This article from International Center for Journalists is focused on journalists and editors working with journalists and other contributors remotely, but much of its advice is applicable for nonprofits working with remote staff and remote volunteers (virtual volunteering) – or working with staff you see face-to-face but you need to work with online as well. The article is written by the project manager of Chicas Poderosas, a community of women in media spread across 18 countries in Latin America.
For instance, when brainstorming a story or a project with your team, she uses remote visual boards like Jamboard. “Jamboard has virtual post it notes, and allows your team to simultaneously create text boxes, write comments and even draw.” Has anyone else used it? What do you think of it?
To keep track of the individual activities in the chart, she uses Trello. Each task is its own card, which can be assigned to a team member, and can include deadlines and alerts. Trello has integrations with other tools such as Google Drive. “In our Chicas Poderosas weekly calls, we update the Trello board, checking up on what each Chica did, and we create and take ownership of new tasks for the next week.”
She also has good, not-techtool-specific advice like:
The best tool is not the latest, or the most complex and automated. The best tool is always the one that is more natural for your team, the project and any other involved stakeholders.
If you do find a new tool that you want to implement, always take the time to schedule on-boarding sessions so that your team can practice using it, ask questions and share their challenges.
Do you use any of the tools she mentions? Do you have other ideas?
And if you want to explore how to involve and support volunteers, whether those volunteers are around the corner or around the world, check out my book with Susan Ellis, The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. The book is the result of more than 20 years of research and experience regarding virtual volunteering, including online micro volunteering, crowdsourcing, digital volunteering, online mentoring and all the various manifestations of online service. It’s packed with examples from a variety of organizations and details on how virtual volunteering works, how challenges are overcome, and how success is measured. It includes
Detailed advice on virtual volunteering assignment, including one-time “Byte-Sized” tasks (micro-volunteering / microtasks), longer-term, higher-responsibility roles and virtual team assignments.
A thorough look at various practices for screening and matching volunteers to assignments, with an eye to getting the most capable volunteers into your volunteering ranks and preventing incomplete assignments or burdensome management tasks
How to make online volunteer roles accessible and welcoming for a variety, diversity of people
Susan and I wrote The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook in such a way that it would be timeless – as timeless as a book about using computers, laptops, smart phones and other networked devices could be. It is USA-centric but it offers a lot of international perspectives as well.
There’s also a chapter just for online volunteers themselves, which organizations can also use in creating their own materials for online volunteers.
If you read the book, I would so appreciate it if you could write and post a review of it on the Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Good Reads web sites (you can write the same review on all three sites).
In July 2018 the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) appointed a panel to consider the question of “digital cooperation” – the ways we work together to address the social, ethical, legal and economic impact of digital technologies in order to maximize their benefits and minimize their harm. The Secretary-General asked the panel to consider how digital cooperation can contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the ambitious agenda to protect people and the planet endorsed by 193 UN member states in 2015. He also asked the panel to consider models of digital cooperation to advance the debate surrounding governance in the digital sphere.
