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.
With research showing that the nature of volunteering and citizen involvement in disaster management is fundamentally changing, advice from the RMIT University team led by Prof John Handmer and Dr Blythe McLennan is regularly sought by individual agencies and organisations in the development of guides and policies around volunteering and spontaneous volunteering.
Dr McLennan was acknowledged for leadership and research in community resilience and disaster recovery recently, when presented with the 2018 Quiet Achiever Awards by Emergency Management Victoria Commissioner Andrew Crisp.
The strategy provides advice to emergency service agencies on what they need to be aware of, and what they need to consider and plan for when working with spontaneous volunteers. Important issues such as legal obligations and social media are also covered, with the work of the project team integral to the Strategy’s completion.
Building on this, the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience has drawn directly on the research to develop a new handbook on spontaneous volunteer management. The handbook provides important guidance for organisations on how to incorporate the principles of the National Spontaneous Volunteer Strategy, and the most recent research on spontaneous volunteering, into their own plans and procedures.
Emergency services are also using the research, with the New South Wales State Emergency Service using the findings to shape how the organisation will recruit volunteers. Work on the development of this handbook was recognised by the CRC in 2019 with an Excellence in Research Utilisation Award given to Dr McLennan and AIDR’s Amanda Lamont.
Emergency services are also using the research, with the New South Wales State Emergency Service using the findings to shape how the organisation will recruit volunteers.
“Findings from the research really helped to shape our Volunteering Reimagined strategy, launched in 2017,” says Andrew McCullough, Volunteering Strategist at the NSW SES.
“The NSW SES is planning to lead in this space, and it is only with the help and the research of the CRC that this is possible,” he says.
In Western Australia, the Department of Fire and Emergency Services has used the research to develop new directions in volunteering, while South Australia’s Department of Communities and Social Inclusion, Volunteering ACT and Volunteering Victoria have also been influenced by the work in developing polices and guides to volunteer management, both during emergencies and in recovery. Be Ready Warrandyte, a community group in one of Melbourne’s high bushfire risk suburbs, has drawn extensively on the research to help educate and support their local community.
Paul Davis, Manager, Volunteer Development and Change, Emergency Management Victoria, says the research is shifting the narrative around emergency volunteering from one of crisis and decline, to one of transformation and opportunity. “This is in fact good news as it may be the very shift that we need to drive organisational change. This is where we must focus our energy and efforts; as communities change, so must we. If we don’t, we face a very real chance of being left behind and looking back at what might have been.”
Findings from this research has also informed another CRC project on sustainable volunteering, focusing on how to best adapt emergency management agencies to these new ways of volunteering. This research centres around exploring the developments that are likely to occur over the next decade that will require adaption, as well as barriers to organisational change.