​We have volunteers all around us every day – in hospitals, businesses, schools and churches, wherever we go.  When disasters hit, the volunteers with whom I’m most familiar show up, sometimes hundreds at a time if the damages are bad enough.  Those volunteers are part of a North Coast CERT, and sit around just waiting for “the call” when they are needed, right?  No, not really!
 
My mother used to tell me that if you wanted something done to ask a busy person.  There is a lot of truth in that statement.  It’s not that busy people can make more hours in a day, they just make more of each hour they have.  They manage their schedule by getting things done and off the list.  They do things right the first time so they don’t need do-overs, and they tackle the jobs they like as well as the ones they hate.  They know their work has value so they work purposefully and diligently.
 
How many times have we left an event and remarked, “Well, that’s two hours I’ll never get back?” Generally, that means we think our time was wasted. Did we walk in two hours before with that expectation of no value?  People who leave an event enthused and excited usually walked in with an open mind and an expectation that they’d gain something from participating and engaging.  The event may not have changed their life in a big way, but in some way they found value.  The most important part is that they found it because they came in expecting it.  They didn’t wait for benefit to fall out of the sky at them.
 
Most of our schedules would fail the test of a logistics professional.  We have too much to do in one day, or we have too little.  Our activities lack a balanced cost-benefit analysis, or sometimes we end up just doing busy-work for the sake of the process.  Our workload is out of balance.  We procrastinate; we avoid.  From an academic perspective, our work to be done and time available are horribly out of sync most days. 
 
And then things get in the way! We’re interrupt-driven, maybe managing sick kids at home the same day we have a really important presentation at work, or an unexpected customer with a problem takes up our whole morning.  Maybe the storm hit and power went out right as we were getting productive. What can you do?  Timing in life is off, always way off.  If we could only get that correct, we could say yes to everything.  Ah, timing is everything!
 
Volunteerism has little to do with having adequate time to do one more thing, or having the request come when the time is right.  The “yes” or “no” is based upon an expectation of a satisfying result.  If you suggest, as part of your request, that “You probably don’t want to do this” then they probably won’t.  On the other hand, when you ask them if they’d like to be a part of an incredibly successful project, their ears might just perk and their head nod, “Yes!” 
 
Volunteerism isn’t dead.  It’s dormant at times because we forget what motivates people and we don’t communicate well.  We make the decisions for them by not asking in the first place. We make assumptions that aren’t correct.  Just like a salesman learns, always ask for the sale!  It never ceases to amaze me at how many sales I can make if I ask the right people in the right way, even under the worst of circumstances. Now when is that storm supposed to hit?

​“I didn’t need that today so I think I’ll get rid of it. No sense taking up space if I’m not going to use it.”
 
We live in a short-term disposable world. Young women don’t value their grandmother’s china anymore, and young men don’t fix up their dad’s old car and proudly drive it down Main Street on Friday night. If we have something in our closet and don’t wear it in a year, the wardrobe gurus tell us to get rid of it. We don’t keep things that don’t have a daily purpose, and as a result our second-hand stores and resale shops have more merchandise than the local mall. 
 
Unfortunately, we do the same thing with disaster resources when we don’t suffer the ill effects of a devastating storm for a year or a few. When we don’t open a shelter, we don’t worry about renewing the agreements, checking the stock, and counting the cots. If we don’t have the need for that special protective gear we use when ethyl-methyl-death creeps down the local ditch, we let it sit in the closet and dry rot. When we don’t need volunteers to clean up debris, sort and assign workers, and do a quick and dirty damage assessment within 12 hours, we park them on a list somewhere and maintain our confidence that they’ll be here for us when the crap eventually hits the fan. 
 
The problem is that then when the proverbial crap does hit the fan, they are not there and we’re somehow surprised. We catch ourselves saying, “Well, you just can’t prepare for Mother Nature, it’s always a crap shoot to do what we need to do. We did the best we could.” We justify the mayhem because it makes us feel like we were prepared, in spite of ourselves. 
 
Well, in fact, we were not prepared. We used to be prepared, but today we were not. We are only prepared when we maintain a true state of readiness to meet the needs of a reasonably serious incident at any given time or place. We don’t have to prepare for Doomsday, but we do have to consider our realistic risks and understand that most of the time, the incidents aren’t going to match the worst possible scenario. Thank goodness! But that does not give us justification to become complacent and dismissive, and to let our volunteers dry rot on a list in someone’s computer.
 
Maintaining volunteer resources isn’t done as the storm approaches. It’s done on bright and sunny days when the storms are far off in another land. It’s best done when there is little risk of an incident, while they can learn and practice, maybe even have a dress rehearsal or two before “THE” day comes. Of course, we never know when “THE” day will be here, so true preparedness geeks assume it might be TO-DAY. That’s true preparedness.
 
Volunteers do what they do for two reasons – first, they have a relationship with someone or something that drives them to want to help. Second, there is a connection between them and the disaster-stricken area. In general, community-based volunteers, the version you find in your town, don’t cross the country to help clean up after a storm. But the people who live down the street or up the road will come help. They have a relationship and a connection.
 
Volunteer managers have to court and cultivate that relationship and connection. It’s their job and it doesn’t happen as a casual consequence.
 
There IS a second-hand store for volunteers. It’s called “that other organization”, and if you don’t cultivate and tend to your volunteer resources, they’ll go there. Maintaining that relationship, whether its personal or organizational, is still important. As a matter of fact, it’s critical and it needs to be done on a fairly regular basis. 
 
“Out of sight, out of mind” is a real end result in the volunteer world, but it should not be prevalent in the actions of volunteer managers. In these days of electronic communication, constant contact via electronic mail, digital newsletters, blogs, text messages, and social media are critical components necessary to sustain the volunteer resources you work so hard to create. It doesn’t take long to lose the productivity enabled by those capacity-building grants of the early 2000s by throwing away the resources we have because we didn’t need them today.
 
Don’t throw your volunteers away today because you didn’t need them. That need can change in a hurry, and you won’t have time to mend your ways when that happens. Keep your volunteers training, engaging, and responding every day so when that stuff hits the fan, they’re in the forefront and one step ahead of you.