The Spontaneous and Ad-hoc Volunteers Integration Toolkit (SAVIT) supports disaster management practitioners to develop preparedness plans for the integration of spontaneous help. The toolkit includes two elements:
Spontaneous volunteers are individuals or groups of people who seek or are invited to contribute their assistance during and/or after an event, and who are unaffiliated with any part of the existing official emergency management response and recovery system and may or may not have relevant training, skills or experience.
Definition by Australian Red Cross (2010)
Spontaneous volunteers provide crucial and immediate assistance, bring in local knowledge, expand the capacity of actors in DRM, bring in a wide range of skills and resources as well as creativity to solve emerging problems.
Despite operational and societal benefits, their involvement raises several challenges: many spontaneous volunteers lack knowledge of hazards, proper equipment, and safety procedures; large-scale convergence can create operational and logistical bottlenecks; responsibilities and liability in case of injury are often unclear; and formal response organisations may lack the capacity to coordinate them effectively.
To make use of the opportunities while mitigating the challenges, a variety of solutions supporting the integration of spontaneous help into DRM have been developed and implemented worldwide. SAVIT toolkit supports discovering some existing solutions.
Through the analysis of recommendations and solutions for the integration of spontaneous help in DRM, we have identified various tasks that need to be supported. We organised these tasks in five main functions: creating the conditions for the integration of informal help, communicating and sharing information, onboarding informal help, coordinating and managing informal help, following up on involvement. Learn more about these functions when playing SAVIT Tabletop Game.
A solution is any kind of means or instrument that can be applied to integrate spontaneous help in DRM. This includes guidelines, practices, processes, strategies, methods, technologies and applications. Solutions fulfil different needs and support different functions. SAVIT Tabletop Game supports discovering Solutions that have been developed and tested worldwide. SAVIT Catalogue presents these Solutions in more details.
