​In the aftermath of this presidential election, the media has branded the Midwest the “uneducated rural America”.  WOW! That is about all I can say.  WOW! 
 
I travel rural Ohio on a regular basis for my work.  We do what’s called “whole community planning” where you sit down with people from every township, every village, and every city in a county and talk to them about disasters and storms, and how it affects them.
 
In this process, we meet with people from small communities. Most municipalities we work with are considered villages, defined as incorporated entities of less than 5,000 residents.  We also meet with townships where when the trustee is elected, they know the job includes plowing snow and filling chuckholes in the roads.  This isn’t the entire population we work with, there are cities too.  But we definitely have our thumb on the pulse of at least rural Ohio.
 
Let me tell you, these people are anything but uneducated country bumpkins! Rural America is self-sufficient, resilient, intelligent and educated. I listened to an economic developer in Celina last week talk about how to successfully develop business and industry in a rural community.  He really does know how to create jobs and foster success, and it is obvious as you drive through the city. I spent time with agriculture officials in Paulding County a couple months ago, and these gals (yes, females) have a very ecologically responsible yet productive approach to agricultural issues in the state. Paulding County is the 5th smallest county in Ohio and doesn’t even have a “city”, but their approach is anything but backward.  I’ve worked with folks in Rocky Ridge in Ottawa County, and while this little community doesn’t have industry, commerce, or glitz, you probably won’t ever see these people crying for someone to come save them no matter what befalls them.  They pretty much just get ‘er done, whatever that happens to be.  The folks in Bellville in Richland County have developed one of the most innovative approaches to private-public partnerships that I’ve ever seen, and it benefits their residents on a daily basis.  Shelby’s floodplain manager was awarded one of FEMA’s leadership awards last year for his role in the city’s flood damage prevention, and I might add in a national competition.
 
The rural America the media has characterized as uneducated is actually quite educated.  In the groups with whom I meet, there is a predominance of college-educated individuals.  Maybe they are not Ivy League graduates, but they are far from uneducated.  It is not uncommon to find individuals with advanced degrees working in rural America, even on the farms that dot the Midwest. They hold the same licenses, certifications, and degrees that you find in the city, and oftentimes the farmers hold degrees in agriculture, food science, animal science, or production.  Let’s not forget that many of the universities in the Midwest were founded on land grants, and thus have a strong background in agriculture even though they have a more diverse offering for students.
 
I think the media needs to look at what they’re spewing and find a better approach. Rural America plays a critical role in how our country succeeds and grows, and if they media wants to paint them as pathetic bumpkins with no education, they might just be missing the biggest story of all.

​Volunteers don’t just show up because you need them. Let me say that again.  Volunteers don’t just show up because you need them.
 
The assumption that says when help is needed, someone will show up isn’t necessarily accurate. At least it’s not when it comes to disaster volunteers who show up to help people after a tornado has struck or a flood has ravaged the community. The work of this situation is definitely needed, but we can’t be sure anyone will show up to do it anymore.
 
We all shop at a big box store that has workers because selling things to customers is work. They build a store, hire people to handle the merchandise before, during, and after sale, and open their doors for business. Workers stock the shelves, check people out, supervise employees, and run the office. They train and manage the workers who show up because they get paid to show up and work.
 
It’s really different how we handle disaster work. To start with, we only pay less than half of the workers. Generally, we pay most of the police officers, firemen, and EMTs who respond in the emergent phase of a disaster. We provide trucks, squads, and ambulances and the supplies they need to help save lives and property. We provide benefits and pay because this work is their job.  But we don’t pay a great majority of what follows them, in other words, the disaster volunteers.
 
What happens in a disaster when the first responders all go back to their station, when the injured have all been cared for and the fires are out, and we’re just left with piles of debris that used to be homes? What happens when the power is still out, and the floodwaters have left germs and filth behind in kitchens and family rooms? Without livable homes, it’s impossible to cook, eat, sleep, pay the bills, play with the kids, entertain the dog, and go to work. What happens when you can’t go to work because work isn’t there anymore? Life hasn’t returned to any sort of normal, and lots of help is still necessary in spite of the fact that first response work is done.  What about second response? 
 
That’s when the disaster volunteers come in because the work is all but done. What waits is difficult, painful, and exhausting. It’s helping people who’ve lost everything through a traumatic and uncontrollable situation. Circumstances can be austere, and volunteers work without electricity, air conditioning, and light. The hours are long, and workers go without food or bathroom breaks. No one gives them uniforms or protective gear. They come in early and stay late, and they take the emotional burden of work home with them.
 
Disaster volunteers do critical work. How do we know for sure these volunteers will be there when we need them? We don’t. We have faith that they will be, partly because they always have been. If we don’t keep them engaged, train and re-train, practice and exercise, and motivate them to come back again, they won’t be there when we need them. Our dependency upon disaster volunteers may have to change unless we pay attention to sustaining this resource. If we fail to sustain them, they won’t be there.
 
