Volunteers in emergency management: an investment in the future?

Abstract

There are currently two interconnected and conflicting challenges in many countries in the world: emergency and disaster preparedness and the public finance crisis. Volunteers are a valuable and necessary resource for emergency and disaster management. This paper deals with various experiences and emergencies in the Czech Republic in which the nonprofit sector is significantly involved. The aim of the paper is to identify the scope of Czech emergency volunteering and its role in the national Integrated Rescue System (IRS). The Czech IRS is a well-established system based partly on volunteers. The volunteer-to-professional ratio is nearly 12 to 1 for firefighters and about 3.6 to 1 for the mountain rescue service; the water rescue service consists exclusively of volunteers. Moreover, hundreds or thousands of people volunteer during large floods. The scope of volunteer engagement during emergency situations can also be illustrated through estimates of its economic value. The Czech Republic saves public finances for operational expenditures of parties of the IRS, because these costs could be lowered with volunteer participation. It is possible to consider past investments in emergency volunteering as investments in the high-functioning IRS. Analogically, current investments in emergency volunteering can and should be considered as investments in sustaining the current activities of the IRS. The Czech model should be explored more thoroughly; it could be interesting for other countries with problems in emergency and disaster response, especially countries that need to reduce public expenditures.

Cross-Cultural Study of Community Engagement in Second-Generation Immigrants

“…Specifically, 12 items adapted from the International Labour Organization (2011) were used to measure participants’ attitudes toward engagement in their host-national community (six items) and engagement in their conational community (six items). This community engagement scale (CES) has been previously used in measuring individuals’ engagement in the community (Dostál & Balarinová, 2013; Li & Frieze, 2016; Salamon, Sokolowski, & Haddock, 2011). Participants rated their agreement on the items based on a 5-point Likert-type scale from 1 ( strongly disagree ) to 5 ( strongly agree ).…”

Recruitment, retention and resignation among Non-Career Firefighters

“…For example, approximately 65% of all firefighters in the United States are volunteers (Evarts and Stein, 2017). Even though the emergency response to accidents and natural hazards is dependent on these non-career firefighters (Dost al and Balarinov a, 2013), there have been significant decreases in their numbers over the past decade, a trend that includes North America and Australia (McLennan and Birch, 2005;Yoon et al, 2014). Further, this also seems to be an issue in Europe.…”

Lessons of cooperation between government and non-governmental organizations in emergency management in the czech republic

“…Looking to the current situation in the Czech Republic, it is clear that the NGOs have become involved in crisis planning that they are trying to coordinate their efforts in this area, and that they are aware of the need for sharing information [3,16]. Dostál and Balarinová [18] stated that failure to provide volunteer aid in emergencies would probably have fatal impacts on the Integrated Rescue System (IRS) of the Czech Republic, especially on the provision of water rescue services, mountain rescue services, and fire protection, and the decrease in human resources to cope with the consequences of flooding would also be considerable. Their study estimates the economic value of selected types of volunteering in emergencies as running to hundreds of thousands of euro for individual types of volunteering.…”