Volunteers - thegoodwills.com

The future for bushfire volunteers

On my late evening dog walks in the rural village of Yangan near Warwick, it has become customary to wave to the volunteer firefighters as they arrive back at base. If they can lift their arms, they wave back.

These volunteers, known in Australia as ‘firies’, are holding containment lines around multiple fires burning in the ranges around Cunningham’s Gap. The Cunningham Highway between Warwick and Brisbane has been closed for two weeks due to poor visibility and debris on the road. The highway opened yesterday, with restricted speeds on several sections.

As a result of fires at Spicer’s Gap, Swanfels, Clumber and elsewhere in the district, we have been ‘smoked in’ on multiple occasions. On Wednesday, a wind change brought smoke down to ground level as district people turned out for the Festival of Small Halls gig at Freestone.

This event, featuring local lads the Fern Brothers, well-travelled duo Hat Fitz and Cara and British songwriter Blair Dunlop, was a much-needed morale boost after two years of drought and two months of bushfire concerns.

You could be forgiven for not knowing there are tens of thousands of Australians who volunteer as firies. When not involved in extinguishing and containing bush fires, they are often out and about cutting firebreaks. Apart from periodic encounters outside bush fire brigade sheds or local pubs, we don’t see these people, who melt back into the community once the danger has passed. It is important that we do not take for granted the vital services they provide to rural communities.

You hear stories – a note left inside a house, surrounded by charred vegetation. “We saved the house…we owe you a bottle of milk.”

Friends who had a rural property in the Grampians returned from travels, unaware that bushfires had swept through the district. Once again, the land was charred but the house saved.

If there is a risk to the heroic status of rural firefighters, headlines announcing that a teenage volunteer in NSW had been charged with multiple counts of arson, were not what the fire services needed. While the volunteer is yet to have his day in court, he has been charged with setting seven fires in the Bega district and then returning to help fight them.

“Our members will be rightly angry that the alleged actions of one individual can tarnish the reputation and hard work of so many,” RFS commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said in a statement to the media.

As explained on The Feed (TV station SBS programme ), bush fires are best managed by a predominantly local, volunteer workforce.

Stuart Ellis, a former Chief Officer of the Country Fire Service in South Australia, said that as fire seasons intensify, the need for firefighters at any one time will vary across Australia.

“It’s difficult to predict when and where the largest bushfires will be; even once fires start, a shift in wind direction can rapidly change things.

“When volunteers are required, they need to be present in significant numbers and often close to the areas where the fires will occur.”

Local firies are more likely to have the knowledge, familiarity and expertise in fuel, weather conditions and topography

The numbers are impressive – 70,000 volunteers keep the NSW Fire Service going – the largest such brigade in the world. The size implies a huge management task for co-ordinating fire brigades, involving around 900 paid staff. A further 7,000 paid firefighters are employed by Fire and Rescue NSW to handle the metropolitan areas, via some 335 fire stations.

In Queensland, 36,000 people have signed up to the Rural Fire Service, with 5,000 currently active. Volunteers (hereafter known in Australian parlance as ‘vollies’), are in the same category as those enlisting with Emergency Services. They never know when they will get the call, but when they do, it’s an open-ended job with no ‘knock-off’ (quitting) time.

Ellis told The Feed that Australia would be unable to manage the largest fire events without the ‘surge capacity’ volunteers represent.

If you have ever met a ‘firie’, they will tell you they are doing it for the community. Signing up to be a bush brigade volunteer is a selfless task, which for the past 30 years has drawn reliable numbers of people.

But despite the large numbers answering the call to fight spring bushfires in NSW, Victoria, South Australia,Tasmania and Queensland, volunteer numbers are dropping.

A Productivity Commission report shows that 17,000 volunteer firefighters have quit over the past five years. Stuart Robb of the NSW Rural Fire Service told The World Today the main issue was that long-serving firefighters were getting older. In NSW, where vollies outnumber career firefighters 10-1, 40% of firies are over 50.

Robb said people in the age group 25-45 were less able to be involved in community firefighting because of work and family responsibilities.an

The trend is also evident in the US, where a study showed that volunteer numbers dropped from 814,850 in 2015 to 682,600 in 2017. The National Volunteer Fire Council said these were the lowest numbers since the survey began in 1983. The decline in volunteer activity is most noticeable in communities of fewer than 2,500 people. Ageing is a noticeable factor, with 53% of volunteers aged over 40 and 32% over 50.

The US government is working to alleviate this issue, with a grant of $40 million to help pay for volunteer recruitment and retention. Congress is working towards making volunteer firefighters eligible for student loan forgiveness and housing assistance.

