Adelaide Cooper

How people volunteer to keep their community safe from natural hazards is changing. As our work and life commitments change, many people do not have the time to dedicate to traditional ways of volunteering with an emergency service, undergo the required training and develop the ability to respond to potentially dangerous situations. But they still want to help, and they still want to volunteer.

This project investigated current and emerging issues around volunteering and volunteers responding to disaster events, and the different factors that can influence people’s participation in non-traditional emergency volunteering.

Many volunteer-based emergency service agencies experience high rates of volunteer turnover, in some cases as high as 20% each year. At times, up to half of all new recruits leave within the first two years. Finding out why this happens – and developing ways to improve volunteer retention – was the focus of this study. While the team determined there was no need for a leadership program per se, because most agencies offer a variety of programs that meet the traditional needs of leadership development, self-determination theory has been identified as a simple method to introduce to volunteer leaders.