 Great. Well, again, thank you all so much for taking the time to join us today. I am the Emergency Programs Coordinator of the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation, and we're so pleased to be able to offer today's program as a part of a webinar series that addresses the needs of the Alliance for Response communities, as well as other cooperative disaster networks nationwide. These programs are made possible through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Today, we'll be exploring the topic of working with volunteers. Following a disaster, there is often an outpouring of support and interest in helping an impacted institution, but working with volunteers requires many careful considerations. In our discussion of this topic, we're incredibly fortunate to be joined by Chandra Fox, the Region 10 President of the International Association of Emergency Managers, as well as Anne Frelson of the National Heritage Responders. For this and all future webinars in this series, we'll be hearing from a subject matter expert, as well as a discussant with some sort of relevant experience related to the topic. Following Chandra's presentation, we'll have the opportunity for questions, and then we'll hear a few brief comments from Anne, and then have time for discussion as a group at the end. We hope that you'll be able to join us for some of the other programs in the series. You'll see that we have many more sessions coming up this month. We'll be addressing topics that are essential to the disaster networks, including how to navigate the public assistance process, how to put together successful tabletop exercises, how to communicate effectively during an emergency, and how to successfully seek funding for your projects. Before we dive into the presentation, a couple of brief technical notes. On your screen, you'll see several boxes, including one labeled chat on the left side of your screen, one labeled web links, and one labeled files on the bottom. Use the chat box to say hello, ask questions, and share information. If you post a question, you'll receive a response, either for me or for my colleague, Emily Conforto. Any questions will be noted, collected, and then I will ask them of the presenters. To use the web links box, click on the link you want to see, and highlight it in blue. Then click on the Browse To button to go to that site. In the files box, click on the file that you want to download, highlight it in blue, and then hit the download file button. If you are unable to attend any of these upcoming sessions, don't fret. We will record all programs and host the sessions on AIC's YouTube channel. You can see the link to that in the web links box below. We'll aim to get all of the sessions up within a week of the webinar date. For those who aren't familiar with Alliance for Response, I just wanted to give a quick bit of program. Alliance for Response began almost 15 years ago with a key mission in mind to help communities more effectively protect their cultural and historic resources. So the immediate objectives are to 1. Build relationships. Initiating an ongoing dialogue between cultural institutions and emergency managers and first responders. 2. To educate cultural heritage and emergency management professionals. Working to raise awareness of the need to protect cultural and historic resources within communities. 3. Encouraging disaster planning and mitigation in archives, historic sites, libraries, and museums. And finally, to develop strong, ongoing networks to facilitate effective local response. We want to make sure that networks have the tools to accomplish all of these goals and a key to an effective emergency response is the ability to successfully work with volunteers. Many of you might be familiar with Alliance for Response as an initiative of Heritage Preservation. In May of 2015, Heritage Preservation closed its doors but fortunately many of its programs transferred to the foundation of the American Institute for Conservation at that time. Alliance for Response and other emergency initiatives at Heritage Preservation joined forces with the emergency initiatives currently underway at FAIC including the National Heritage Responders, formerly AIC CERT. A team of trained collections care professionals who can provide on-the-ground support for impacted cultural heritage institutions. You can find out more information about the National Alliance for Response initiative and the existing networks by visiting our website heritageemergency.org slash AFR. You can access this link by clicking on the box below. Before I turn things over, we wanted to get a sense of who is on the webinar today. So we have just a few quick poll questions to that end. First up, are you currently involved with an Alliance for Response network? Please go ahead and answer that question. Great, I'm going to go ahead and broadcast the results for everyone to see. See just a few more folks chiming in on this. So we're seeing that while the majority of you are involved with AFR currently, quite a handful are not, which is really good to see. We want to make sure that others are aware of what this group seeks to accomplish. Hey, next up, if you are currently involved with Alliance for Response, do you know anyone from another network outside of your region? Several of the Alliance for Response networks have close relationships with nearby AFRs, but I'm curious to know just how widespread those connections are. Let me go ahead and broadcast the results of that as well. So I'm really happy to see that there does seem to be quite a bit of collaboration, but always room for improvement there as well. We're also curious to know what region you're joining us from. So if you're here in the US, what region do you call home? Go ahead and broadcast the results. I'm seeing a lot of folks from the east coast here, a handful from the northeast and the southeast, and just a couple from the west. So a lot of fellow east coasters like myself. Oh, and I'm seeing in the comment box Mid-Atlantic, yes. We should capture that as well. Great, and then final question for the group based on the topic at hand today. We're curious who here has experience with volunteering in an emergency response or recovery effort at any type of institution. Go ahead and share the results of that as well. Looks like we're pretty evenly split. Some folks have, others haven't. Okay, great. Thank you all so much for sharing that information. It's really helpful for us to know who's on the program today. So it is now my pleasure to introduce our main speaker today, Chandra Fox. Chandra is a professional emergency manager working at the local level in Washington State. Her background includes 15 years as a coordinator for emergency services coordinating agency, serving a population of 190,000 people in 10 cities, during which time her duties included all aspects of emergency management programming. Ms. Fox deployed to the 2014 SR530 mudslide incident where, as a part of the debris task force she was responsible for the creation of the personal belongings reunification program, recovering and caring for over 2,000 items for survivors and victims' families. Chandra is also a contract instructor for the Emergency Management Institute, EMI and a Washington State certified NIMS ICS instructor. She is active in both the Washington State Emergency Management Association and the International Association of Emergency Managers where she currently serves as IEM Region 10 President. Ms. Fox holds a BA from the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma and received her certified emergency manager CEM credential in 2007. I'm pleased to turn things over to Chandra who will be answering this all important question. Chandra why do they always show up in flip-flops? If we can figure that out we'll be doing good. I was going to say good morning everybody but I guess those of you on the east coast it's afternoon for you. I'm very happy to be here with you today and I thank you for the invitation. You know I had no idea what you guys did, the Alliance for Response and so now