A thriving and diverse volunteer workforce is essential to build resilience of Australian communities to natural hazards. To help volunteer leaders build effective skills that support volunteers across the country, researchers at the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC and Curtin University have created a new toolkit full of helpful and engaging resources, all available online.
The Volunteer Leader Toolkit – accessible here – is a new online package of resources, free to use, aimed at current or aspiring volunteer leaders. It's designed to help leaders learn more about how to better recruit volunteers, support new volunteers, and retain current and future volunteers through effective leadership.
The Toolkit is full of interactive and engaging evidence-based resources that were developed by researchers at Curtin University, with real volunteers and their managers. The resources are based on what would be most helpful to volunteers and leaders, and include training videos, volunteer interviews, tip sheets, checklists, case studies, thinking exercises and templates sorted into three modules:
- Module 1: Recruiting – to support the effective planning, promotion and selection of new volunteers.
- Module 2: Onboarding – to support volunteer registration, induction, support, training and engagement.
- Module 3: Leading – to guide volunteer management and improve leadership skills, such as sharing responsibility, providing feedback, recognising achievements and dealing with conflict.
The modules can be used together as a full support package, or users can choose the topics from within each module that are most helpful for their brigade, group or unit.
At a recent launch of the Toolkit, Kate White, the Senior Coordinator for Volunteer Capability and Sustainability at the Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) in Western Australia, reiterated how beneficial the Toolkit is – not only for emergency services volunteers but for all volunteer organisations.
“This Toolkit is a framework that’s applicable everywhere, general enough to apply across the entire state, but also specific enough to apply locally and focus in on ideas with specific groups and how it applies to them,” Kate said.
“It’s a really clever synthesis of an academic approach with the lived experiences of those individual volunteer teams…that authoritative voice has really helped us as we’ve rolled the Toolkit out across Western Australia.”
Speaking about how the Toolkit is specifically used within DFES, Kate highlighted the structure as one that can be adapted to suit every team’s needs, no matter how small or large.
“One of the incredible and clever things about the Toolkit’s structure is the way its broken into separate areas, allowing us as end-users to focus on specific support for volunteer groups, because you can pick and choose the elements according to your group’s needs,” Kate said.
“We use it as the basis of all our teaching around the concepts of recruitment, onboarding and leading…Whether I’m dealing with a small group of volunteers, or a group of staff learning about managing volunteers, I will use these resources to deliver a consistent and simple message.”
The modules are the result of five years of research conducted in collaboration with volunteers and emergency services, primarily the Department of Fire and Emergency Services in Western Australia. They were developed through the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC’s Enabling sustainable emergency volunteering project, with research by A/Prof Patrick Dunlop, Hawa Muhammad Farid and Prof Marylène Gagné at Curtin University’s Future of Work Institute, as well as Dr Darja Kragt from the University of Western Australia.
The resources within each module draw directly from experiences of volunteers who were interviewed and surveyed over the years of research.
Curtin University’s A/Prof Dunlop lead this research, speaking at the launch about the importance of working directly with the volunteer network to create meaningful, helpful tools.
“We are really excited to share these resources with the sector,” A/Prof Dunlop said.
“We consulted and interviewed widely with volunteers, leaders and volunteer associations, and built a strong understanding of what volunteers actually need, what they want and what a resource should look like. This Toolkit is the result, delivering helpful resources based on what the sector told us they really needed in order to support volunteers.”
Prior to developing this Toolkit, this research team had created several other helpful tools for emergency volunteer leaders, including the Recruitment and Retention Toolkit for Emergency Volunteer Leaders and the Recruitment Messaging Toolkit. These tools have now been either incorporated into the new Volunteer Leader Toolkit or have been used to directly inform the resources within it.
The resources are not intended to replace the existing information provided by emergency service agencies, but rather to support the existing strategies where there might be gaps or topics that can be improved with research-backed resources. All of the resources can be adapted or amended by volunteer leaders within emergency services to fit existing, internal portfolios or training units.
Access the Volunteer Leader Toolkit here.
For more information about how to use or integrate the modules, contact A/Prof Patrick Dunlop at patrick.dunlop@curtin.edu.au.
The recording of the launch of the Toolkit can be seen below.