The Co-Chairs of the panel are Melinda Gates (USA), representing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Jack Ma (China), Executive Chairman of the Alibaba Group. Ex officio members are Amandeep Singh Gill (India) and Jovan Kurbalija (Serbia) of the Secretariat of the High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation. Members of the panel that contributed to the report include:
Mohammed Abdullah Al Gergawi (UAE), Minister of Cabinet Affairs and the Future, UAE
Yuichiro Anzai (Japan), Senior Advisor and Director of Center for Science Information Analysis, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Nikolai Astrup (Norway), Former Minister of International Development, now Minister of Digitalisation, Norway
Vinton Cerf (USA), Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
Fadi Chehadé (USA), Chairman, Chehadé & Company
Sophie Soowon Eom (Republic of Korea), Founder of Adriel AI and Solidware
Isabel Guerrero Pulgar (Chile), Executive Director, IMAGO Global Grassroots and Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School
Marina Kaljurand (Estonia), Chair of the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace
Bogolo Kenewendo (Botswana), Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry, Botswana
Marina Kolesnik (Russian Federation), senior executive, entrepreneur and WEF Young Global Leader
Doris Leuthard (Switzerland), former President and Federal Councillor of the Swiss Confederation, Switzerland
Cathy Mulligan (United Kingdom), Visiting Researcher, Imperial College London and Chief Technology Officer of GovTech Labs at University College London
Akaliza Keza Ntwari (Rwanda), ICT advocate and entrepreneur
Edson Prestes (Brazil), Professor, Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
Kira Radinsky (Israel), Director of Data Science, eBay
Nanjira Sambuli (Kenya), Senior Policy Manager, World Wide Web Foundation
Jean Tirole (France), Chairman of the Toulouse School of Economics and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse
From the report:
Our dynamic digital world urgently needs improved digital cooperation and that we live in an age of digital interdependence. Such cooperation must be grounded in common human values – such as inclusiveness, respect, human-centredness, human rights, international law, transparency and sustainability. In periods of rapid change and uncertainty such as today, these shared values must be a common light which helps guide us…
We need to bring far more diverse voices to the table, particularly from developing countries and traditionally marginalised groups, such as women, youth, indigenous people, rural populations and older people…
The resulting report focuses on three broad sets of interlocking issues, each of which is discussed in one subsequent chapter:
Leaving No One Behind argues that digital technologies will help progress towards the full sweep of the SDGs only if we think more broadly than the important issue of access to the internet and digital technologies
Individuals, Societies and Digital Technologies underscores the fact that universal human rights apply equally online as offline, but that there is an urgent need to examine how time-honored human rights frameworks and conventions should guide digital cooperation and digital technology.
Mechanisms for Global Digital Cooperation analyses gaps in the current mechanisms of global digital cooperation, identifies the functions of global digital cooperation needed to address them, and outlines three sets of modalities on how to improve our global digital cooperation architecture – which build on existing structures and arrangements in ways consistent with our shared values and principles.
Some of my observations about the report:
I like the three broad sets of interlocking issues.
I was very pleased to see so much emphasis on countering misinformation and on the need to use online tools to build trust and social cohesion.
The date of the publication is nowhere to be found on the report. I think it was published in June 2019.
The term non-governmental organization (NGO) is never mentioned in the report. Not once.
Activists nor activism is never mentioned in the report. None once.
The phrase civil society is used. Does that include the work of NGOs, or activists, including those opposed to government or promoting alternative strategies to those being promoted by more mainstream international NGOs, all of whom mobilize people to engage online as consumers, clients, campaigners, supporters, proponents, opponents of activities by corporations/businesses and the government?
People with disabilities and their unique needs regarding access digital technologies are lumped in with other marginalized groups, which ignores the unique needs of people different kinds of sight impairments, people with hearing impairments, people with different mobility issues, and a range of other physical and intellectual challenges that people creating online tools do not design for. And there’s no mention that improving accessibility for people with disabilities improves access for EVERYONE. The scant references, lumped in with other marginalized groups, are easy to find: just look for the word “disabilities.” This would have been remedied if the panel had included Sharron Rush (USA), of Knowbility or anyone from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
For the next year or two, this report will be used to justify what any UN initiative does regarding ICT4D – and used to dissuade other proposals, like supporting the needs of human rights activists online, or initiatives that make a centerpiece of promoting accessible web design. And given those ommissions, it’s a mixed bag – a followup is most definitely needed to address this.
I’m seeing more and more local organizations – non-governmental organizations (NGOs), charities, schools – in developing countries posting on sites like Reddit, asking foreign volunteers to travel to their countries and volunteer. These NGOs and others offer no information on whether or not its legal for foreigners to come to the country and volunteer, no information on what they will do to ensure volunteers will be safe, no information on what screening they do of volunteers to ensure safety of volunteers – they just post, “Hey, we help orphans / wildlife / women, and you can come here and help us.”
It’s troubling.
