When disaster befalls your
community (or one near you; or one you care about), helping others in distress
may seem intuitively obvious to you.
However, like much else in modern society, government agencies and
institutional organizations regulate, control, and manage spontaneous
volunteering. Like traffic lanes
and traffic lights, or standard time zones, the processes usually work out well
for everyone when participants keep to the program.
 |
About half of the Texas Conservation Corps members
who attended training in
"Managing Spontaneous Volunteers".
They get paid $12,000 per year to build trails
and otherwise manage public lands
and respond to disasters such as
Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey.
After a year, they get $5500 toward college. |
Generally, any community
has some kind of emergency response coordinator. Large towns have several agencies that assume known roles,
such as a CERT (Community Emergency Response Team). The Red Cross and Salvation
Army are the two most visible private entities. They act because they have
legally-recognized authority from a government agency with competent
jurisdiction. Your county sheriff
or township police may have signed a “memorandum of understanding” (MOU)
granting those powers in case of an emergency. These are all necessary (and proper) because a disaster will
overwhelm and deplete the usual first responders: police, firefighters, and
emergency medical technicians.
Terms to know:·
- VOAD –
Volunteer Organizations Active in a Disaster·
- VRC –
Volunteer Resource Center
- Affiliated Volunteers are members of recognized organizations such as
the Youth Corps, the Senior Corps, Americorps. They may actually be paid in
some way. They have formal training and are credentialed in their special
skills, such as interviewing and intervention or machine operations, from
chainsaws to Bobcat “Skid-Steers”. Their organizations assume some liability
for them.
- Spontaneous Volunteers reflect two meanings. On the deeper level, the
volunteer is spontaneous, personally motivated by the news events to come to
aid. Once on the scene, the
spontaneous volunteer can be counted on for enthusiasm and energy. They are
free of cost to the agency that engages them. Spontaneous volunteers bring a range of
skills. They provide additional
resources that can be marshaled.
However, spontaneous
volunteers are known to come with a wide range of problems, from lack of
training to sociopathic predatory behaviors.
“In a report published
online on March 25 in advance of the print edition of Disaster Medicine and
Public Health Preparedness, Lauren Sauer, M.S., surveyed 24 nongovernment
volunteer organizations (NVOs) that had responded to disasters in the past and
found that 19 of them — or 79 percent — had spontaneous volunteers show up to
help. While a majority of those organizations said they found such volunteers
useful, 42 percent reported that volunteers had been injured in the response,
and there were two reported deaths among them. Organizations were allowed to
respond anonymously as a way to encourage survey participation.” (Read here.)
If the town next to yours
suffers a tornado or a flood and you feel motivated to help out, your
experience will go better if you know what to expect and what is expected of
you.
- Report to the VRC, the
Volunteer Resource Center.
- Provide full identification with any validated credentials such as Adult First
Aid or Commercial Vehicle Operations.
- Be prepared to take care of yourself. Bring 72 hours of food, water, and sleeping
gear. Do not expect that the VRC
will be able to bivouac you.
- Know what is needed. Know what you can do. Ask for a list of tasks and
pick the ones that suit your skills.
You might arrive as an electrician and find yourself pumping water from
homes – and that might be fine for you, if you expect that possibility.
- Take direction. The volunteer center has
been lawfully empowered by a memorandum of understanding. If you go off on your
own, you might find yourself dismissed or (ultimately) arrested and jailed;
that is embarrassing all the way around for everyone.
The best way to help out
is to prepare in advance by joining a recognized voluntary relief agency. Some faith-based organizations prepare
a million sandwiches and deliver them to the Red Cross; others distribute ten
thousand Visa Debit Cards. What
you do is up to you. You will be
more effective if you understand the Management of Spontaneous Volunteers.
(This was written from some of the notes taken during an eight-hour training session in "Managing Spontaneous Volunteers" April 11, 2014, sponsored by the Texas Department of Public Safety and the One-Star Foundation.)
ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
At the checkout of my local HEB Grocery Store, the guy behind me had a cake: "Good luck ... Manchaca Fire Department..." I handed him my card, and said that although I am a technical writer, my degrees are in criminology. "You don't get that with police," I said, indicating the cake. "No?" he asked. "I would not expect it," I replied. We thanked each other and I left. The police are necessary and important; without them, you have a failed State. That being so, nonetheless, firefighters live the hardest line of the highest virtues in protection of the lives and properties of others. 