you are now a resource for me too so I'm very excited to be here. This is my first webinar, my first experience teaching virtually so let's all give this a shot shall we? This will be fun. So I wanted to, well I guess we kind of covered this in my bio but volunteers and working with volunteers is a subject that I really enjoy because it's been part of my career from the beginning I actually started. My career as a volunteer I took the CERT, the Community Emergency Response Team program as a student and I just absolutely fell in love with it. I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever done and so when I finished I asked you know what can I do, how can I be involved and I became a volunteer for the agency and I became a CERT instructor and then a couple years later they had a staff commission come open and I was lucky enough to be hired as staff and when I became staff I was then given responsibility for the entire CERT program and so I managed everything from scheduling the training to managing our ongoing volunteers and continuing education and all of those things. So it's kind of a subject that's near and dear to me. So I wanted to begin talking about the incident that Jessica referenced in my bio and you may have heard of it. It was a significant event and we did get national news coverage on it. So on March 22nd in 2014 we had a major landslide here in my home county. The incident site was about 40 miles from my home. It was a massive, massive landslide that basically destroyed a rural neighborhood and the debris field was a mile wide. It was 75 feet deep at its deepest point and I was deployed to that response as part of the debris task force and the reason I was deployed as part of the debris task force was because several years prior I had been very involved in the development of the county's disaster debris plan. My home agency was a major stakeholder in that plan and so I was very involved in that plan development. And when this incident happened it became immediately clear that even though we had this very good, very robust debris plan we were missing two important pieces and these two identified priorities were the rescue and recovery of individuals within the debris field and then the recovery of personal belongings out of the debris field. So we had no protocols for either of those things and so my assignment was to go in and develop the protocols for the personal belongings. So why we're talking about this today is because it's relevant for a couple of reasons. It makes a really nice informal case study for what we're talking about. We actually reached out to the Washington State Archives for technical assistance on the response and I'll go into that a little bit and explain why that was to you. And then we had an extensive use of volunteers as well and so some of the practices that I'm going to be talking about today I can show you how I utilize those in this response and show you the difference that it can make. This is a little bit different. This response was a little bit different than what I think you guys normally do given that we were working with personal belongings of individuals as opposed to museum collections or cultural sites but it's still something I think that you all will be able to relate to very easily. So the provision of technical assistance that we received was really just immensely valuable and I can't express how valuable it was. Much of the recovered belongings that were coming out of this debris field included Bibles and scrapbooks and important documents people's marriage licenses, their birth certificates. We had a collection of high school newspapers from the 1950s which was very cool and we literally had thousands and thousands of loose photographs and all of these items were wet, they were muddy, they were stuck together, they were starting to mold and mildew and we really didn't know what to do with them. We felt we had an imperative to do something to try and salvage them but we really had no clue what to do so we reached out, we requested assistance from the state archives and the interesting thing was when we first made the request to the state EOC we got a little bit of pushback. They didn't understand why we wanted the archivist to come and help and when we explained to them what the reason was then they said oh okay well alright fine. So they allowed the archivists to come and help us and what you're looking at in that photo is about one half of my warehouse and you can see basically everything that you're looking at is the drying area for the photographs and the documents and things that we were processing. When the archivist came I thought that they were just going to come and give us a few tips and then leave but they didn't they arrived and they backed their van up to the warehouse and they unloaded their supplies and they stayed and they worked with us and they taught us for 10 days and it was absolutely phenomenal what they did. They taught us about temperature and humidity and how to control use those things to help impede the growth of mold and mildew and so we brought in commercial air movers and dehumidifiers and we kept the temperature low in the warehouse and they taught us we got a freezer because they taught us we needed to freeze the books and things to dry them slowly and take care of those and they taught us how to wash photographs and that was completely new to me. I had absolutely no idea that you could wash a photo and it would be fine and so you can see again the left is our work station, our photographing, washing, processing station and then again the drying area and at the end of the response we had saved literally saved over 20,000 photographs for people so it was truly phenomenal and the very cool thing was that the archivists themselves said to me we talk about this a lot, we train on this we do table tops, we don't have the opportunity very often to go out actually in the field and do this and so it was very useful for them and it was good for them and they actually rotated a number of their staff through the warehouse for the 10 days that they were on site with us so that a number of them had the experience of coming out and working with us so it was very, very cool. And then the second thing is the utilization of volunteers. This was a big deal and it did require a large number of volunteers to manage this and to get this work done. We started out with 24 volunteers per day working a 12 hour shift and as we got further into the response the numbers kind of ebbed and flowed as needs changed and as we got better at what we were doing. Of course we had successes and some hiccups and so we'll be talking about those today. An interesting point to all of this is that in reality we were in this situation because there were spontaneous volunteers working on the debris field. Immediately following the incident the numbers of the community descended upon the debris field and started working trying to find and rescue their friends and their neighbors and these local spontaneous volunteers stayed for the duration and it was because of them as they were working on the debris field they would recognize things and they would find these belongings and they would pull them out and set them aside. We had this collection of things basically because we had local people working the site. If the response had been limited to the professional responders who did not have that connection to the community the items in all likelihood would have remained in the debris field because the professional responders would have been entirely focused on their rescue and recovery mission and they wouldn't have perhaps even really seen or registered what it was that was around them in the debris field where these local volunteers recognized things and knew that they were important to their friends and their neighbors and they wanted to save them if they could. We were actually in this situation because of the actions of volunteers so that's just kind of an interesting point. I'm going to include a short glossary here basically because I have a degree in English and I