The reality is that it is not ethical nor appropriate for any NGO to recruit foreign volunteers unless they are already involving LOCAL volunteers and have the full endorsement of local people for the work they do, and it is inappropriate for them to recruit foreign volunteers unless they have complete information on assignments, safety, screening, quality control and more.
Hosting International Volunteers: A Where-To-Start Guide For Local Organizations provides detailed suggestions for NGOs in developing countries interested in gaining access to foreign volunteers. This is a “getting started” guide, NOT a comprehensive guide: it’s impossible within the boundaries of a simple web page to detail all an organization needs to do to host volunteers from other countries.
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
If your group (association, university class, etc.) is in the USA and the group you may want to receive one of my trainings is an audience that will be at least one third African American, Latino and/or American Indian/Native American, I will give you a special, reduced rate for an online or onsite training. This is per my commitment to helping African American, Latino and American Indian/Native American managers in nonprofits, civic organizations, government programs and schools in particular to build their capacities regarding communications and/or volunteer engagement, and to cultivate far more trainers and consultants and leadership from these communities.
Please contact me for more information about my special rates for your audience.
Nonprofits, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), charities, government agencies, schools and other mission-based organizations, no matter what that mission is, needs to be aware of persuasive technologies and how that tech is being used to gather data and use it to target people to get them to buy or do something. You should even consider how you can educate your board, your other volunteers and your clients about persuasive tech and they can better recognize such.
We are as concerned as you are about the harms caused by persuasive technologies. A key lever in our theory of change at the Center for Humane Technology is applying pressure on technology companies by educating policy-makers. When government officials understand the harms more deeply, they can create guardrails to protect society.
On June 25, Tristan Harris, a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, testified on Capitol Hill in the U.S. Senate Commerce subcommittee hearing, “Optimizing for Engagement: Understanding the Use of Persuasive Technology on Internet Platforms” with Rashida Richardson (AI Now Institute), Maggie Stanphill (Google, Inc.) and Dr. Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Research). Tristan’s opening statement argued that persuasive technology platforms have pretended to be in an equal relationship with users, while actually holding the upper hand in an asymmetric relationship. Paired with an extractive business model that is based on predicting and controlling people’s choices in the name of maximizing engagement, this inevitably causes serious harm. Algorithms like YouTube recommendations suggest increasingly extreme, outrageous videos to keep us glued to tech sites. In the hearing Tristan said, “Because YouTube wants to maximize watch time, it tilts the entire ant colony of humanity towards crazytown.”
While many people feel they are opting in as an equal, in reality, algorithms hold asymmetric power over us — they know more about us than we know about ourselves — even predicting when we are going to quit our jobs or are pregnant. As platforms gain the upper hand over the limits of human brains and society, they cannot be allowed to have an extractive relationship but a “Duty of Care” or a “Fiduciary” relationship.
The Gizmodo article does a great job of showing that, the longer you spend in these social media ecosystems, “just scrolling”, the more machine learning systems learn about you. They build a profile of you, based on what you are looking at, what you have “liked,” what your friends have liked, etc. Think of that profile as an avatar – as, Tristan Harris, the executive director of the Center for Humane Technology, puts it, “a voodoo doll-like version of you inside of a Google server. And that avatar, based on all the clicks and likes and everything you ever made—those are like your hair clippings and toenail clippings and nail filings that make the avatar look and act more and more like you—so that inside of a Google server they can simulate more and more possibilities about ‘if I prick you with this video, if I prick you with this video, how long would you stay?’ And the business model is simply what maximized watch time…”
“Without any of your data I can predict increasing features about you using AI… All I have to do is look at your mouse movements and click patterns […] based on tweet text alone we can know your political affiliation with about 80-percent accuracy. [A] computer can calculate that you’re homosexual before you might know you’re homosexual. They can predict with 95-percent accuracy that you’re going to quit your job, according to an IBM study. They can predict that you’re pregnant.
