Gav's Blog

I see the hoary old problem of Civil Defence and volunteerism has raised its head again.

There was discussion at the meeting about the very nature of civil defence - and the fact that a lot of people find it a dry, rather boring, topic. It was agreed that the City Council should make more effort to make civil defence more sexy.

While some might find that amusing, or feel we are trivialising civil defence by saying such a thing, there’s a deadly-serious intent behind trying to make civil defence more sexy - to get far more people involved as volunteers and far more families aware of the need to be prepared for a major earthquake or some other large-scale emergency.

I did my first Civil Defence volunteer training sometime mid-1997. Initially I figured it would be a good way to learn some potentially useful life skills – namely about getting up to speed with what happens before, during, and after an emergency or disaster. I started off in rescue – so picked up some good basic training in first aid and light rescue. I was a member of a number of volunteer teams.

It was from here that I became more interested in some of the challenges that a disaster environment presents and decided to do some study in this area and make it a profession.

Anyway, the point I want to make is that retention of volunteers in CD is a challenging problem, and it probably won’t be solved just by trying to ‘make CD sexy’.

One of the biggest problems our volunteer teams faced was actually being utilised. Whilst there was plenty of training available, and we’d have two or three exercises a year – we rarely got the chance to use our skills in anger. Of course, if you think about this, it is a good thing that Civil Defence volunteers are not used that often!

But from a personal and team perspective, it is extremely difficult to maintain interest in volunteering without having some actual experience. Whilst CD volunteers often have a load of enthusiasm and interest, over time, as we are not used, that wanes, and people eventually drop out of CD due to a lack of use.

Unfortunately, making something ’sexy’ won’t help retention, it will only make attracting new volunteers easier. Any effort to build a sustainable CD volunteer network needs to build on long-term retention, and making sure that volunteers get experiences that makes them stay.

Unfortunately, most experiences that are likely to retain volunteers are either expensive (one of my more memorable training experiences was with the military Iroquois practising rescue hoisting and flying around Wigram) or infrequent (responding to actual events as they happen so infrequently, and even when they do happen, volunteers can often be overlooked).

Given that we can’t control when actual events occur, and plan it into training schedules, these are not really a viable option. In the current economic climate, expensive options are certainly out.

In my mind, this leaves a couple of likely options.

1. Life skills. One approach may be to design CD training so that where possible skills can be applied not only in CD, but also in normal life. This was one of the reasons I started in CD as I thought first aid and rescue were good general life skills to have.
2. Finding more creative means of getting interesting opportunities to maintain volunteers interest in Civil Defence.

Civil Defence won’t maintain volunteers unless opportunities are created for them to continually grow, and gain new experiences. Unfortunately, that comes at a price to ratepayers, and the tricky part will be balancing in at a time when CD budgets seem to be getting trimmed. No small challenge indeed!

Just wanted to add some brief comments following discussion as GOVIS 2008, in the ‘Our Place in Space’ stream. This was held in Wellington last Friday. At the end of the day I raised the following challenging comments to the audience, and they seemed to be well received. I will be reviewing and adding to these in the near future.

1. Don’t wait for application ideas or business cases. Free as much data as possible and the applications will follow. The killer application for your data has not been invented yet.

2. Consider community and volunteers. We are enthusiastic, have a huge capacity to learn, we have a hunger for data, and if it suits us we will dedicate massive amounts of time to it. Our expectations are being fed by online mapping and we want more.

3. Spatial citizens don’t care about arbitrary political boundaries and are happy acting with national and even international datasets. We don’t want to work with 80+ Local Government agencies. We want it to be trivial to find spatial information. Let us integrate the data we want using our own systems. We want to package the data our way. We want to take it out into the real world where there is no web access. We want to fix your data, but only if it is fixed once and fixed fast. LINZ – are you listening? We can do it in 24 hours and we’re not getting paid to do it. We will only get faster, more competent, and hungrier for information about our place in space…