Emergency service volunteering: Current & future challenges

This article was first published in the December 2019 edition of Nexus, the newsletter of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA).

My article in Nexus (Vol 29, No. 2) in August 2017 foreshadowed research being undertaken under the auspices of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre (BNHCRC) and the University of Wollongong that was examining the contemporary forces impacting on the resourcing of the emergency service volunteer workforce in Australia. This article summarises the key findings of a Master thesis titled “Valuing volunteers: better understanding the primary motives for volunteering in Australian emergency services” that is available at https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses1/558/. The Valuing Volunteers study provides new insights on the motives for formal emergency service volunteering through empirical research on volunteers’ shared and contrasting values, and critically evaluates the broader policy and social contexts for such important and essential civic participation.

Emergency services are responsible for the protection and preservation of life and property from harm resulting from emergency events, and include the fire service organisations, ambulance service organisations, State emergency services, marine rescue and coast guard organisations, and lifesaving organisations. Volunteers are the lifeblood of emergency services in Australia and are integral to the nation’s emergency management capabilities and overall disaster resilience. The concurrence of an increase in the risks posed by a range of climate change-related natural hazards and a decline in formal volunteering rates threatens Australia’s emergency preparedness.

The study explores five key research objectives:

• Demonstrate that emergency service volunteering represents exceptional civic participation
• Establish the validity and utility of a values framework for interpreting and understanding the primary motives for emergency service volunteering
• Determine the distinct shared and contrasting values of a sample of emergency service volunteers
• Evaluate the efficacy and integrity of current processes for determining national emergency management priorities
• Identify trends in changing core values with implications for future forms of civic participation, including emergency service volunteering.