believe that words matter and I want to be sure that all of us are on the same page working with the same information as we go forward so that when I'm using words you understand exactly what it is I'm talking about. So volunteer, volunteer is both a noun and a verb. Volunteer is a person who freely offers to take part in an enterprise or undertake a task and then the verb volunteer is to render a service or take part in a transaction while having no legal concern or interest. Volunteers can be either affiliated affiliated is officially attached or connected to your own or another established agency or organization or they may be unaffiliated so no previous formal relationship with any agency or organization. And lastly, spontaneous an action performed or occurring as a result of a sudden inner impulse or inclination without premeditation and both affiliated and unaffiliated volunteers can be spontaneous. Generally affiliated volunteers we try to train them at least from the emergency management perspective we try to train them so they understand not to self-deploy as we say but you know they may but if they do you know they come with a certain level of training and you may be able to utilize them different than just your typical spontaneous volunteer coming to you just off the street. So why do people volunteer? This is something that I don't think agencies and organizations spend enough time thinking about. People volunteer for a wide variety of reasons from simply wanting to help to having a vested interest in something or to just wanting to be on the news. We know that happens. For your situation and the work that you do perhaps those reasons are you know they're passionate about the work of a particular artist who you hold in your collection or maybe they're a social activist who wants to ensure the sanctity of a cultural site is adequately protected. Something like that. There's any number of reasons. So why do you care? Why do you care why people come to you as a volunteer? And this actually turns out to be important. The motivations. So the reasons that people come to you. What is motivating them to come to you. These motivations affect both their actions and their interest in tasking so you know what it is they're going to do. And their priorities may in fact be very different from yours. And so you may get questions like why do I have to do that? I want to be doing this over here or you know I think we should do it this way. So you may have to have these conversations and these conversations are driven by what their motivations are. And then secondly perception. Perception is everything. And their motivations will color their perception of your organization and the experience they have with you. So if their experience with you is not meeting the needs of their motivations the experience and their perception of you and your organization becomes negative for them. So it can become a problem. Fortunately the reverse is also true and so if things are positive and you're meeting their needs then they're more likely to have a positive perception of you and your organization. Now you don't need to know precisely what their motivations are. But you need to be aware that they are coming with motivations and you need to kind of have a general sense of it and you can accomplish this by simply talking to them. When you are doing your intake, when you are registering them and deciding what it is you need them to do, ask them the question. Why are you here today? Why are you interested in helping us? Another reason why this is important is because of social media. We'll talk about this a little bit later in the presentation but it's something again to be aware of. People tweet, they post and so if they are having a negative experience or a positive experience they're going to share those things. So be aware of it and if you're having trouble with someone it could be that there's a disconnect. This could be the reason for the disconnect and the problem that you're having. So just be aware of it. Positive impacts of volunteers. We know that volunteers do wonderful things. They are a force multiplier. Many hands make light work and they can be really a force for good. They enable specialized and professional resources to do other work. So if you have a technically trained person who has a certain skill level, you don't need them sweeping up or unpacking things or repacking things. If they have a technical skill that can be better used somewhere else then you can have volunteers do the other work that does not require specialized training. They provide local knowledge and expertise. Like I said earlier, the local volunteers we had on the debris field in the landslide incident. They knew the area. They knew who was likely to have been home. They knew these things. It was very, very helpful to our professional responders on the scene. Folks know things that you might not. This is probably one of the most important things is allowing them to volunteer and giving them the opportunity to be involved. It builds a sense of community and it gives them ownership in the recovery process. It helps keep them involved. From the work that has been done on resilience and sustainability we know how important this sense of community and the ownership of the recovery process is. This is vital to the success of recovery efforts and resilience in communities. So that's really a very big piece of this is encouraging that growth. But unfortunately, yes, we have an opposite side and there are negative impacts when dealing with volunteers as well. They are resource intensive. Oh my gosh! They require resources to supervise, to staff, all of those sorts of things. They can be a distraction or my favorite term is time suck. You have a lot of things you need to do in a response situation. Your attention is being pulled in any number of directions and you have things that you need to be working on, things you need to be doing and yet you have this pull to oversee and manage and supervise your volunteers. They can themselves be difficult to manage and they can cause problems. If they're not following directions, if they are going off on their own tangent, if they're not paying attention, all of those sorts of things can create problems. And probably most important and most commonly cited when we talk to folks about negative impacts of volunteers is simply the safety concerns. There are so many safety concerns around volunteers for many, many reasons and we'll get into that a little bit more later. And then unfortunately we have rotten apples. They're rotten apples in the bunch and you will always have bad actors. There will always be folks who come around with malicious intent whether it's something that I don't understand, I just know that it's there and people do try to take advantage of a situation. They do come in and there may be issues with theft or things like that. And it's a very tough thing. So you want to be aware of it. I don't think you will ever not have exposure to bad actors. I think there's always a risk that they will be there. But if you're aware of it, if you have policies regarding it, a volunteer code of conduct also helps. So as people are coming into you and you're bringing them into your organization, you explain to them what your expectations are and as a volunteer you will behave this way. And the good news here is that yes, you bet, volunteers can be fired. You don't have to keep somebody in your response if they're not helpful. If they are creating problems, just because someone comes and volunteers for you does not mean you have to accept their help. So be aware of that. And if you have policies in place, if you have a code of conduct where you can say this is the problem, this is what you are doing or not doing, this is the issue we are having with you. And you can document that and back that up. You bet. You can fire them. You don't have to put up with bad behavior. So challenges with volunteers. So those were some of the pros and the cons. So let's talk more specifically about what our challenges are. So to begin with, we have