When things are chaotic, lots of people are trying to help in lots of different ways, adding to the chaos. That is a good thing — your group wouldn’t be able to do everything, so it’s important to know what you are doing, and who is doing other things. To coordinate across the response, you’ll need folks in a cluster to liaison with those other groups, including the formal sector.
Understanding the arc of disaster response will help you know when and how the formal sector will show up. Regardless of when and if they do, you’ll need to deal with “spontaneous unaffiliated volunteers” — the folks that aren’t already in your group who see you doing good work and want to help out. When others show up, you’ll want to do a sniff test to see if you want to team up, and then if you do team up, you’ll need to manage trust. In all this, you’ll need to be aware of some trends in the formal sector.
The folks who will do well in this cluster are friendly without being naive, can maintain multiple channels of communication, and are good listeners.
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Managing trust
In this shift, it will be important to know that the federal, state, and municipal response organizations are not a monolith. There are good people being asked to work in a broken system. And they will themselves be fighting to do what is right, within the structures they are obliged to follow. Help them interpret…
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Trends in the formal sector
Just as a general trend, Emergency Services and the coordination tend to be “command and control” while people with social work background are the folks actually in the field. The implementation of Project 2025 will change crisis response. These concrete steps aligned with Project 2025 fit into a bigger strategy: What does this mean for…
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Sniff test & teaming up
Determining if they’re collaborative When I was doing crisis response in 2010-2018, the vast majority of people in the formal sector actually wanted to help the frontline population and had a deep breadth of education and experience in doing so. One of the things about the formal sector is that they’re NOT starting from square…
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Arc of disaster response
There’s this standard graph of needs versus resources that emergency managers use. It indicates that needs for an area are usually pretty steady, but when a disaster strikes, needs rise. Needs rise because some resources are destroyed and because people are distressed and injured (needing more resources than usual). It also indicates that access to…
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Spontaneous Unaffiliated Volunteers
Anytime there’s a crisis, there’s a flood of people showing up to help. They’re called “spontaneous unaffiliated volunteers” (SUVs) in crisis response circles, and they’re generally considered a chaos amplifier. They’re mostly seen as getting in the way, of being untrained and untasked, and often as not being willing to be trained or tasked. And…