Lawmakers weighed in on the issues as well:
Sen. Schatz (D-Hawaii) “Companies are letting algorithms run wild and only using humans to clean up the mess. Algorithms are amoral. Companies designed them to optimize for engagement as their highest priority, and in doing so eliminated human judgment as part of their business model.”
Sen. Thune (R-South Dakota) “The powerful mechanisms behind these platforms meant to enhance engagement also have the ability, or at least the potential, to influence the thoughts and behaviors of literally billions of people.”
Sen. Tester (D-Montana) “I’m probably going to be dead and gone—and I’m probably thankful for it—when all this s— comes to fruition, because I think that, this scares me to death.”
So… what can you do?
Consider creating a workshop jointly with other agencies to educate volunteers and clients about how social media is used to gather information about them and their children, and how that technology is designed to encourage them into action and beliefs in ways they may never have realized.
Write your elected national representatives and tell them you believe these companies should be required, by legislation, to do a better job of talking about how they target users to keep them engaged.
Create a written social media policy that makes a commitment to never “like” or share any information on social media that does not fit absolutely into the mission of your organization and that cannot be verified. Know what your social media manager is doing (watch, don’t just ask). If a board member or prominent volunteer asks you to share something via the organization’s social media account that you feel does not meet that criteria, be prepared to explain to that board member why you will NOT be sharing such.
Create a page on a private GoogleDoc or a public web page that has a list of links to the Facebook pages you want to check in regularly regarding news and updates instead of liking those pages on Facebook (I have a private page where I have listed the Facebook pages of all of the city and county governments of my area, political groups I support, nonprofits I want to keep an eye on, sports teams I like, etc.). Any time you want to get an update, you just go to that page you’ve created and click on the link of any group or office you are interested in. Unlike every Facebook page except those you want to publicly, officially endorse by doing so. The result: you are more likely to get the updates you want from the groups you most want, because you aren’t relying on Facebook to show such in your timeline.
Get rid of your Facebook group for volunteers, clients, etc. Facebook data mines every post made to these groups, even if you set the account to private. Also, not everyone wants to use Facebook, because of its data-mining/profile-building and selling practices. Free alternatives include YahooGroups, Groups.io, and MeWe. Or consider making the investment for a completely private platform to create an online space for working with your volunteers or clients – my favorite is Basecamp.
Be flexible about how you communicate directly with volunteers and clients online and be ready to use whatever tool they seem most engaged in – and be ready to change as they change. That may mean using WhatsApp for a year or two to send direct messages to volunteers or clients and then switching to Telegram because that’s what your volunteers or clients are switching to.
Keep using Facebook if its proven to be a good way to get your message out and engage with others, but never use it as your only avenue for online outreach: your web site should be always up-to-date, you should post to Twitter and create content for YouTube, and you should post information, as appropriate, to online communities on other platforms, like Reddit and even Craigslist. I find places to potential new places online to post information by asking clients or volunteers where they are getting ANY information.
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
The world is experiencing a trust crisis. People don’t trust their national governments nor their local governments – not elected officials and not public sector employees. People don’t trust established media outlets. People are pushing back against science and historical facts being taught in schools. People will believe an unverified viral video or social media post shared by a friend or family member but not an article by a journalist or peer-reviewed academic paper by a scientist.
In addition, in the USA, there has never been a time where there have been as many opportunities to talk directly to elected officials, via council meetings, town halls, open houses, social media, email, surveys and citizens’ advisory committees, yet people are staying away from these. Officials are talking to largely empty auditoriums and rooms and getting low returns for any surveys inviting feedback about projects.
Skepticism can be a healthy thing: it can encourage people asking questions that very much need to be asked and force a project designer to improve a design before anything gets built or launched. Answering questions can make the reason to do something even stronger. But these days, people aren’t even asking questions: they are dismissing outright anything government representatives or academic institutions or news sources say. They are saying civic participation doesn’t really matter.
