Nonprofit Groups Search for Better Ways to Manage Disaster Volunteers

On September 11, Lisa C. Orloff quit her job as a consultant and clothing designer in Manhattan to volunteer for

World Trade Center relief efforts. But at first she could find nothing to do.

Ms. Orloff tried to give blood at St. Vincent’s Manhattan Hospital, but was turned away. She tried to volunteer at Chelsea Piers, a sports and entertainment complex where people had gathered to help, but again was turned away. Eventually she joined others waiting in line at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which had become an impromptu volunteer center after the attack.

Seeing no group organizing the people, Ms. Orloff took it upon herself to find volunteers to haul supplies to the Twin Towers site.

“They had thousands upon thousands of people signing up to volunteer, but there wasn’t a lot of coordination,” she says. “There was a lot of delay in someone taking authority.”

Civic Spirit Waning

The lack of coordination by charities and emergency personnel in handling volunteers has caused disaster-relief groups, nonprofit managers, and the federal government to start developing ways to take better advantage of so-called unaffiliated, spontaneous volunteers in the future.

In addition, the White House is trying to transform the civic spirit that appeared at the Javits Center and elsewhere after September 11 into a long-term resource. To that end, President Bush asked all Americans last January to donate 4,000 hours over their lifetimes to federal national-service programs and charitable causes.

Administration officials say the president’s effort has made some progress. For example, Teach for America, a nonprofit group in New York that places college graduates in public schools in poor areas, in the current school year has its largest number of participants — 2,500 — involved in its programs. Last academic year, the group had about 1,650 participants.

However, experts say the civic spirit that September 11 generated, and that the president hoped to tap, has already waned.

While studies showed an increase in the willingness of people to volunteer after the attacks, that willingness has not produced much action, says Robert Putnam, a Harvard University professor who studies civic engagement. After the attacks, “there was a little bit of a pickup in volunteering, but it had mostly gone by the winter,” he says.

The pickup that Mr. Putnam mentions may be attributed to September 11 relief efforts. The American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and other charities used at least 176,000 volunteers from all 50 states and U.S. territories in New York, Washington, and Shanksville, Pa. Charity officials consider that to be the largest volunteer response to any U.S. disaster.

‘An Opportunity Was Missed’

But many of them also say charities and the government should have been better prepared for the influx of volunteers, even though they say there were undoubtedly more people who wanted to help than there were productive activities for them to contribute to.

Ms. Orloff says the poor coordination may have turned people off to volunteering not only for September 11 activities, but for future causes as well. “I know of a lot of volunteers who signed up at the Javits Center or signed up with the Red Cross and never got called back,” she says. “I know for a fact that these people felt a sense of disassociation.”

Managers of volunteers feel like “an opportunity was missed on September 11,” says Katherine H. Campbell, executive director of the Association for Volunteer Administration, in Richmond, Va., a professional association for volunteer managers. Though Ms. Campbell isn’t sure what more volunteers could have done in New York, she does say that the city and charities could have had a better-coordinated effort, including a designated safe area, such as Central Park, to process volunteers.

Nonprofit groups in New York defend their performance, saying that if the city’s Office of Emergency Management had not been evacuated because of its location near the World Trade Center, volunteers would have been managed better. However, they do concede that more planning would have helped.

“We really did take a chaotic situation and make it orderly and useful. Were there other ways in which that could have been done? Perhaps,” says Ariel Zwang, executive director of New York Cares, which organized 10,000 volunteers to help with relief efforts.

A New Plan

To help nonprofit groups and government agencies better handle disaster volunteers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Points of Light Foundation, both in Washington, are developing a plan that is scheduled to be released late this month. The plan will suggest steps that federal, state, and local emergency-management offices and charities need to take. They include:

• Developing agreed-upon activities that disaster volunteers can participate in and exploring new, creative ways they can be put to work.
• Putting a priority on giving residents who live near a disaster site the opportunity to participate in recovery efforts.
• Training firefighters, police officers, and emergency workers in managing volunteers.
• Building a national computer database of volunteers to be used in times of emergencies.

The plan isn’t the first that the federal government and other entities have developed to find productive work for disaster volunteers. After Hurricane Andrew tore through South Florida in 1993, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and nonprofit disaster-relief organizations began developing a strategy to accommodate volunteers. But that approach, while it included government and nonprofit relief officials, didn’t include volunteer groups that work on nonemergency causes. That limited the plan’s viability, says Carol S. Clegg, who is working on the national disaster-volunteerism plan as director of partnerships at Points of Light.