Meanwhile, the Australian government has been lobbied by a group of 23 former fire and emergency service leaders. They want the government to declare a climate emergency and commit to investing in more water-bombing aircraft and firefighting resources.

Researcher Blythe McLennan of the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University says that bushfire volunteering is at a crossroads.

If we are fighting bushfires into the next decade with the same or declining numbers of volunteers, using the same approaches we use today, then clearly the job will be much harder and the demands on volunteers will become more extreme.

One of the major reasons for a decline in volunteer numbers, particularly after prolonged and serious fires, is that volunteer firies may suffer financial hardship as a result of missing days at work.

The Volunteer Fire Fighters Association (NSW) has asked the NSW Rural Fire Service to investigate the feasibility of providing financial support via a welfare/relief fund to volunteer fire-fighters during protracted bushfire emergencies.

Eukey Qld Fire Brigade volunteer Rob Simcocks says it’s not just about time off and lost income, but also the sheer exhaustion and mental health concerns after such big efforts.

“It’s not just the time on the fireline, but also a lot of recovery time where you just have to rest, getting nothing else done.”

He agrees volunteer numbers are declining but thinks the age estimates are conservative, given that his local brigade has an average age of 60.

This reminds me of the story my late father-in-law used to tell, of his time fighting forest fires in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia.

“I retired when I turned 75 because I was embarrassing the young blokes who told me they couldn’t keep up with me.”

That may be a shaggy dog story, but it typifies the attitude of people who take on a dangerous job to keep their neighbours out of harm’s way.

Volunteering and election fatigue

Image: Volunteers for Habitat for Humanity building a new home on Vancouver Island. Photo by Jon Toogood

It’s National Volunteer Week, as good a time as any to encourage people to offer their skills and labour to community organisations and causes they believe in.

For those who donated their time to support a political party or independent candidate, though, battle fatigue has set in.

More than four million Australians voted during the three weeks leading up to last Saturday’s Federal election. This was more than double the pre-poll vote in 2016. Instead of election volunteers concentrating their efforts on just one day, it meant putting in that sort of effort for 17 consecutive days.

University of Sydney senior lecturer Stephen Mills says the pre-polling trend is changing the traditional election campaign in unexpected ways.

“Candidates are spending less time campaigning in the community and more time at pre-polling stations. Parties are announcing their more attractive promises earlier. Party volunteers are being exhausted by long weekday shifts on the hustings. And many voters are casting their votes with incomplete knowledge.”

Mills and co-researcher Martin Drum of the University of Notre Dame Australia found that three weeks of pre-polling stretched the resources of the smaller parties.

“Early voting is not a level playing field, Recruiting and organising volunteers for three weeks is more of a challenge for smaller parties and independents than for the major parties.

“Incumbent MPs are more available to stand at pre-poll centres all day than, say, a minor party candidate with a job and other non-campaign commitments.”

While the long-term trend towards volunteering is down, 5.8 million Australians aged 18 and over carry out volunteer work every year. Volunteering can range from high-risk activities (bush fire brigades, surf lifesaving and State emergency services), to delivering for meals on wheels or selling raffle tickets outside the local Neighbourhood Centre.

My father (and maybe yours as well) would often use a barracks catch-phrase from time serving in WWII – “Never volunteer for anything.” So I can use that as an excuse for rarely volunteering, apart from local fairs, fetes and music festivals.

Big music festivals like Woodford and the National Folk Festival need thousands of volunteers to ensure that they run smoothly. This year in Canberra, the NFF engaged 1,300 volunteers on tasks ranging from MCs and stage managers to garbage detail. Even small festivals, like the re-born Maleny Music Festival, need about 180 volunteers. Music festival volunteers are given weekend tickets in exchange for an agreed number of volunteer hours ranging from 20 (NFF) to 25 (Woodford).

Volunteering for an election campaign is a bit like being one of the 45,000 Australians who held their hand up to help run the Sydney Olympics. It’s a massive job, but once it’s over you won’t have to think about it again for years.

In 2019, tens of thousands volunteered for political parties large and small. The Greens said in an email last week they needed 10,000 people for Election Day alone.

In any one of the 151 electorates, parties needed two to four people to hand out how-to-vote cards in each booth. An average sized electorate with 30 polling booths would need 120 volunteers over a 10-hour period for this one job. Each party also needed volunteers for door knocking and phoning campaigns and then to help staff pre-poll centres for two or three weeks.