I grew up in rural Kentucky, in a civically-minded family: one of my great-grandmothers worked for a local county government, one of my grandfathers was a city council member and active member of and volunteer with a variety of civic groups (he even helped rally support for a school tax back in the 1950s), my other grandfather was a minister and outspoken in the community on a variety of issues, my mother was a deputy sheriff and then assistant to the head of the county government for many years, my father was the local head of a political party in Western Kentucky, and both of my parents sometimes attended and often talked about local government and school board meetings they had attended. I always knew who was running in every local election long before I could ever vote. Politics and values – but never facts – were frequently debated at family gatherings. No one was discouraged from working on a political campaign, from writing a letter to the editor of the local paper, from voting, etc. I never once heard It doesn’t matter. It won’t make a difference Why bother? from anyone. My family didn’t always like what local government agencies or public schools did, but they believed it mattered to use official channels to find out what was happening and to let their opinions be known. I also got my undergrad degree in journalism from a university that, at the time, was widely known for its journalism training, worked at a few newspapers, have worked with journalists for decades, and have idolized journalism, when it is at its best, for most of my life. I have always had a paid subscription to a newspaper, even if, now, it’s entirely online.
In the eight years I lived outside the USA, I was often working on initiatives that encouraged civic engagement in other countries, and people – particularly women – seemed hungry to take part, and encouraging their government to be more transparent via its own publications and via its interactions with the media. It was incredibly energizing to encourage the kind of civic participation I had grown up with and to see people from a variety of cultures and economic levels jumping in and doing it their own way. As a result, when I moved back to the USA in 2009, I was inspired to do my best to be a part of local government, as a citizen and resident and maybe as a government employee, if I found the right position. In the first town I lived in Oregon, I joined the local government’s bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee. In the next town I lived, I joined the local government’s public safety advisory committee, the county’s public arts coalition and the local chapter of the League of Women Voters. I also went through the county sheriff’s 12-week citizens’ academy. I attended city council meetings and political candidate forums. And I have, indeed, applied for a few government jobs.
I’ve known where to look for these kinds of opportunities to observe government, and participate in such, because of my background. And I’ve come to it with a trust in the people that staff government, public schools and media outlets, a trust that was long-cultivated. I’ve never thought of them as anything but people, with strengths and weaknesses just like anyone, just like me. But I’ve realized most people my age and younger aren’t like me: they have a built-in distrust of these institutions. They also need more than one post to a Facebook page or one tweet announcing a meeting to be motivated enough to attend. They need more than one notice in their utility bill to be inspired to do anything. They need more than whatever worked 20 years ago to get them to that meeting, that open house, that presentation. Because for every one official message from a government office or school, they have gotten probably a dozen from family and friends about how whatever it is that office is doing isn’t in the public’s best interest, isn’t trustworthy, has nefarious intentions, or just really doesn’t matter.
Governments and public schools: in your outreach planning, you not only need strategies for meeting your legally-mandated public communications requirements and for letting people know about your events and activities, you also need strategies for cultivating, even rebuilding, trust with the community. And this is something you need to hire someone to do – don’t think you can get an intern to manage your social media and make it happen.
Cultivating or rebuilding community trust takes multiple steps and ongoing efforts – not just one public meeting or open house. You have to think not only about how you will invite public comment on activities but also how you will regularly show how public comment has influenced decision-making. You have to have strategies to make yourself aware of misinformation campaigns about your efforts and strategies to address them. How will you leverage speeches, presentations and meetings with civic groups, social media posts, surveys, community meetings and more not only to share information but to also find out what trust gaps exist and to address those gaps? I research and compile recommendations for trust-building on my web site about how to folklore, rumors, urban myths and organized misinformation campaigns interfere with aid and government initiatives, and those recommendations, which come from a variety of organizations, can be adapted to help any agency craft its own strategy for addressing the trust crisis.
