although this issue has been widespread for a long time, it has been the subject of little research.

“We know that very large numbers of people quickly converge on incidents saying they want to help. And no one has really looked at this in a research sense in Australia or New Zealand. These people are willing and usually able to help but they don’t want to be a part of the formal response organisations.

“There is a significant and largely untapped opportunity for emergency management agencies to contribute to building community resilience to natural hazards by supporting and engaging with non-traditional emergency volunteers—and volunteering organisations—in new ways,” Professor Handmer says.

The traditional model of emergency volunteering in Australia and New Zealand is based on formally accredited volunteers who are affiliated with state emergency management agencies and are largely involved in response and recovery roles. While this form of volunteering is crucial and has many strengths, it excludes the potentially large number of people who are motivated to volunteer before, during and after emergencies in a less ongoing and formal way.

“One thing that has changed in recent times is that spontaneous volunteering is now not necessarily place specific. It used to be just about turning up at the incident site but agencies are now dealing with networks of remote—mostly online—volunteers harnessing resources and people to respond. Many of these people may be nowhere near the actual incident site but they are having an impact on the response, often over an extended period.

They may be organising people or donations, or connecting people with resources, for example,” Professor Handmer says.

Fellow RMIT University researcher Dr Joshua Whittaker notes that almost everyone in society has the potential to volunteer in a crisis.

“In many cases the first people on the scene of an emergency or a disaster are these local volunteers. The initial response is often local—by spontaneous and untrained people. Then later, the emergency services arrive and these initial efforts are often sidelined or stifled. At the other end of the incident, when the formal relief and recovery services have finished, the community is still there dealing with these problems, largely through volunteers,” Dr Whittaker says.

The role of volunteers in increasing community resilience to disasters is recognised in both the priority actions of the United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction’s Hyogo Framework for Action and the priority outcomes of the Australian National Strategy for Disaster Resilience.

“It is pretty hard to implement these strategies if we are saying that everyone should just wait for the emergency agencies to turn up. It is actually about well-prepared and self-sufficient communities.

“And in a lot of communities that capacity already exists. That may be a group that forms with a specific intent like BlazeAid, or it might be an existing sporting or community organisation that responds by drawing on its established resources and networks,” Dr Whittaker says.

Given the growing exposure of people to natural hazards due to rapidly expanding settlements in rural, coastal and fringe areas over recent years, it is likely that non-traditional volunteers will provide the bulk of the additional surge capacity needed to deal with the more frequent natural hazard events occurring under climate change.

At the same time, there are more and more examples of government and non-government organisations, and motivated individuals and groups, finding new ways to harness the capacities of non-traditional emergency volunteers. However, these examples are isolated and have not yet been integrated into new and more inclusive models of volunteering for the emergency management sector.

The development of new, coordinated models is needed to provide a framework for engaging further with this potential additional workforce.

Dr Whittaker acknowledges that this type of volunteering is not new. “But what is new is the acknowledgement by the emergency services that these people are out there and they are doing good things. How can we best work with them?

“This is really an acknowledgement of the importance of these people right through from the 80-year-old sandwich maker, to the bloke with a shovel, the person who rushes to free people from the rubble, or the distant internet fund-raiser.”

This project will select case studies to illustrate both the benefits and the problems with non-traditional volunteering. Dr Whittaker explains:

“It’s not always positive. Sometimes it can create problems for the emergency services.

“One of the examples that is often discussed is the huge convergence of people on the scene of Ground Zero after 9/11. They had tens of thousands of people descend on New York City—locals, but also people from all around [the USA], all wanting to help. That become a major logistical challenge for the emergency services who had to then manage this.

It created real problems. Many turned up wanting to help, but they didn’t know how to help. They couldn’t really help. The best thing they could do was not be there but this created all sorts of tensions and problems from the agencies’ point of view.” Professor Handmer says the project will develop a model for agencies to better work with non-traditional volunteers. “But that is a high-level goal.

The benefits are not just for the agencies. It will benefit communities because they are the ones most affected.

“Community resilience is about involving communities in emergency management, it is about them taking responsibly for their risk, and preparing and responding in the best way. And to ensure that when they are doing good things on the ground the formal system supports and facilitates the community,” Professor Handmer says.

Retaining active volunteers

A related project in the CRC is focusing on improving the retention and engagement of volunteers in emergency service agencies.

The NSW State Emergency Service (SES) estimates that the attrition rate of active volunteers is around 20% each year. High attrition rates create high operating costs (recruiting, training and equipping volunteers) and it reduces organisational effectiveness by leaving a small, overworked core of experienced and trained volunteers. This phenomenon of high turnover in the volunteer sector is not restricted to the SES—it is a common problem in most volunteer organisations.

This project, led by Dr Michael Jones at the University of Wollongong, will help volunteer based organisations better use and manage both their resources and their volunteer workforce.

Findings from this project can be used by comparable organisations across Australia to optimise their workforces and financial strategies to better serve their communities.