Spontaneous Volunteering in Emergencies

Abstract

Volunteering in emergencies, crises, and disasters nearly always occurs, despite being ignored by some professional emergency managers and government officials. Unfortunately, when crisis/disaster plans are written up to try to mitigate and respond to future incidents, the untrained disaster volunteer and the emergent process of which she/he is a part, is usually not included explicitly among the explicit dimensions of the plan. This is true even though the importance of the work of disaster volunteers and the resources available to them are probably unsurpassed by any of the other types of participants in the societal response. Recognized or not, much volunteer helping behavior takes place, ranging along a continuum from official actions by formally trained and certified volunteers to unofficial actions by spontaneous volunteers who operate outside the formal and planned disaster response. The inability to manage such spontaneous volunteering is a key reason for this neglect by emergency/crisis/disaster professionals.