Here are my related resources, which aren’t just my own ideas, but ideas from a variety of resources, with an abundance of links to other articles and web sites (and I would welcome suggestions for other resources as well):
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On 12 June 2019, the United Nations Special Rapporteur Clement Voule issued a report (A/HRC/41/41) on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association in the digital era. The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law has created an unofficial summary of the report here. In its introduction, ICNL notes:
As technology plays an increasingly vital role in the freedom of assembly and association, the Special Rapporteur finds that many governments are not fulfilling their obligations under international law. In fact, government measures restricting online space have become all too common. Furthermore, technology companies act as gatekeepers to people’s ability to exercise these rights, creating new issues. The report addresses these challenges, with a focus on developing guidance to preserve and expand the digital civic space.
In its summary of the Special Rapporteur’s report, ICNL notes the following regarding “digital technology companies,” and I think it’s worth highlighting in particular:
Digital technology companies, particularly social media companies, have become gatekeepers, controlling people’s ability to exercise assembly and association rights online. The role these companies play has created new risks or exacerbated challenges. The Special Rapporteur finds that these platforms’ policies and algorithms may undermine the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, despite some attempts at improvements. The Special Rapporteur is particularly concerned that social media’s content policies seem to affect those with a public profile in a disproportionate manner, placing activists and those calling for mass mobilization at risk of facing arbitrary content removal and account suspension or deactivation. Compounding this problem is social media companies’ increasing use of algorithmic systems to flag content for takedown and determine findability. In the words of the Special Rapporteur: “Algorithmic systems have the power to silence stories and movements, prevent civil society actors from reaching a wider audience, and reinforce echo chambers or reproduce bias and discrimination, to the detriment of democratic development. These measures can also have a disproportionate effect on already marginalized or at-risk groups.”
Sophie Otiende is a program consultant for HAART Kenya, a nonprofit that bills itself as the only organization in Kenya that works exclusively on eradicating human trafficking. In this podcast with The Nonprofit Quarterly, Otiende discusses her anti-trafficking work and why awareness campaigns fail to deter vulnerable women who are already suffering from poverty and abuse in their own homes. She also says donors must do a better job of providing emotional support to frontline staff. And she talks about the ethics around what The Nonprofit Quarterly calls “survivor porn,” which happens when survivors of trauma are asked by a nonprofit to provide an account of their causes, in a video, in an interview with the press, etc., to provide an emotional hook to attract donors to the nonprofit. The podcast asks some hard questions about the power dynamics between survivors and the nonprofits that have helped them.
On a related note is this article from March 2019 from the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism: “Inspiration Porn: How the Media and Society Objectify Disabled People.” This article is about, specifically, someone film or taking photos of a person with a disability in public doing just about anything – eating, getting on and off a bus, going down the street – without that person’s permission, and then uploading it to social media with some sort of inspirational message, making the person with a disability’s experience a “feel good” story. Even journalists are guilty of this. Often, the stories are about someone helping the person with a disability – say, to push their wheelchair over a corner curb that doesn’t have a curb cut – which deflects from what should be the real story: why doesn’t the curb have a curb cut? As one person in the story says, “Inspiration porn makes us feel that everything is going to be OK.”
Both of these are, like “poverty porn”, voyeuristic. As Skye Davey says in this article, “It captures human beings in vulnerable, deeply personal moments, and packages that trauma (and humiliation) for consumption.” All three over-simplify poverty, famine, human rights issues, sex trafficking, accessibility and challenges for people with disabilities, and other complex issues. It promotes a fiction that these issues can be fought with charity and message-promotion on social media, without structural change.
Poverty, disease, injustice, and conflict are all heartbreaking. But sometimes the work needed to tackle them is not new, innovative, or sexy. It might be citizens demanding fundamental services like improved healthcare or better roads; or governments better managing their budgets; or pressing local agencies to be more responsive to public concerns… We must highlight the grey area between our interventions and the reality of how social change occurs. Trust the public with a little more nuance – they can handle it.
The subhead on this Guardian piece says, “Our job is to tell compelling stories without trivialising people’s lives – and to promote a more nuanced narrative about how to achieve lasting change.” Without poverty porn, survivor porn or inspiration porn. It can sometimes be a difficult balance, but it’s a balance worth pursuing.