the challenges of safety, command and control, and accountability. And these are all kind of interlaced. I titled this presentation, why do they always show up in flip flops? Well, they show up in flip flops because they're simply unfamiliar. They're uninformed. They're unfamiliar with the risks in a disaster environment. So it doesn't occur to them oh gosh, maybe I would want closed toed shoes. Might be a good idea. They don't have the relevant experience to know what makes sense here. They don't know the NIMS ICS structure. They don't know how we work in a hierarchical organization. They don't know that we have span of control and accountability issues. And they may not understand why it's important that we know when they are expected, where they are, what they're doing, if they leave, you know, all of those things. Again, because they lack the relevant framework to understand what all those things mean. Other challenges include, again, support resources, you know, management, registration, all of those sorts of things. Care and feeding, you know, they need to be fed, they need to be watered, they need to have a safe place to go on breaks, they need hygiene, all of those things. And then of course, communications. So how do you communicate with them? Do you have a set mode of communication? Do you have, you know, call trees? Do you have websites? How do you do that? Making sure that you have consistent communications with them, and that really, really is key, is consistent communication with them. Now, all of these challenges that we have can be addressed in a very positive way by thoughtful, and I emphasize thoughtful here, thoughtful planning and training efforts. So some of the strategies to meet these challenges include addressing safety. And as I said, safety is probably the biggest challenge because there are so many different aspects and things which impact the safety of a person in a post-disaster response environment. And the safety and command and control and accountability, they all need to be addressed and reinforced in a variety of ways. So think in terms of your messaging, how consistent you are in your messaging, making sure that you're including safety information in everything from your recruitment bulletins to, you know, maybe you have scripted dialogues for your call center. You know, if you are taking calls from people interested in helping, your call center has scripted information that they can share about the risks in the disaster environment. Policies and procedures. So everything that you're doing with your volunteers needs to be written down somewhere. You need to have a policy, you need to have a procedure, and again, safety and accountability and command and control, all of these are worked in and throughout these documents. So explain why you're doing what you're doing and be clear about your expectations for them. Make sure they understand that if they agree to come and volunteer that they have a set of expectations that they're required to meet as well. It is a two-way street here. And then also key, of course, are supervisory roles and the leadership both for the organization and specifically on site. So the volunteers need to know who is in charge. They need to know who their direct report supervisor is. So if they have a problem, if they have a question, they know exactly to whom they can go to and ask those questions. So that has to be very, very clear for them. So as an example from our landslide response, one of the first things we did to address the safety of the volunteers was we requested technical assistance from our health district. And you have to remember that the items that we were working with, we were in a contained environment so we were in a closed warehouse. And the items that we were working with had come off of a debris field. And this debris field had flood water, it had sewage, it had a miasma of all of the household chemicals and the weird stuff that people keep in their garages and their sheds. So there was all sorts of stuff that had kind of gotten mixed in together and mixed around. And it had been in the mud and dried in the mud and so it was now in and on all of these articles that we were working with. And so we had an environmental health specialist come out and take a look at what we were doing. They knew the conditions on the debris field and then they came and they took a look at what we were doing within the warehouse. And they evaluated the risks and the exposures that we were facing and they gave us recommendations for the appropriate PPE, personal protective equipment, and of course hygiene. And so we addressed all of those things with our volunteers and everything from we didn't have a whole lot of mold in Mildew, but there was some, so we provided masks, we didn't require folks to wear masks, we left that up to them as a choice. We did require everyone to wear gloves and we had very strict rules about the break room. So if you had been on the warehouse floor you were required to remove your gloves and wash your hands before going into the break room. So we tried to be very, very clear about that. We also provided each new group of volunteers coming in an orientation session. We sat down with them before they ever went out onto the warehouse floor. We sat down with them and talked to them about the safety issues, what our rules and expectations were, what our guidelines were, as well as talking about the job expectations and what the work was they were actually going to be doing. And I didn't include this on the slide, but one of the things we also did was when we confirmed the volunteers for their work shifts we explained to them upfront before they ever even came that the environment they were going to be working in was cold, it was dry and so we basically told them that they needed to dress in layers and be sure to bring their lip balm, because with the fans and the dehumidifiers going it was cold and it was dry. So more of the strategies to meet the challenges is something that I call intentional tasking. And intentional tasking is a thoughtful approach to pre-identifying the necessary tasks and deciding what the qualifications are, if any that are necessary for an individual to assist with those tasks. And this is something that you can do ahead of time you know going in that if you have certain types of media that you're working with, certain types of collections and things, then you know ahead of time some of the basic things that you're going to need to do. And so you can start this process ahead of time by identifying those jobs and identifying if there are special skills that are needed for those jobs, or if this is something that you can simply take a person to and quickly explain to them how they can do it and then set them free and let them do it. The second part of this is using affiliated volunteers in leadership roles. And this is really, really key and very, very helpful if you can do it. So do you have in your organizations affiliated volunteers who can be trained and step into these management and leadership roles when you have volunteers, when you have spontaneous or additional volunteers come in. This would be something if you have docents in your museums or even grad students, if you're part of a university system or something, are there grad students that you can pull in and press into service in this manner. So what we did with our landslide response for the intentional tasking, we had kind of a special situation because we were working with people's personal belongings and because it was property we were working under the auspices and supervision of the sheriff's office. And so they made the decision that we would have backgrounded volunteers only working in the warehouse. And fortunately in this area CERT is very, very strong. We have a lot of agencies who have very active CERT programs as well as Medical Reserve Corps MRC programs and all of those folks have been backgrounded. So we were very lucky in that we had a pool of existing volunteers that we could tap and so that's what we did. We basically put out a call to all of