Published works

The modern landscape of emergency volunteering in Australia is characterised by far-reaching change, converging challenges and emerging new opportunities. In this context, a key concern within the emergency management sector today is how the changing landscape threatens the long-term sustainability of Australia’s formal emergency management volunteer capacity. Some volunteer-based emergency management organisations are responding to the changing landscape with new volunteer strategies, models and management practices. While the pace of change has picked up in recent years, overall it has been slow.

This paper posits that greater engagement in frame reflexive learning and practice can help enable further and faster adaption of emergency volunteering models and approaches to better meet the challenges and opportunities presented by the changing landscape. It aims to support frame reflexive learning and practice by articulating the different ways that 'what's wrong and what needs fixing' is framed among a range of emergency volunteering stakeholder groups. The results are based on interviews and questionnaires conducted with over 180 stakeholders, including representatives from emergency service agencies, disaster welfare organisations, volunteer representative groups, volunteering peak bodies, local governments, and community sector organisations. The paper identifies and describes four key frames currently in use by stakeholders: Competition, Professionalisation, Expectation-Capacity Gap, and Culture Clash. It concludes that deeper and wider collaboration at the sector and community level is needed to enable frame reflexive practice through which multiple frames and their implications can be made more visible and a wider range of options for addressing complex cross-boundary volunteering problems revealed.