It’s not just political parties that need volunteers. Lobby group GetUp said that more than 9,000 volunteers made 712,039 calls to voters and knocked on 36,315 doors. More than 1,800 volunteers put in 5,954 hours on the campaign to elect independent candidate Zali Steggall in Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah.

Even small campaigns need the support of volunteers. Controversial Anglican priest Fr Rod Bower contested a Senate seat for Independents for Climate Action Now. He told me that 50 volunteers worked with him on the campaign. It was a first for Fr Rod, who is best-known for maintaining an ever-changing campaign of political slogans outside his Gosford Parish. It was also a first for ICAN, which gained 18,430 votes in New South Wales (all-up 32,525 votes in a three-state campaign).

Who knows how many of the election volunteers of 2019 will hold their tired heads up again in 2022. Some will probably be part of a trend that began in 2014 when an Australian Bureau of Statistics social survey showed that the rate of volunteering had slipped from 36% in 2010 to 31%. The next ABS social survey can be expected later in 2019.

It may come as a surprise to find that the largest proportion of volunteers is not, as you might think, drawn from the post-retirement age group. As Professor Melanie Oppenheimer, Chair of History at Flinders University, wrote in The Conversation, the highest rates of volunteering are among people aged between 35 and 54, working full-time, with young children.

“Busy people are able to find the time to volunteer, possibly because it is important enough for them to be able to overcome their time limitations.

“The most regularly cited reasons given for not volunteering are ill health, lack of time, and lack of interest.

“With an ageing population, ill health is likely to grow as a barrier, while at the same time (there is) increasing demand for volunteer-provided services such as health or aged care.”

In a separate study, academics from Curtin University and the William Angliss Institute discovered a volunteer crisis unfolding in small rural communities across Western Australia. The researchers surveyed 10,000 people in rural WA, to find that volunteering in that part of the country is a way of life, with participation well above the national average. However, 35% of those actively involved in volunteering said they were planning to move away from rural areas, with more than half citing a lack of essential services or the cost of accessing these services in larger towns.

Australian volunteer participation is ranked second behind the US as a percentage of the adult population. The UN Volunteers global report found it accounts for the equivalent of 109 million full-time workers. The majority (57%) of this figure are women, while in Australia, the percentage is even higher, with 63% of volunteers being women. Another pattern observed in Australia found organisation-based volunteering rates were higher for the youngest group of people (aged 14 to 24) and people over 65.

ABS data shows that Australia’s volunteers each put in an average of 135 hours a year – 783 million hours of unpaid labour per year. According to Volunteering Australia, they are involved in areas including arts/heritage, business/professional/union, welfare/community, education and training, animal welfare, emergency services, environment, health, parenting, children and youth. As the global study found, 70% of volunteering is informal and community-based, including ‘spontaneous volunteering’, after floods, bushfires or cyclones have left communities devastated.

Flinders University researcher Lisel O’Dwyer has estimated the economic contribution of volunteering in Australia at $290 billion, surpassing revenue from major sectors including mining and agriculture. (The figures, revised in 2014, take into account the value of lives saved by volunteers such as firefighters, SES crews and life guards.)

Try telling the mining lobby that.

Three cheers for volunteers

Firefighters Stephen Mitchell — Country Fire Service volunteers, photo by Stephen Mitchell https://flic.kr/p/sviX2

In the twilight hours of the Illawarra Folk Festival, the call went out for volunteers. Not those who had already put in the hours to pull off the biggest folk festival in New South Wales. No, this was an urgent call for paying punters staying over on Sunday night to donate 12 hours of their time on Monday for the pack-down. Those volunteering for this task would be rewarded with a full refund of their weekend ticket.

Most of Australia’s music festivals make heavy use of volunteers – (shortened in typical Aussie fashion to “vollies”). The logistics involved in training and managing 2,500 volunteers (Woodford Festival) or 1,300 (The National Folk Festival) is only one side to recruiting a (free) but willing workforce. The fact is there are very few paid positions behind the scenes at music festivals, big or small. Volunteers do the forward planning, the publicity, the volunteer co-ordinating and, once the festival has started, vollies are assigned tasks such as checking wristbands at entrances and exits, managing venues, MC’ing, helping find lost children, looking after artists, spreading straw on muddy patches and the never appreciated but vital task of collecting rubbish and removing it from the site. Volunteers invariably keep the toilets and showers clean and make sure there is plenty of toilet paper. (Except when other people come in behind them and make a mess).

Sometimes being a volunteer at a music festival can be really cool “I got to MC the main stage and actually shook Harry Manx’s hand”. Or “Kate wrote a smiley face on my plaster cast.”

