Volunteer Spotlight: More than just disaster deployments

Volunteers

April 6, 2022

Volunteers support our Disaster Response Team in many ways beyond deployment. They bring valuable knowledge and expertise to the team with their array of background knowledge. We are grateful for their desire to lend us their time, experience, and hearts. Projects like creating a new inventory system can feel overwhelming, but volunteers are working methodically to ensure we are ready to deploy our resources.

Organizing this project might sound boring to some, but for these volunteers it is an exciting opportunity to assist the disaster response team in readiness. Doug Brott, MJ Shipley, Sandy Turner, and Suzy Kinner have begun to revitalize the disaster response inventory system. Medications, inhalers, camping equipment, the mobile medical unit, water purification systems, and portable toilets are just some items these volunteers are brainstorming about how to inventory, organize, and deploy quickly. Often the disaster response team has less than 72 hours to pack up the essential equipment and send out teams internationally to areas impacted by disasters. Organizing equipment is essential to responding on short notice to those in need.

We know their support will help take us to the next level. In the future, this team hopes to log all items into an electronic database, create an education program for training others how to use equipment, and schedule inventory and maintenance on a regular cadence. It’s an intensive project that will take months to tie all the strings together, but the end reward will be a high-functioning system that can deploy teams quickly and is led by volunteers.