our partners in the region and said this is what we're doing we need folks who have been backgrounded let us know who you have available and who's willing to come and work and so that was how we dealt with that. And then in the leadership role I knew before we even opened the warehouse I knew that I was going to need assistance that I would not be able to do it all myself because I still had to attend debris task force meetings. I had to deal with logistics and supply chain and all of these sorts of things and so I wanted someone who I could trust to kind of manage the warehouse floor and supervise the volunteers when I had other things I needed to do so I was lucky enough in my home organization that we had a couple of long time volunteers they were a married couple they were both retired so they had lots of time and I called them up and I said this is what I'm doing I need you for two weeks can you come and they immediately said yes no hesitation and I was so relieved that I was going to have the help that I needed because I long time volunteers they were well trained and they were exactly who I needed at that moment and to be perfectly honest throughout this whole deployment I cried twice this was the first time I was so relieved when I knew I was going to have them and have their help I was so relieved I actually cried of course I'd been in the EOC for 12 hours and I was on my way home and I was really really tired but I was so happy it made me cry so some of the other strategies continuing on of course is planning and planning is key it's the bottom line for everything and when you're talking about volunteers you have to plan for both management of the volunteers so how you're actually going to manage what they're doing and you also have to plan for the provision of resources because as I've said managing volunteers and working with volunteers can be very very resource intensive so making sure that you know what you have what you need in order to have the capacity to manage these volunteers do you have the necessary personnel do you need help do you have adequate people within your organization to supervise and train and staff and manage and do all of these things and the management planning needs to include roles and responsibilities so again who is in the leadership roles who are the volunteers answering to what your policies are what your procedures are and your communications plan that's very very key and then training once you have decided on and developed your volunteer management plan so just how exactly you're going to approach this make sure that you train to it you know I think that's a breaking point for a lot of organizations on a lot of different things they write a plan but then they don't bother to train to it and so you have a plan but nobody knows how to use it nobody knows how to implement it so once you have developed your plan your program make sure that you train to it so everybody is on the same page and everybody knows what you're doing and you can do this through socialization workshops through table tops and functional exercises and when you're talking about working with volunteers and exercising with volunteers this is a challenge for I think virtually every organization out there because it can be really really difficult to generate the number of participants for a functional exercise dealing with volunteers it's hard to get the numbers of people to participate in the exercise so this is a good opportunity to partner with your other agencies and the other folks in your alliance can you partner together and have a combined exercise so that you each get the benefit of running through your plans and your protocols but it's not as difficult as having one exercise over here and then trying to generate enough participation for another exercise over here if you combine your forces and work together it can be easier to accomplish that and then it's value added for everybody and just as a side note here I have to say that after Jessica extended the invitation to me I went out and I was poking around your website and it's very cool I'm very impressed with you guys you have lots of information out there on training and I'm really excited about that and then of course just in time training for the volunteers so once you are on scene once you have folks in front of you and you need them to do something make sure you have the materials to accomplish that just in time training so whether it's an orientation or safety briefing or job aids or specific tasking make sure you have those materials ready to go and available to your volunteers so from our landslide experience the planning the planning was interesting because of course as an experienced emergency manager when I was given the assignment the first thing I did was try and find any existing documents I immediately started a search to find out if anybody else had done this and had developed a plan and the answer was no there were communities across the country who had done similar things but not quite the same and no one had written it down we had to start from scratch is really what we did I met my sheriff's office liaison for the first time on the Wednesday morning following the landslide and at that meeting he informed me that his direction from the sheriff was that the sheriff wanted a plan by 5pm on Friday so we had 3 days we had 3 days to draft a plan and we did it was a very kind of broad brush plan it described in general terms what we thought we needed to happen based on the situation we were in at the time and how things should be managed we made our best guess at how we would do this and as we went through we filled in the details as we worked as things went along in real time we filled in the details and the plan was very much a living document but we did have the broad strokes we did have the bones of the plan in place so we did have an idea of our structure before we brought in the volunteers and then of course training I alluded to earlier we held an orientation session as folks came in to work in the warehouse and that included a code of conduct as well as job specific instructions and that was actually another piece going back to touch on the archive briefly they helped us write the job descriptions and the job instructions for what the folks were doing specifically working with the photos and things and so we developed all of those just in time training materials based on the specifics of our situation so social media is clear as well you cannot talk about any type of interaction with the public these days and not consider the implications of social media it is flat out inescapable you have to address it, you really do and just like the volunteers themselves you can be negative so you just have to deal with it and when you're talking about volunteering now it's not just that they're going to post things on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram it also includes virtual volunteering so folks working in the cloud can be really unique assisting in management and activities in the virtual realm so as you're doing your intentional tasking think in terms of that as well are there things that you need help with that people can do virtually as a group that will support and benefit the response work of the alliance itself so that's just something else for you make sure that what you are doing with social media is addressed in your communications plan so social media can be used for all sorts of things but it can also be used to recruit and organize your volunteers, you can schedule training opportunities and events you can do their work schedule in a virtual space so it can be a very effective tool, it really can be but it's one of those things that you need to be ready to monitor it and respond if you need to use it to tell your story don't let your story be co-opted make sure that the information that is getting out is the information that you want to get out so using social media platforms kind of has to be a conscious decision you can ignore it but I think you ignore it at your peril because it's one of those things that if