Volunteering concepts go through second round of town hall meetings

In the past few months, five partners of the SEE project conducted another round of town hall meetings to discuss disaster preparedness and volunteering in emergencies with citizens and stakeholders. The basis for discussion were the concepts for joint voluntary action of formal and informal volunteers in emergencies. These concepts outline how spontaneous volunteers, i.e. citizens willing to help, can work together with established and trained emergency volunteers, such as those from the participating organisations. They were developed in a first round of town hall meetings earlier this year and a follow-up process in which participants in these town hall meetings got together to complete the draft concepts.

Events took different formats, drawing from lessons-learned from the first round of town hall meetings. The goal was to reach as many relevant citizens as possible. This is why some organisations opted to deviate from the typical workshop format of the first round and implemented their second meeting attached to public events, visited by large numbers of citizens. This approach was successful overall and enabled the organisations to gather the input of demographics that could not be reached with the first round.

In the next steps of the project, there will be activities that facilitate the application of the newly defined concepts, including communication to and involvement of additional qualified volunteers of the respective organisations as well as outreach to a wider public audience and additional stakeholders.