Volunteering has long been a noble task where those who perform work for non-profit organisations and charities do it for no monetary reward, either in cash or kind. Festival volunteers at least get free tickets. In the case of Woodford, a season ticket with camping now costs close to $700, so that is a good inducement to offer one’s services. In return for a ticket, Woodford volunteers are required to put in five hours a day. If you do the math, volunteers are working for about $20 an hour (in kind) over the six-day festival.

That’s a pretty good deal for festival fans whose budgets do not stretch to paying for a full season ticket. (You might be rostered on somewhere else just when Kate Miller-Heidke is playing, but what the hell – she’ll probably write a song about it.)

Firefighters, lifeguards and emergency services

Circling out into the deeper water of volunteering in Australia, I found some statistics which gave me pause to worry about our youth unemployment rate. Close to six million Australians volunteers each put in an average of 135 hours a year. That’s 743 million hours of unpaid labour (per year). It makes you wonder.

Melanie Oppenheimer, chair of history at Flinders University, who has written books about volunteering, said in a 2015 co-authored article in The Conversation that the rate of volunteering has slipped from a 2010 high of 36%. An Australian Bureau of Statistics social survey found that 5.8 million Australians volunteered in 2014 – 31% of people aged 18 or over.

Why is it so?

A panel of academics headed by Flinders University has begun a three-year study to find out why volunteering appears to be in a long-term decline. They hope to find answers to these questions and more:

Are increasingly busy Australians finding it harder to prioritise volunteering as part of their lives?
Are we becoming more selfish as a nation and less inclined to help others?
Is volunteering “on the nose” with young people, the next generation of volunteers?
Does the decline in volunteering reflect the long, slow decline of rural Australia, where volunteering rates have always outstripped those of their city cousins?
Has population decline and an ageing population in these areas reduced the supply of willing and able-bodied volunteers?

Adelaide University’s Dr Lisel O’Dwyer has estimated the economic value of volunteering to Australia at $200 billion, using methodology which includes calculating the worth of lives saved by volunteer fire fighters, SES crews and life guards.

But she warned that a focus on the economic value of volunteering can be dangerous, and does not show the whole picture.

Work 70 hours a week for nothing – why not?

Volunteering has come in for a bit of criticism in the past few years, with unpaid internships (sometimes known as ‘work experience’) attracting world-wide opprobrium. Just google “interns and controversy” and you’ll wish you had never started.

There’s also been some media coverage of something dubbed “voluntourism” where predominantly young people can travel abroad and have adventures in exotic locations. The deal is usually food and accommodation in return for a set number of hours working for not-for-profit groups. You can do the legwork yourself, but beware, there are scammers out there all too ready to charge gullible youngsters a fee for finding them an unpaid job overseas.

While volunteers do not get paid for the work they do, local, state and federal governments treat them as part of the workforce. When you volunteer you are covered by workers’ compensation, public liability insurance and the same rules about discrimination and bullying in the workplace apply to volunteers as well.

The biggest exercise in recruiting and training volunteers was in 2000 for the Sydney Olympics, when 45,000 people said “yes” to the concept of being involved in an event that would put Australia on the global stage.

But volunteering is more often about small tasks not even identified as such, like staffing the tuckshop at your children’s school or mending shirts, shorts and skirts for the second-hand uniform shop.

Another star in heaven

Maleny Music Festival director Noel Gardner said even small festivals like the one staged in Maleny last August required 180 volunteers, all of whom were given a free pass in exchange for two shifts of three to four hours over the weekend.

“Festivals couldn’t work without their volunteers,” he said. “The only inducement apart from a free ticket is the joy of helping and perhaps an extra star in heaven.”

Gardner says volunteers often form a family-like bond and friendships are created and cemented year after year.

“I think we (humans) are at our best when we work together for a common cause.”

Friends of ours look after the co-ordinating of volunteers for just one Woodford event (the Fire Event and closing ceremony). Planning for the 120 volunteers needed for this event starts in August, and as our friend said, rarely does a day goes by without something needing to be done.

The upside is that by the time the festival starts, their job is done.

“Obviously we enjoy the tickets to the festival. But we also like the feeling of contributing to a festival we value, and enjoy being part of the organisation and seeing some of the behind-the-scenes planning.”

You, you and you – latrine duty!

Men of my generation probably had fathers like mine (with military experience in World War II). “Never volunteer for anything,” they’d say. Perhaps this is why I have done so little volunteering – car park attendant at the Maleny Wood Expo, MC at Woodford a few times, running a monthly folk club with She Who Only Got Mentioned in the Penultimate Paragraph.

Apart from that, I keep my head down. Evidently there are six million people out there who will do my share for me.