Exercise developed and produced by:

Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies

National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism

Office of Justice Programs, National Institutes of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

They Will be There: Managing and Protecting Volunteers

Transcript  [Listen to this talk]

DR. TIERNEY: Thank you very much, Ernie. Our last formal presentation is by Dr. John Clizbe. For many years, John was the Vice President of Disaster Services for the American Red Cross. He left the Red Cross, but is now back with the Red Cross as CEO of Red Cross Triangle Area Chapter in Raleigh.

During his time with Disaster Services at the Red Cross, his responsibilities included planning for disaster, disaster response and recovery, training including volunteer training, both with respect to disasters and with respect to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

John is a psychologist by training. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Washington University at St. Louis, specializing in organizational and clinical psychology. Welcome, John.

DR. CLIZBE: There is a story told in the Red Cross that is both apocryphal and prophetic, I think, but it's a story that's applicable probably to every single organization that's represented here. It seems that a few years ago a group of our people were checking into a hotel right along the eastern seaboard just before a hurricane was due to strike. And as they were checking in, the hotel clerk said gee, it's nice to have Red Cross people here. And they looked around, didn't see any identification. They said how did you know who we were? And she said well, everybody else is checking out and you're checking in.

Well, I think there are some important messages in that story about how to manage and protect our volunteers. And as a psychologist who got my start in disaster working on the disaster mental health side, I think it became increasingly clear to me that the issue of dealing with volunteers was as much an emotional issue as it was a logistics issue.

Let's start with a person who's volunteering. There are a number of distinguishing features about that person. One of them is that they're there because they want to be there, and only because they want to be there. They don't have to be there. They're not paid to be there. They're not even expected to be there. They are there because they want to be there.

Now they can want to be there for a lot of different reasons. One of them might be a genuine desire to serve other people. That might be the motivation. Somebody else might be motivated by the excitement of it all, what some of us affectionately refer to as the cowboys. Some people may be motivated to be there out of some social kinds of needs that maybe a group of a neighbors come together to help respond, similar to what Diane was describing. Or it could be the motivation as my wife I hope professionally says could be my rescue fantasy. You know, I want to go in there somehow and rescue a bunch of people. But the point is that as we manage volunteers, we have to manage them differently, depending on where they're coming from, what their motives are.

I can give you one very concrete example. Let's take our cowboys. I can tell you the one thing we don't want to do to protect our cowboy is to give them a mask and some gloves, because if we do, they're going to feel safe to deal with every imaginable kind of biological or chemical outbreak. We have to manage them differently because of the way they're approaching the situation.

There are some other distinguishing features about our volunteer. It is, for example, their belief, and it is entirely their call what they will do. Now for those of us in emergency management, we're accustomed to thinking that we assign people based on what we believe needs to be done. The volunteer who is arriving is thinking in terms of what they want to do.

Now there are some important implications for that. One of them from my point of view is that we must, absolutely must adhere to the standards of performance and expectations that we would have regardless of who the person is that shows up. As a volunteer, and then ultimately as someone attempting to manage and lead volunteers, I became convinced that the issue is to have the right person in the right place, doing the right things at the right time, in the right way, and it didn't matter if they were a volunteer or a paid employee. But we needed to have consistent solid standards and expectations that remained in place, whether it was a volunteer or an employee.

Now there's another implication, I believe, and that is, and we don't like to talk about it a whole lot, the issue of selection. From my point of view, some volunteers who want to volunteer shouldn't volunteer. And we have a responsibility to select in and select out the people who can fulfill the expectations and the standards that we've established.
Another distinguishing feature of our volunteer is that they believe it's at their discretion when they're going to work. We like to think in terms of 16, 17 hour days, seven days a week. A volunteer plans to volunteer on Tuesdays for three hours. That raises havoc with our typical way of thinking about continuity and consistency, but there is an implication to that also. It's called job sharing.