Besides drawing up a strategy for using disaster volunteers, the Bush administration is developing a reserve of retired medical personnel to volunteer during times of crisis. The administration also is trying to build connections at the local level between volunteer managers and government emergency-response personnel.

Government and private dollars are supporting charities involved in these efforts. The UPS Foundation, the grant-making arm of the United Parcel Service, in Atlanta, has set aside $1-million for as-yet-undecided volunteerism projects, including efforts to better engage volunteers in times of crisis. The federal Corporation for National and Community Service has contributed grants to help disaster-relief groups use volunteers, such as a grant of up to $248,000 to establish groups in New Jersey’s 21 counties that will coordinate emergency-relief efforts.

‘We Can’t Let This Happen Again’

Some cities that frequently endure natural disasters already have developed plans to deal with a massive influx of volunteers, and officials are looking to them as possible examples of efforts that can be duplicated.

The Volunteerism Project, in San Francisco, is one such plan. The program started after the Lomo Prieta earthquake in Northern California in 1989. Volunteer centers in the San Francisco Bay Area were overwhelmed when 11,000 people called to donate their time to recovery efforts.

“We simply jumped in, unsure of what our role was supposed to be,” says Margaret Melsh, disaster-response coordinator for the Volunteerism Project. “After that, everyone just said, ‘My God, we can’t let this happen again.’”

To prepare for future earthquakes, the Volunteerism Project developed a plan involving five volunteer centers in San Francisco and surrounding counties.

Those efforts include starting a phone bank to process calls from people wanting to volunteer during an emergency, designating charities and government agencies to process volunteers, and training government workers in how to manage volunteers.

Building Trust

Training government workers may have been the most difficult, says Ms. Melsh, because firefighters, police officers, and other government emergency workers usually view spontaneous volunteers as potential risks, rather than assets. Such helpers are not trained for disaster work and could get in the way of relief efforts — and even become victims themselves, she says.

“In the old days, the government [in the Bay Area] did not want to have anything to do with spontaneous volunteers,” she says. “But over the years, their attitude has changed tremendously.” Convincing firefighters and others that volunteers could be beneficial required building trust with volunteer managers through several years of discussions about emergency plans, Ms. Melsh says.

Physical and Emotional Risks

While the Volunteerism Project may be a valuable model, even it will need to do more planning now that terrorism has become an increasingly viable threat.

Having volunteers work in a disaster caused by an act of terrorism presents a greater risk to them and raises security issues, Ms. Clegg says. With natural disasters, in most cases, the danger of physical harm to volunteers has passed once relief efforts have begun, but terrorists have been known to target recovery efforts. For example, in Israel, Palestinian militants have attacked emergency workers after a terrorist bombing.

Such danger raises issues of insurance liability. Most disaster-relief groups purchase insurance policies to cover volunteers, but it is unclear whether volunteers are covered if they are attacked by terrorists while at a disaster site.

In addition, terrorists could pose as volunteers at a cleanup to gain access to sensitive areas, says Ms. Clegg. Points of Light has suggested that nonprofit managers thoroughly screen volunteers before giving them access to a disaster site.

One major problem for volunteers after a terrorist attack is stress. Charity leaders and volunteers involved in relief efforts after the Oklahoma City bombing showed signs of severe stress and depression. To minimize such problems, Ms. Orloff, the Manhattan volunteer, established a nonprofit group in New York.

Called September Space, it provides emotional support for volunteers and emergency workers by providing them a place — a spacious loft in lower Manhattan — to share their experiences. Since it opened in February, about 900 volunteers and emergency workers have participated in the charity’s activities, which include informal support groups and art therapy. Ms. Orloff plans to expand the charity’s services to people who volunteer for other stressful work.

“We hope to support the volunteer community on an ongoing basis. That means not only the disaster-volunteer community, but the volunteers who go out to the cancer center or the AIDS clinic, or help the elderly,” she says.

‘A New Greatest Generation’

As Ms. Orloff, Points of Light, and others deal with the issues surrounding disaster volunteers, the question remains whether the opportunity created by September 11 to energize civic spirit has ended.

Mr. Putnam, the Harvard professor, who also is working as an informal adviser to the president in his call for public service, says that even though volunteering rates appear stagnant, an opportunity still exists to create a vast resource of new volunteers. Groups should try to build a “new greatest generation,” he says, by prodding people between the ages of 12 and 25 to volunteer.

Charities should not “think about this just in terms of how you are going to get more people to your soup kitchen next week,” Mr. Putnam says, “but how we can use this occasion as a civic investment in America that will pay dividends over decades.”