New handbooks for evacuation planning and managing spontaneous volunteers
The Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience has published two new handbooks to build capability in emergency management and disaster resilience, both freely available on the Knowledge Hub with associated resources.
The new Communities Responding to Disasters: Planning for Spontaneous Volunteers Handbook is valuable for any organisation with a role in supporting communities after a disaster. This handbook recognises the important contribution spontaneous volunteers can make in emergency situations and provides strategies for managing their involvement.
The Spontaneous Volunteers Handbook describes a range of principles and policies to help support and coordinate spontaneous volunteers, and provides guiding questions, strategies, case studies and advice to operationalise the principles.
The revised Evacuation Planning Handbook is designed to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of the emergency evacuation process, through principled planning and implementation. The handbook provides guidance to people within government and its agencies, NGOs and communities on how to plan for the five stages of an evacuation, emphasising the primacy of life, as well as imperatives for community recovery.