Volunteer relief workers in the Houston area after Hurricane Beryl (Source: Texans on Mission, July 2024).

Volunteers: Incident Management Assets or Liabilities?

Volunteer responses are often only effective if volunteers and their teams meet specific criteria. They must be trained, prepared, motivated, and deployed. Lesser investments can lead to a diminished mission, a well-meaning but ineffective response, or, in the worst case, a negative outcome. However, a trained, prepared, motivated, and deployed volunteer cohort could magnify the incident management mission greatly. 

Texans on Mission has refined these criteria over its 57 years of responding to major disasters in the U.S. and abroad. Each deployment meets these four standards (and involves a continuity pattern of evaluation and retraining) that serve as a base for the organization’s volunteer-utilization best practices. 

Effectively Trained 

In the chaos of incident response and recovery, the difference between ineffective and effective operations is often training. Providing volunteers with a functional-based best-practice outcome helps agencies define roles and responsibilities more effectively. 

Texans on Mission provides intensive training that experienced volunteers write, review, and conduct. These volunteers understand the purpose, work, and methods of disaster relief and have years of experience in incident management.  

The general training, which is repeated every five years, is a two-hour overview of volunteer expectations and opportunities. While this training is delivered in person, an online course is also offered for convenience. In addition to the general training and orientation, specialty areas involve classroom training to ensure volunteers understand organizational procedures and mentors who accompany them during callouts. 

In addition to training in the methods of effective volunteer response, this training includes the following expectations: 

  • Adaptability – Training curricula offer best practices while acknowledging the need for flexibility learned through previous deployments. This philosophy enables trainees to adapt to changing needs within a deployment. 
  • Diverse specialty training – Volunteers begin their training journey with a broad-based overview of disaster response and recovery. However, the majority seek specialty training that allows them to move from generalists to trained specialists within several subdisciplines, including incident management and leadership, food handling, chainsaw and heavy equipment operation, shower and laundry provision, fire and flood recovery, child care, damage assessment, chaplaincy, temporary roofing techniques, and more. 
  • Outcome-based, effective incident response and recovery standards – Volunteer responders do not work in a vacuum. They must interact with governmental entities, responders, nongovernmental organizations and other responding volunteers, humanitarian aid providers, survivors, the larger public, local businesses, and the media. Early recovery efforts established organizational strategies to improve work efficiencies. Those efforts also integrated the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Incident Command System within the organization, which is familiar to other responders such as firefighters, law enforcement, and emergency management. Training to a professional standard allows volunteer organizations to interact more efficiently and effectively within the incident area of operation. 

Practically Prepared 

Preparation may seem like an extension of training, but there is a distinction. While training provides hands-on techniques and methods, preparation elements include practice, volunteer interaction, team-building, and mental and emotional readiness for deployment. 

For example, during the basic feeding onboarding, there is a combination of classwork and lab/fieldwork. In addition to learning safety elements such as the five key bacteria and viruses that cause food-borne illnesses in many humans, volunteers are onboarded through lab trainings and deployments. During these activities, leadership and experienced mentoring volunteers guide trainees through safety practices that prevent food-borne illnesses. 

Likewise, chainsaw volunteers are exposed to a multi-hour classroom experience. Next, they undergo an outdoor lab that covers best safety practices, chainsaw techniques, and an introduction to working in an incident environment with a team of others (carrying dangerous equipment). 

In summary, many volunteers do not have prior experience in the often-chaotic environment of disaster response. This onboarding process exposes them to effective classroom education, practical hands-on training, and the development of a resilience mindset to increase their field effectiveness within the organization’s mission parameters. 

Since training is only a half-measure for volunteer readiness, it is critical to stress putting training into practice and individuals into context with their specialty teams. The intent is twofold: (1) Integrate each volunteer’s training into a practical setting, and (2) put volunteers into a group setting that promotes integration, camaraderie, and group effectiveness. 

Although practice events often fill these opportunities, it is beneficial to quickly funnel newer volunteers into smaller, local responses or non-disaster contexts such as mass feeding for large meetings. These non-incident or low-level practical preparedness events manifest as mental and emotional readiness for large-scale, disaster-related deployments. They also promote confidence in abilities and training, familiarity with tasks and functions, and mental readiness for the demands of large-scale deployments. 

Preparing volunteers involves becoming familiar with response tools. Incident recovery often uses specialty equipment that relies on prepared operators, from simple wheelbarrows for removing debris from a home to a complex skid-steer working with a chainsaw team. Effective equipment operation represents opportunities to serve more survivors. 

