My father and I talk about the issues that today’s volunteer fire departments face whenever we are together. When he started volunteering in the 1960s, there were 100–200 calls annually. Basic first-aid skills were all that was required to staff an ambulance. The fire academy was weeks long instead of months long, and there was plenty of time for training, softball and other social activities to keep the members interested and engaged during the time between calls. When the sirens summoned them, firefighters were fighting for space on the rigs as they rolled out of the bay doors.
Now, at some stations, the doors don’t even open when the siren sounds.
Training requirements for today’s fires are endless: basic and advanced medical skills, fireground operations, safety, wellness, incident command, leadership development, fire behavior and the list goes on. Then there’s the not-so-glamorous list of duties, such as apparatus maintenance and station upkeep, tracking training and personnel records. In volunteer fire departments big and small, the responsibility to purchase the fuel to keep rigs on the road and to outfit them with the latest equipment requires members to spend hundreds of hours—away from their family and friends—and sometimes to take vacation days to host carnivals and spaghetti dinners or do boot drives.
The goal of this supplement is to provide the blueprints for a successful recruitment and retention program from agencies that have been successful. Thank you to the staff of the National Volunteer Fire Council for their support on this project. I encourage you to review the content in this supplement and, if you’re in a volunteer agency, make sure that you share it with your neighboring communities, so they can spend less time reinventing the wheel and focus more on recruitment and retention.
If you have programs that you implemented to recruit or retain firefighters that have been successful, please share you story with us at [email protected].
–Peter Matthews, Firehouse Editor-in-Chief
This article is part of a larger supplement on Recruiting and Retaining: The Future of Volunteer Fire Departments. View the supplement in its entirety here.
