Volunteer organisations say they’re losing younger members as disaster recovery work drags on due to a number of factors including burnout and a lack of rental accommodation.
The executive director of Resilient Lismore in the New South Wales Northern Rivers region, Elly Bird, said emergency services were “just too stretched” due to natural disasters becoming more frequent and covering greater areas.
“Because the nature of volunteering is changing, they don’t have enough volunteers to do the work they need to do,” she said.
According to Volunteering Australia’s 2022 report, the rate of volunteering (formal and informal) for people aged 15 to 24 dropped by almost 10% between 2019 and 2020, while the rate of people aged 70 and over increased across formal volunteering and remained steady for informal.
Bird, who is also a Lismore councillor, said there needed to be “quick response funding available” for organisations like Resilient Lismore so they could provide short-term contracts and incentives to keep promising young volunteers engaged.
One of these is 21-year-old Frewoini Baume, who Bird said would be “an ideal candidate to offer ongoing employment if the funding was available”.
Baume said she can still remember the “shocking image” when her family drove into Lismore the day flood waters receded – there were chairs and fridges in trees while dead cattle were scattered by the roadside completely “blown up”.
For the first six weeks of the recovery, she was volunteering nearly every day, helping clean people’s houses and “getting dirty”.
“Young people are more willing to give anything and everything a go, whether it’s physical or it’s more administrative,” Baume said.
Bird said Resilient Lismore had a “surge of younger volunteers” in their 20s during the early stages of the recovery, sourced via Instagram, which was important because of their “strong digital skills”.
She said it was critical for the organisation to be active on social media platforms like Instagram to attract younger participants.
“I’m a Gen X, I’m not on Instagram much but there was a huge wave of organising that was happening through Instagram; whereas we were sort of relying on Facebook.”
However, Bird said it became “untenable for younger volunteers” to stick around for long periods of time as they needed to earn an income.
In addition, the younger generation has left the community because rental accommodation was “wiped out”, according to Bird, who estimates only 15% of local houses are re-occupied.
As the flood recovery continues in communities like Lismore, Australia’s east coast braces for more wet weather and flooding with La Niña conditions predicted to return for a rare third consecutive year.
Bird said people in Lismore today were exhausted and frustrated. She said the number of volunteers dramatically dropped over time, leaving behind “the more consistent volunteer base which tends to be retired and semi-retired people”.
In the past month, Baume has only been able to volunteer one day a week.
“You have to sacrifice your time and career to an extent in order to support your community during these natural disasters,” she said.
Baume believes politicians need to have “the audacity to face the implications of their actions because they’re so distant from the effects that they are having on the community”.
“You think of Australia as this rich, resourceful country but here are some of the first climate refugees, and this is how we’re treating them.”
According to the NSW State Emergency Service commissioner, Carlene York, the service has more than 10,000 volunteer members supported by about 300 salaried staff.
“During the flood event earlier this year, NSW SES members faced extreme challenges. Our people were exhausted, and yet they kept showing up day in, day out,” she said.
Bird said a lot of young people don’t want to go and sit at the SES once a week for a training session “they want to be able to volunteer flexibly”.
According to Baume, volunteer organisations should offer a supportive network and the opportunity to make friends if they want to attract the younger generation.
“But it’s very challenging to get people to think with their hearts when it’s not natural; and when our politicians don’t do it, it’s very hard to expect young people especially to do it.”
