FireLink

Tonight was meeting night for one of my volunteer depts. We only have 4 active members to begin with, and our acting chief is out of town. This leaves me in charge. I had three tones sent out, and made a couple of phone calls to make sure everyone knew. Meeting time: 6pm. 6:30pm, I was still at the station alone. 6:45pm, I said the hell with it and came home. The last call this dept. had was a large house, fully involved. 2 people from this dept. showed up, nearby depts did most of the work. Not the first time this has happened. I've tried everything I know to do. I am a member of three other depts, none of which are this short-handed. I've even tried talking members of those depts into joining this one, or at least responding to a few calls with us to no avail. I have given other Firelink members advice on this subject, and have tried all of my own suggestions plus some. I will welcome any advice, but am mainly just blowing off steam. It's frustrating.

We used to be in the same spot several years ago with volunteers dropping like flies or just not responding.  We are a combination dept that had just gone through consolidation.  One of the captains was chosen to go to some volunteer recruitment/retainment classes.  Along with that, lots of table discussions on how to solve the situation.  



First place we looked for recruits was at the high school during one of their job fairs.  We are also fortunate to have a community college close by that offers fire degree classes and ems courses.  We also started a resident program that, after interviews, volunteer FF's with their FF1 and EMT can live at the station along with the paid staff.  There are some other requirements for them as well such as minimum hours a week they must live at the firehouse.  We also started allowing out of district volunteers that aren't assigned pagers, but have to hang out at the station for 48 hrs a month.  This program has caused a problem however.  Due to the amount of applicants we receive, we've had to create a "hiring process".  We try to bring on 10-12 new volunteers at a time and we normally will have 40-50 applicants for volunteers spots! 

With their hopes of getting hired somewhere and being next to Kansas City does help.  Our success rate is around 90% of our resident vollys getting hired either by us or other depts.  We do have volunteers that will always be vollys since a lot of the time their salaries are better than ours lol.  There are requirements that all must meet both paid and volunteers.  We also now have set up a "retirement" that after 20yrs of service there will be monies paid out.  Won't be huge but it will be better than a sharp stick in the eye;)      

Johnny 

We have the same problem, too. We can get people to show up but when they do they have to talk about deer hunting instead of training. I hope our new cheif will solve this problem.

Good luck and stay safe.