you don't pay attention to it it can come back and really bite you in the butt if you're not careful give it some thought and make sure that it's something that you want to engage in and that you have the ability to engage in going back to the virtual volunteering that may be something that you want to do you may want to have someone who is virtually monitoring the social media presence for you so that you don't have to think about it but you have someone else not directly involved in the work that you're doing on the ground you do have someone else who kind of has your back and is monitoring the social media feeds for you so in our landslide response the social media, we had really to the social media issues and that was because of our situation specifics security was really really important to us and that was for a number of reasons we had people's private information we had personal belongings we had people's tax documents and things like that we were very very aware and very careful about maintaining security the location the warehouse was always locked we did not allow media of any kind and we went as far as to not publicize our location the address of the warehouse was provided to volunteers once they had actually been scheduled to work so we did everything we could to keep it very close to the vest we had kind of a running joke with the sheriff's office that our warehouse was a black ops site but all kidding aside I felt very strongly that we had a duty to protect the privacy of the families and so I established very very very clear rules about social media and what you're seeing in the photo there I had that posted right inside the door of the warehouse and we had a sign in table right there and as people came in they were required to read that sign and understand just what it was they were walking into and how seriously we took the job that we were doing and I had a very very clear rule that cell phones were just simply not allowed on the warehouse floor folks could have their cell phone outside the break room but they were not allowed out on the warehouse floor because I simply did not want to run the risk of a victim's family member being on social media and seeing a photo of something pop up and that gave me nightmares and so the rule was if I saw your phone I took it and I guess that seems kind of very junior highish but it made a difference and I think reinforced the respectful attitude that I wanted these volunteers to have with what they were doing because what we were doing was very important work and I wanted them to understand the magnitude of that and I did have my deployment there I did actually have to take phones away from people a couple of times and I said you know give me your phone or leave and they both chose to relinquish their phones because they understood I think hopefully the importance of what they were doing how do we get there how do we create viable plans and or programs to manage spontaneous volunteers it's thoughtful, it's intentional it's making sure that this is what you want to do and identifying the direction that you want to go in it begins with an honest assessment of where you are and what you want to do so make sure that your organization or agency both wants to take on the management of volunteers that they actually that they want to be invested in that and actually do that and that they have the capacity to do so whether it is in a big way or partnering with others make sure that your organization wants to do this and make sure that your organization understands they have a choice to do this or not do it or maybe they want to outsource the effort entirely but begin an honest dialogue about it and figure out what it is you actually want to do one of the most popular concepts is that of the Volunteer Reception Center and the Volunteer Reception Center is popular because it works quite frankly and there's organizations all across the country from New York to Florida to California who very successfully utilize this model and it works it works because it addresses intake volunteers so how you recruit and how you register and how you assign assignments and also accountability it addresses all of those things in a very robust way the only issue of course is that the organization running the VRC needs to have the staff capacity to do it there are resources required to stand up a VRC so be aware of that it is an option it's a very good option but just make sure that you have the capacity to actually pull it off so there's lots of resources available on how to do a VRC points of light foundation Lisa Orloff who was the founder of World Cares Center she wrote her book managing spontaneous community volunteers in disasters she wrote that in 2011 and FEMA of course has a couple of training programs also they have an independent study class on developing and managing volunteers that is IS 244B so that's an independent study and then they also have the G course 489 management of spontaneous volunteers in disaster now the G course is a multi-days I believe it's three and a half days long it's been a while since I've looked at it but I believe it's three and a half days long that's a field delivery course so those of you who are connected in with your emergency management agencies talk to their training officers and see if there's any interest in bringing that class to your region that's a field delivery course it's designed to be taken out to the states and delivered in the field you don't need to go to EMI to take that class in the web links section we've provided some of the links to points of light to World Cares Center and then another one Best Practices for Volunteer Management Professionals is another website that I found that's got a lot of good information on it as well so all of these resources will give you guidance on how to manage and work with volunteers but the bottom line here really is that human capital so volunteers are a resource and that resource is human capital and volunteers are people and people means relationships and whether they are your long time volunteers or whether they are somebody who comes in to help you out for just a couple of days a relationship is created there and both sides of that relationship want the relationship to be successful and people generally as a rule do better when they have clarity when they understand what is expected of them what the rules of the road are so to speak so rules and responsibilities need to be clear for everyone and these things need to be decided as best as possible ahead of time and again going back to the discussion earlier about motivations understanding the motivations of the people and for the vast majority of folks they are there because they want to help, they are there because they care and so you want to harness that positivity and you want to harness that and be able to make it work for your organization and a key point here is that buy in from your leadership is essential it absolutely is if you don't have support from your leadership from the folks who make your program run then you are going to struggle so finally pain is inevitable, suffering is optional and I love this quote for a lot of reasons but mostly because so much of everything we do and we struggle with is actually a choice and so the thought that I want to leave you with is that this working with volunteers it does not have to be difficult the real challenge is not that the people are volunteers, it's not that they are spontaneous the real challenge is that for most of us working with spontaneous volunteers in a disaster environment is a low frequency low impact event and because it's low frequency low impact what happens to it, it falls down, down, down down the list of our priorities and integration of volunteers we just don't think about it, it's not a problem until it becomes a problem but the reality is that working with volunteers is just like everything else that we do in emergency management we are more successful when we are proactive as opposed to reactive when we lean forward and anticipate instead of react and so what I want you to do