Spontaneous Volunteer Management:
Setting up a Volunteer Coordination/Reception Center
Volunteers – sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands – show up to help after a disaster, bringing skills, energy and compassion to the relief effort. These trainings seek to help local communities plan for the coordination of spontaneous and unaffiliated volunteers during disaster recovery efforts.
Trainingswill provide local municipalities with best practices and materials, in order to prepare their communities to handle the management of spontaneous or unaffiliated volunteers in times of disasters (SVM). These trainings will also allow local municipalities the opportunity to self-identify with the state, those individuals that are prepared to manage spontaneous volunteers if a larger event were to occur where their skill sets could be called upon.
Each municipality in attendance will receive a “Go-Kit” that will contain all the materials necessary to initially stage a Volunteer Coordination/Reception Center or VCC.Local municipalities including towns, cities, and counties should identify key players to serve as VCC Managers as well as VCC teams. It is recommended that municipalities send at least 3 individuals to this training and up to 5 individuals per locality.
It is highly recommended that the emergency manager or at least one individual who attends be familiar with NIMS and ICS as well as the local emergency plan in order to provide context to the other individuals in attendance from a specific locality.Materials are derived from FEMA and Points of Light Trainings which incorporate knowledge of emergency management with knowledge of volunteer management to create a cohesive and usable set of skills for volunteer managers.
Pre-training materials will include the following topics:Disaster Basics, Intro to Spontaneous Volunteers, Intro to Risk Management, National Service and Disasters, Affiliated Volunteers, Donations Management, Virtual Management of Volunteers, Understanding Faith-based Response Groups, and Citizen Corps Assets. The training will review these materials and then a full scale VCC Exercise will take place.
We will be teaching in Richfield May 28th. Register for the class on U-TRAIN, Course ID: 1049904. Tentative locations for upcoming trainings are: Orem, Heber and the Price/Green River area. Watch userveutah.gov/SVM for updates!
For more information on these training opportunities, please visit userve.utah.gov/svm or contact Karrie Beardall at . These trainings are being conducted in coordination with DEM and the Utah Volunteer and Donations Coordination team (VDCT) and the State Emergency Operations Plan.