There are some good resources regarding ethics and photography in humanitarian work that have advice that can be applied for nonprofits working with vulnerable populations (people who are homeless, people experiencing addiction, people who have experienced domestic violence, foster children, people with disabilities, etc.) in their own countries, including:
I would love to hear from others about how they maintain this balance in their representation of vulnerable populations in public relations and marketing materials.
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In March 2019, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) published its 2017 U.S. Fire Department Profile report. It’s based on data collected via a national survey of fire departments. The report estimates that there were 682,600 volunteer firefighters in the USA in 2017. That is down significantly from the 814,850 and 729,000 volunteer firefighters that the NFPA estimates were active in the U.S. in 2015 and 2016, respectively. The volunteer firefighter numbers for 2016 and 2017 are the lowest recorded levels since the NFPA began the survey in 1983.
According to the report, 83,550 of the 132,250 reduction in volunteer firefighters between 2015 and 2017 occurred in fire departments protecting communities with populations of 2,500 or fewer residents. The NFPA estimates an overall decline of 83,900 firefighters (career and volunteer combined) in those communities, a reduction of more than 20 percent over a two-year span.
In addition to the decline in the number of firefighters serving in the smallest communities, the average age of those firefighters continued to increase in 2017. Fifty-three percent of firefighters serving communities with populations of 2,500 or less were over the age of 40, and 32 percent were over the age of 50 in 2017. This continues an aging trend that has been happening for years among the population of firefighters in small communities.
Number of Firefighters in the U.S., 1983, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015-2017
Year
Total
Career
Volunteer
1983*
1,111,200
226,600
884,600
1990
1,025,650
253,000
772,650
2000
1,064,150
286,800
777,350
2010
1,103,300
335,150
768,150
2015
1,149,300
345,600
814,850
2016
1,090,100
361,100
729,000
2017
1,056,200
373,600
682,600
*Note, this is the first year for which firefighter numbers are available from the NFPA. Source: NFPA Survey of Fire Departments for U.S. Fire Experience
As the National Volunteer Fire Council notes, it is important to note that these numbers are estimates based on responses to a survey of a sample of U.S. fire departments that is designed to be representative of the overall U.S. Fire Service. Approximately 8.7 percent of fire departments surveyed responded to the survey. Any annual differences reflect both actual changes in what is being measured as well as year-on-year statistical and sampling variability.
The NVFC says that, this year, the federal government will award more than $40 million to local fire departments to help pay for volunteer recruitment and retention efforts through the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) grant program, funded out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And that’s great. But it’s going to take a huge change in the attitude of most local fire departments for this money to make a difference. As I said in my blog why you can’t find/keep volunteer firefighters: There ARE potential volunteer firefighters out there, even in your small town. There are a LOT of people who are hungry to connect, hungry for a deeper, substantial activity that connects them with the community and causes they believe in, one that gives them an immersive, hands-on, intense experience. Volunteer firefighting can have a great deal of appeal to today’s young people. But if you don’t have a welcoming environment, if you aren’t trying to reach them where they are, if you aren’t using social media, and if you are just talking about all the work that has to be done and the obligations to be fulfilled, those young people are going to overlook you and even go elsewhere and numbers will continue to decline.
In short: we will never, ever go back to a time when volunteer firefighters are recruited in the way they were before the 1980s. The recruitment of volunteer firefighters must radically evolve. How volunteer firefighters are engaged must radically evolve. And it’s going to take more than money.
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It was inspired by so many of the ideas for volunteering for young people that, in my opinion, are dreadful, suggestions that teach supremacy and superiority, that encourage a young person’s introduction to different regions of the world – say, the country’s of Africa – through a lense of poverty instead of first talking about the beautiful culture and rich history and many talents and skills of the people there.
How can adults – parents and teachers – encourage young people to be compassionate for and kind to others while not cultivating pity and feelings of superiority? Here are some ideas. It’s a first draft – suggestions welcomed (post in the comments or contact me directly).
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