is think about it, make the decision to make having a volunteer program a priority and then actually do something about it so decide what makes sense for your organization, are you going to take responsibility for a full blown VRC or do you just need to deal with folks showing up on your doorstep wanting to help, is this something that you can incorporate into your response organization, so is this something that the Alliance for Response can work on together so that when you arrive on site at an incident you have orientation materials, you have task lists, you have job aids that are created and ready to go so think about what you want to do, think about where you want to be and then do something about it and lastly your program does not have to look exactly like anyone else's, it just needs to work for you and your organization, there's lots and lots of guidance available out there so take what works and leave the rest and be successful, go out and do good things so that is that's all I have for you today, so questions, comments Jessica? Great, thank you so much Chandra, that was a really wonderful presentation, I think we all learned a lot from that, so I do want to remind everyone if you have questions to go ahead and drop those in the chat window there and I see a couple are coming up already Samantha is wondering if you might be able to define a VRC, would that be something that is set up at an incident to receive volunteers, so if you could just elaborate a little bit more on the VRC concept A VRC is a volunteer reception center and it can either be a physical facility or there are parts of the VRC that can be done virtually as well so the purpose of the VRC is to have a location, it's generally not at the incident site because you don't want folks just descending on your incident site, so it's generally a facility that is somewhere away from the incident site and it is the place where you have volunteers come in, you have intakes, so they are registered, you get their name and their information and all of that sort of stuff, you find out what their skill sets are, what they're able and interested in doing, what their availability is, all of these sorts of things and then you can decide how to task them. Are they suited for jobs that are available somewhere in the incident response? The VRC can be set up to where as folks, once they're registered and they come in, you can do just in time training right there at the VRC to address the safety issues, any other pertinent training can be held right there and then the folks are deployed out to whatever job assignment that they're given based on their skill set and what's needed. Is that helpful? Great, I think that was a comprehensive answer. That's a yes. Well I see there's a couple of other folks typing in there, so we'll just give it a quick moment to see if folks had other specific questions for Chandra and then just a reminder that we're going to hear from Anne Frelson briefly here and then at the end we'll have the opportunity for additional questions and discussion on this topic. Okay, there's my photo credits I should show those. Oh yes, thank you. I have to give credit for that. Great, well while folks are finishing up with questions and again if you think of any during this next section do feel free to drop those in the chat window. I want to go ahead and take this opportunity to once again thank Chandra for that great presentation and then to also introduce Anne Frelson who as I mentioned previously is a member of our National Heritage Responders team that we run here through the foundation of the American Institute of Conservation and Anne has a lot of experience with responding to disasters and I thought it would be really helpful for her to share some of her words of wisdom on what it means to work with volunteers in those kind of situations. Those who are familiar with the field and protocols and those who are unfamiliar as well. And I'm going to go ahead and unmute you Anne so that you can join in the conversation. Thank you Chandra that is just an amazing experience that you had to deal with and I really appreciate much of what you had to say and I think that many of my own experiences dealing with volunteers who show up are very much addressed by many of the things that you had to say. One thing I thought I would talk about a little bit is an experience that our AFR group Heritage Emergency Response Alliance Atlanta. It was kind of our first big volunteer effort. It was at a local company privately owned, family owned it was the oldest still published African American newspaper in the country and because it was a family owned business when the tornado took the roof off of their building or damaged it severely they were not eligible for any kind of FEMA funding at the time. They were in a historic district but their building was not a declared historic building so they were kind of left out of everything at the time. So our local HERA group got together and we organized a response to go down and try to help them out and I think that so it was mostly a group of people who were library archive a couple of museum people I think and so we had an interest and we had some experience but it might have been many people's very first time to actually show up at an event and I can't begin to stress what Chandra said about exercising your plans. You need to practice over and over and over again in order to get good at this and for these things not to have to be when you're in the heat of the moment you don't want to have to be pondering what you're doing next so it needs to come very easily to you so practice every time you can and I have taken people to personal events. My very first big volunteer response event was at a private home and they had been flooded and we were sorting through all of their very personal papers. I'm glad back then we didn't have social media but it is always something that you do have to be very concerned about so we had a very small team of volunteers we were working very hard. You need more than one manager because you can't do it every day all day long so you need to have several people who can step in when somebody else needs a day off or a day of rest we also had a situation where we knew we needed more help. This picture that you're looking at is actually a room that had some very important collections in it and they are in fact buried in that pile. The top box there's sort of a line at the top that's about eight feet to the top of that line and the open ceiling was above us so all of that material was wet but you can see that they didn't have the best organization system and yet these collections that were in those stacks are kind of nicely wrapped in brown paper but they you know it didn't look like collections so it was also upstairs a very narrow set of stairs and we just physically could not imagine carrying all the garbage out in order to get to the collections which were all mixed in. So a local city councilman brought a group of people who had been sentenced to community service in our local county court system so for the most part they were very young but they weren't there because they were motivated to help for any particular reason and so it became very clear almost immediately that we really needed to explain to them the importance of the institution why these materials were so important, why they didn't look like they were important and the need to be extremely careful. Thank goodness they were very young and strong and energetic many were engaged once they understood more about this newspaper and its history in their very own community but they required a lot of attention. Unfortunately the city councilman left and I guess he sort of thought we were going to monitor them I don't think we had that understanding in the beginning but they did require monitoring because they were required to do service and they had to sign in and out and we weren't prepared to deal with that when he left he was doing his city councilman work and that was really important in the community much of which had been effective but it also meant