In fact, many of the things that we do, many of the tasks we perform on a disaster operation can, in fact, be shared by numbers of people, instead of following our traditional model of believing that one person has to do one thing all the time. There's another distinguishing feature of our volunteers, although I'm increasingly convinced it doesn't distinguish them from paid staff, and that is that their training and experience can range from zero to a lot.
Now there are some important implications of that also. One of them, obviously, is training, and not just training in advance, but being prepared to run an honest to goodness training operation when the operation is occurring. Many of our organizations are not set up when a disaster happens to conduct on the job training right then and there. But there's another implication of that range of training and experience, and that is that some volunteers, in fact, have more training and more experience than some of our paid people. And we need to recognize the strengths and the assets that the volunteers are bringing to us. More about that in just a minute.

Now let's take this person and plop them into the situation. And we know first and foremost about that situation that it's a disaster. Often a disaster in more ways then we intend. And a number of dimensions arise because it's a disaster. One of those dimensions is that it's a very intense climate. The last thing we think we have is time to deal with the complications of all these volunteers who are showing up, and we get very impatient with them.

They, in turn, get very impatient with us because they came ready to do some work, and we start running them through all kinds of structural and bureaucratic rigmarole from their point of view. Now the implication from my point of view is very straightforward. We absolutely must have a full time person or team devoted exclusively to managing the volunteers. I know of no other way to deal with the dimension of intensity, and that full time person responsible for volunteers needs to be an integral part of the incident command system and structure. They need to be right there where it's all happening, and know what's happening so they know when and how to put volunteers to use.

Now the other dimension of this disaster is it's very complex. And we talk about having multiple balls in the air, those kinds of things. The interesting news is given all I've said about volunteers, the good part is they can diminish the complexity for us in a number of ways, many of which have already been discussed. They can, for example, take on a myriad of those tasks that we don't quite ever get around to assigning to the full time paid people who are there. They can take enormous items off our plate.

On the other hand, they can bring enormous insights that diminish the complexity. They know the neighborhoods. They know the people. They know the vendors. They know the transportation system. All those things that are giving us fits in attempting to manage that disaster situation, the volunteers know and have the answers to, so the volunteer actually can diminish the complexity if we take advantage of the knowledge and skills that they bring to us.

Now that gets to the final dimension that's involved in this disaster situation, and it's something those of us in the disaster business preach all the time, and that is that all disasters are local. Well, Oklahoma City and September 11th certainly drove home the localities that become involved, particularly in acts of terrorism. We know it was a local disaster in New York City, and in New Jersey, and in Connecticut, and in Washington, D.C., and in the surrounding communities, and in Pennsylvania, but it was also a local disaster within New York City.

There was a neighborhood here that Diane describes. There was another neighborhood there that someone else may talk about. All of those were local disasters, but on September 11th it was a disaster in Des Moines for the mother who had the six year old being bombarded on television and who couldn't sleep. It was a disaster in Minnesota for the tourists who were stranded, foreign tourists who were stranded and couldn't get prescriptions. It was a disaster in Los Angeles for the man who had a friend working in the World Trade Center. It was a nationwide series of localities, and the implication is that we can take these volunteers, and in fact probably use them best in their locality, whether it's Des Moines or Los Angeles, or the neighborhood in New York City, or the neighborhood outside the Pentagon area.

One clear implication is the opportunity to use volunteers within the locality that they reside and that they know. So really what I'm saying is that everything we've been taught about managing people is exactly what we have to do to manage and protect volunteers. We have to have standards and expectations well articulated in advance.

We need to recruit a large pool of people that could potentially be available to us in advance. We need to make good selection decisions. We need to place people well, and we need to train them. That's how we manage and protect volunteers.

Now the good news is a whole lot of that is already in place. Speaking from my own experiences in the Red Cross for decades, we've been establishing standards of performance for volunteers, we've been recruiting them, have been selecting them, have been training them, have been placing them. And that's true of the voluntary organizations active in disaster around the country. Those skills already exist in practically every community represented here today. We just need to take advantage of those skills that already exist. And certainly the civilian corps and a number of the government programs that are emerging are ideal opportunities to exploit and take advantage of those skills that already exist in our communities.

Volunteers will, as Kathleen said, show up. We don't know for sure in bioterrorism exactly how the proportions are going to work out, but they will be there, and we need them to be there. The real issue is are we ready? Thank you.

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