Look closely at what is really happening with disaster volunteer organizations today. One national disaster organization has made sweeping changes to centralize their operations. That means they don’t have offices and staff in individual communities anymore; maybe they don’t even have local connections anymore. Other federal groups have nationalized supply caches, given up local facilities, increased volunteer requirements and eliminated local leadership. Some organizations are just holding their breath, hoping all will be well even though grant funding has disappeared and local checkbooks are not filling the gap. Others are still frantically doing more with less, and working harder every day to survive, living with the fear of elimination.
 
We’re not doing a very good job providing for our disaster volunteer resources. We’re letting them starve to death. As environmentalists tell us climate change will make storms bigger and more ferocious, we’re strangling the local resources we’ll have to depend upon when those storms hit. As terrorists drop bombs and backpacks explode at marathons, we’re allowing the volunteers who help to bleed out and die. We need to get back to supporting volunteers with money, resources, equipment, respect, and appreciation.  Yesterday wouldn’t have been soon enough.
 
Just remember – volunteers don’t just show up because you need them.

​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.

Thanks to the Ohio Township Association for inviting Resource Solutions to speak at winter conference and to everyone who attended yesterday's session on whole community planning. Townships are a vital part of the emergency planning process. If you aren't already involved in planning in your county, I hope yesterday's session gave you some ideas on where to begin.  If you'd like further information, don't hesitate to reach out. ~Lauren

Here are links to the presentation materials and FEMA documents I referenced in the session.
Whole Community Planning: What it Means to Partner Up Presentation - January 28, 2016
Whole Community Planning Handout - January 28, 2016
A Whole Community Approach to Emergency Management, FEMA, December 2011
​Plan Integration: Linking Local Planning Efforts, FEMA, July 2015

Since 2009, Resource Solutions Associates has worked with our EMA partners in Erie, Huron, and Ottawa counties to coordinate the Community Emergency Response Team. CERT is a 100% volunteer organization dedicated to promoting emergency preparedness, training volunteers to assist our communities following a disaster, and supporting emergency responders and volunteer agencies during a response. We're insanely proud of the 100+ volunteers who participate in the team. They dedicate an amazing amount of time and effort to the organization. Without their work, North Coast CERT would not be the strong organization it is today. 

We're so thrilled to celebrate five years of CERT in Erie, Huron, and Ottawa County, we made a video! Please take a few minutes to walk down memory lane with us and celebrate the volunteers who make North Coast CERT such a fun team to be a part of. If you'd like to learn more about the team, check out our website www.northcoastcert.com. 

And because the message bears repeating ... THANK YOU VOLUNTEERS!!

Emergency preparedness is costly. Surviving a disaster is costly, and so is dying in one. It seems nowadays everything regarding emergencies is expensive. Thus, cities and counties face a huge challenge when they attempt to right-size their public safety departments and balance the budget at the same time. Few jurisdictions get it done to the satisfaction of their constituents. The City of Sandusky, along with dozens of other cities, faces this dilemma right now as the fire department budget has been slashed, and the knife isn’t done making its hashes yet. 

The answer to rightsizing a response capability lies partly in the step of a thorough hazard and risk assessment. Oftentimes cities and villages don’t really know what, when, where, and how emergencies occur in their jurisdiction. Instead of basing their actions on all hazards impact data, they work from memory. Memory tends to be emotional rather than logical. 

Inside the gut of every elected official is the desire to to make their jurisdiction safe. And then the budget takes a downward spiral and they have to deal with budget demons. All parties end up at odds when, in fact, they need more than ever to work together in a game of collaboration and cooperation.

Jurisdictions need to complete a comprehensive risk assessment for their community, and use those statistics to develop a logical plan that facilitates prevention, maximizes the use of all resources available, and shares the costs of response with other stakeholders in the community. The answers are not inside the box. Officials can no longer afford, either monetarily or politically, to succumb to actions they cannot support strategically and statistically. Robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn’t work anymore. Sound reasoning starts with knowing the hazards and risks that exist, and having a full list of the alternatives to compose workable solutions. Those solutions are a result of parties who work together to find creative and effective new solutions to old problems. That’s how we create resilient communities with affordable answers. 

Frustrated with the cost of specialized textbooks? Are you tired of paying for an entire textbook when your students only need to use a few chapters? Would you offer more specialized content in your fire and EMS programs if you could manage the cost of course materials? JB Learning PUBLISH is your solution! Choose just the material you want from the entire JB content library. Customize materials from multiple books and sources to create a textbook or ebook that matches your exact specifications. Contact Sandy at sandy@consultrsa.com to learn how JB Publish can work for your program.

(More after the jump)

Jones & Bartlett recently introduced an interactive ebook/eworkbook to accompany the Emergency Care and Transportation of the Sick and Injured, 10th Edition and other EMS product lines. This user-friendly resource is a great way to seamlessly connect your EMT students with videos, activities, review questions and other interactive tools while they consume the textbook's content. To explore all that the ebook/workbook has to offer, check out this video introduction.

As an authorized distributor of Jones & Bartlett EMS, Firefighter, and Criminal Justice training materials, RSA works with instructors to find the right digital and print resources to meet the needs of their students. Contact us today for details!