that then I found myself walking around and I would walk around a stack of boxes and there would be somebody back there sleeping or playing on her phone obviously not working and that became a frustration and I was not allowed to kick them out so I think it was a very successful partnership I highly recommend you look at people who need to do community service it's way better than picking garbage up along the side of the highway to have an event that happens like this but I also think that you have to engage them so you have to give them enough information to make them understand what they're doing and the importance of it and how it affects them so you have to make it very personal otherwise you're just not going to get their engagement and I think that one of the things we experienced were that obviously some were very engaged and they really took it to heart and they worked themselves to the bone and again that safety issue going up and down the stairs carrying 40 or 50 pounds of wet stuff out to a dumpster was taxing and I think that they were given donuts and coffee or something and it wasn't nearly enough and so we should have had a little better organization so every time you do something like this you learn more and hopefully you remember it the next time the other thing I wanted to talk about was because of the volunteers as Chandra mentioned their expertise because we had explained to them the importance of the materials we actually had one young man bring a box back from the dumpster he had seen it go in, he didn't think it looked like garbage and he climbed in the dumpster and pulled it out and brought it back up to us and so we were able to save something that had been thrown away and that goes back to the monitoring can you assign somebody to watch every single thing that they're doing in our case we should have been looking at every single box that went out of the building our arm full of stuff and we were not experienced enough maybe we were tired we didn't have the manpower to devote to that kind of monitoring and so I think that we were very lucky I hope we didn't lose anything else but I do think that as Chandra said you have to be very careful and so this is just another picture of different storage area those are the bound newspapers on the left that go back to the early well to the beginning of the 1900's and then in the pile on the right there are desk drawers that actually did still have important information and there's a chair and underneath and behind the historic ledgers that we ended up having to pull out and so it was really hard to convince people that there was important stuff in what looked like garbage and unfortunately I think that sometimes the collections don't necessarily look that important Tina C2 who was also on this so I have to say I'm very proud of our HERA members because many of you are on this webinar today Tina is pointing out that that was in fact the founder's desk in the right hand picture and it had been taken apart and was in pieces because somebody in the past had been going to restore it and got it taken apart but then didn't put it all back together again so it became a you know it was her grandfather's piece and so it was important to them. I think you do the best you can and you learn every single time and hopefully then you are more prepared for the next time. I think volunteers particularly for my community, library, archives, small historic sites, museums small museums they're absolutely necessary and we just have to learn how to deal with them so thank you for offering this opportunity to talk about it. Wonderful thank you so much Ann it's really helpful to have your insights into this experience from first hand response to impacted institutions so thank you so much. I see that we had a question come in from Nora and I believe this is for Chandra she's saying that you had mentioned safety as a big concern and for vetted and affiliated volunteers they may cover injury liabilities but how do you manage liability concerns for unaffiliated our service agencies that are under another umbrella? So that's a very, it's a good question, it's a tough question and the reason for that is statutes vary from state to state so it really depends on where you're at as to what the actual liability laws are so this is a good reason for being tapped into your emergency management agency because they can help you answer that question specifically for the area that you're in. Where I am in Washington state we're very lucky because Washington state has a very broad definition of what an emergency worker is and so anytime we have an incident if you have folks, once you have folks who volunteer and this goes back to the importance of intake and registering so once you have those folks registered to work on that incident in Washington state at least they are then defined as an emergency worker and they are covered for workers compensation not the case in every state. In some instances if they are working with if they are registered volunteer for another service organization it could be possible that they could be covered under their umbrella it really really depends on where you are locally and I'm sorry but that is the best answer I can give you is the laws vary so much across the nation there is no hard and fast rule that applies to everybody so please do get in touch with your emergency management agency and talk to them about it. Sorry. I think that's great advice and of course since this is a national group and we have people from all corners of the country I would encourage everyone here to research those specifics that apply to each of your individual networks and to work with the emergency managers that you've been establishing connections with to get that information. If anything it's a great opportunity to reach out to them again if you haven't been in touch to use this as a way to get those channels of communication going again. Nora's responded great answer. Well I'm realizing that we're getting close to the end of the time that we had a lot of for this program and I'm not saying too many other questions come in but I do want to encourage everyone if you have other things that you think of after the session wraps to feel free to contact me I believe you all should have my email information and it's also available in the flyer in the file section of the box. I do want to take the time now to just say a big big thank you to Chandra for taking the time to put together such a wonderful presentation. This is really in depth look at this very important issue for our groups and of course I really want to say thank you to Ann for sharing that experience that you had and giving us all some insight into how we can look at this issue for our other AFR groups down the road. I wanted to wrap up today by once again having this slide of the upcoming webinars and to remind you if you haven't done so already to go ahead and download the flyer in the file box and we of course will welcome anyone who's interested in these topics to join in these sessions. They were designed for members of the Alliance for Response communities but we want to spread the word to get this great content out there to as many people as possible and even encourage new networks to form in other corners of the country where we don't have them yet. I'm going to go ahead and pull over a link for the evaluation today's program. If you could just take a few moments to fill out, it's just a brief 10 question survey but this information is really incredibly valuable for us in shaping future programming so we thank you for your time on that. And one more big thank you of course to give a shout out to our funders, the National Diamond for the Humanities for making this webinar series possible. I hope that everyone on the program today has a wonderful Tuesday and we hope to see many of you at our next session which is going to be this Thursday January 12th at the same time, same place 1pm Eastern here in the meeting room. Thank you once again to our speakers, our attendees and everyone really grateful for this wonderful opportunity.