On an organizational scale, being connected to state and national disaster entities boosts readiness levels. These connections facilitate discussions about critical needs and where and how to respond to impacted areas. In turn, volunteer organizations have greater access to disaster areas to serve families in the most needed locations and ways. 

It bears noting that a successful preparedness strategy includes a decentralized equipment model. For example, Texans on Mission owns only about 25% of its response equipment and houses it at its Dallas headquarters. Churches and Baptist denominational associations scattered around 14 areas in Texas own the majority to ensure fast deployment and utilization by local churches and teams to meet community needs and help churches serve their communities. 

The decentralization of equipment and volunteer teams serves the organization’s mission by spreading the services across a large state. However, mission effectiveness relies on a centralized model of leadership, corporate communications, fundraising, financial services, warehousing, and maintenance of many of the larger support vehicles and ancillary equipment, such as cargo trailers and feeding units. 

These centralized, shared services can be illustrated in the organization’s fundraising efforts. As a faith-based nonprofit, the work is primarily funded through private and church-funded methods, with little foundation giving and no governmental support. By centralizing its fundraising efforts, the organization can guide donors to provide resources that best fit the needs of the overall organization. In addition to these macro-level strategic fundraising efforts, the teams around the state fund their local work and the purchase and maintenance of their equipment through micro-level fundraising efforts. 

Motivated to Serve 

In addition to training and preparation, volunteer and professional organizations often share the belief that an effective responder is a motivated responder. While motivations differ from individual to individual and organization to organization, volunteers in faith-based organizations tend to have strong faith-driven motivations that compel them to respond through action. Organizations can provide survivors with spiritual and mental support through specialties like chaplaincy. 

Critical Incident Stress Management training, for example, is geared toward survivors, first responders, and other volunteers to enhance effective incident recovery. With this training, chaplains can rapidly morph from an active assailant incident to a tornado recovery. They train to respond to various stress factors and types of events. The motivation of faith-based organizations is captured in taglines like that of Texans on Mission, “Bringing help, hope, and healing.” Volunteers bring spiritual as well as physical help, hope, and healing. 

Actively Deployed 

Volunteer responders are a game-changer for incident recovery, but only if trained, prepared, and motivated. All the trained volunteers, outfitted trailers, and the desire to provide help, hope, and healing mean nothing without going and doing. Deployment can range from a single unit for a single day to every aspect of response with thousands of volunteers over months. Following the initial disaster relief deployment is the physical work of rebuilding homes, houses, and families long after the initial response ends. Tropical Storm Beryl is a current example of those efforts. 

Effective volunteerism starts with volunteers who respond with action, meaning volunteers who deploy. Volunteer presence initiates a certain proof of volunteer effectiveness. Being present and demonstrating the professionalism of the volunteer organization conveys volumes to the survivors and the people they work alongside. Credibility among volunteer organizations is imperative for effective response and recovery. 

That broader, external public credibility was illustrated in 2024 when the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM) honored Texans on Mission as the Volunteer Organizations Active in Disasters (VOAD) member organization of the year. Texans on Mission was the first organization to receive the recognition. 

According to TDEM, the award “recognizes an individual or group that has demonstrated exceptional commitment, impact, and service in disaster response and recovery across our great state. The recipient exemplifies the four Cs of VOAD – cooperation, communication, coordination, and collaboration.” Such recognition is a referendum on the volunteer team’s effectiveness and its value to the greater mission of incident response. 

As the disaster relief director of a faith-based, volunteer-focused nonprofit organization that provides disaster relief for a broad spectrum of natural and human-caused disasters, this author has had a front seat in participating in and leading disaster responses for almost three decades. These experiences have solidified his belief that organized volunteer-led efforts are integral to total incident recovery management. 

David Wells

David Wells is director of Disaster Relief for Texans on Mission, a U.S. 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that empowers volunteers of the Christian faith to respond to the biggest challenges around the globe through disaster relief and feeding, water sustainability, and capacity-building initiatives. Wells began his response journey as a Baptist pastor in Wyoming, leading his congregation to provide aid to travelers trapped by routine interstate closings due to snow. He later became state director for Disaster Relief for the Wyoming Southern Baptist Convention. As a pastor in Missouri, he led shower, chainsaw, laundry, and feeding response teams among Missouri Baptists, eventually becoming associate director of Disaster Relief for the Missouri Baptist Convention. Wells joined Texans on Mission in 2019 and has served as the director of Disaster Relief since 2020.

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