Abstract
Embedded in growing expectations for post-disaster volunteer participation are questions of volunteers’ psychological well-being. Witnessing destruction and suffering, and the intense pressures of the work itself, can place heavy demands on crisis volunteers, particularly in “informal” community groups that may lack the structure, systems, and supports embedded within “formal” disaster response organizations. This article examines how the Student Volunteer Army in Aotearoa New Zealand has negotiated volunteers’ well-being across two disaster responses: an earthquake in 2011 and terrorist attacks in 2019. We identify three interrelated practices adopted by the group to support well-being: “action” (enabling opportunities for people to engage in volunteering); “reflection” (facilitating processes of discussion and debriefing); and “connection” (creating physical space and practices to enhance social interactions). Our discussion considers the implications of multi-layered practices of support that can develop within informal crisis volunteer groups.
Introduction
Volunteerism by everyday citizens is a frequent feature of the aftermath of disaster (Quarantelli & Dynes, 1977). This action can be as part of professional volunteer organizations, but also in “informal” groups that spontaneously form after disaster or layer disaster response over their existing activities (Twigg & Mosel, 2017; Whittaker et al., 2015). These groups of community volunteers contribute in the immediate aftermath of disaster, helping to fill gaps in official disaster response and often continuing long after these services have ceased (Strandh & Eklund, 2018). Their activities can include search and rescue, removing debris, transporting and distributing relief supplies, and providing food, drink, and wider psychosocial support to victims and emergency workers (Twigg & Mosel, 2017; Whittaker et al., 2015). Informal volunteer groups are sometimes perceived as a nuisance or liability by emergency managers, in that they often lack training in disaster response and can be perceived as unpredictable (McLennan et al., 2016; Nissen et al., 2022). However, there is increasing interest among disaster response researchers and practitioners in enabling community volunteerism to play a more pronounced role in disaster response, in recognition of their important resource, capacity, and potential for empowerment (McLennan et al., 2016; Twigg & Mosel, 2017; Whittaker et al., 2015).
Embedded in this interest in enabling post-disaster volunteer participation are concerns relating to the well-being of volunteers themselves. Involvement in post-disaster civic action can be transformative for volunteers, for instance, supporting recovery from a traumatic event and forging new connection with communities and place (Steffen & Fothergill, 2009). However, bearing witness to destruction and suffering, and the intense pressure that can come with the response work itself, places heavy demands on volunteers (Harris et al., 2017; Thormar et al., 2010). As such, there have been calls to pay closer attention to the well-being of volunteers within informal disaster response groups (Adams, 2007; Thormar et al., 2010; Twigg & Mosel, 2017). If this volunteerism is to be encouraged and given space in disaster responses, there is a need to explore the variety of practices developed within these groups to support volunteers’ well-being. For this article, we emphasize psychological well-being, while acknowledging that well-being has multiple, often structural, dimensions (e.g., Brooks et al., 2017).
Our article examines the practices developed to support volunteer well-being by the Student Volunteer Army (SVA) in Aotearoa New Zealand. The SVA emerged during the Canterbury earthquake sequence of 2010–2011, when the group coordinated thousands of volunteers to help clean up streets and residents’ properties (Carlton & Mills, 2017; Nissen et al., 2021). Over the subsequent decade, it has mobilized in the aftermath of several other disasters, including floods, fires, another major earthquake, a terrorist attack, and the Covid-19 pandemic (Carlton et al., 2021, 2022). The significant impact of the SVA in each of these responses has meant it has featured as a disaster relief success story internationally (Whittaker et al., 2015). Led by university students, the group has also been presented as potential blueprint for youth-centered post-disaster civic action (Mutch, 2014), in a context where young people are often excluded from disaster response (Peek, 2008).
Drawing on a data set of in-depth interviews with people close to the SVA, we consider the processes and practices developed by the SVA to support volunteer well-being in two different responses undertaken by the group: the February 22, 2011, Canterbury earthquake and the mosque terrorist attacks of March 15, 2019. After providing background to these disasters, we set the scene by presenting interviewee perspectives on the well-being challenges they faced as an informal crisis volunteer group during these two disaster responses. Adopting an interpretive approach, we then identify three practices that interviewees considered significant in sustaining volunteers’ well-being. The discussion then considers the implications of overlapping and multi-layered systems of support that can emerge within informal volunteer groups following disaster.
Informal Volunteer Groups and Post-Disaster Well-Being
Disasters have long been recognized as turbulent and traumatic periods in people’s lives. In these disempowering circumstances, participating in the response in informal groups—such as spontaneous convergence on a disaster site or as part of existing community groups that take on activities related to disaster response—can give a sense of purpose and agency through acts of helping to transform the physical and emotional spaces of the disaster site (Shaw & Goda, 2004; Steffen & Fothergill, 2009). This volunteerism can support recovery from trauma by stimulating feelings of self-esteem, interconnection, healing and empowerment, and build new relationships within communities (Solnit, 2009; Yumagulova et al., 2019).
However, participating in informal groups can present challenges for psychological well-being. Research specifically relating to the well-being of members of informal volunteer groups is acknowledged to be relatively sparse (Adams, 2007; Twigg & Mosel, 2017), in part because these forms of organization have tended to be overlooked in disaster research (Strandh & Eklund, 2018). However, existing research suggests disasters expose these volunteers to pressures and trigger stress responses, which may not appear until some time after the event (Thormar et al., 2010; Twigg & Mosel, 2017). Studies of informal volunteers in crisis situations suggest they can experience elevated levels of anxiety, burnout, and difficulty sleeping (Hagh-Shenas et al., 2005; Yumagulova et al., 2019) and in the longer term, depression, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and feelings of grief and vulnerability (Armagan et al., 2006; Lowe & Fothergill, 2003; Mitchell et al., 2004). Direct or sustained encounters with distressing situations can exacerbate these issues (Cetin et al., 2005; Thormar et al., 2014).
These physical and mental sequelae are also experienced by other people involved in disaster response, including among official disaster responders (e.g., Marmar et al., 2006; Witteveen et al., 2007), volunteers in professional disaster response organizations (Armagan et al., 2006; Chatzea et al., 2018), and people carrying out similarly challenging work such as humanitarian aid workers (Lopes Cardozo et al., 2012; Rizkalla & Segal, 2019). However, it has been noted that informal crisis volunteer groups have a number of particular characteristics that may amplify psychological well-being issues for participants (e.g., Thormar et al., 2010). Informal volunteer groups are often short-lived with fluid structures, and people involved in these groups can therefore lack post-disaster support networks that can assist with psychological well-being, such as being able to talk with friends or colleagues with similar experiences or having access to formal counseling services (Thormar et al., 2010). New to the activities of disaster response, these groups are likely to take on work in situations that are unfamiliar, unsafe, and physically demanding, while also often being personally affected by the disaster events themselves (Mitchell et al., 2004; Thormar et al., 2014). Moreover, since informal volunteer groups are often on the “outside” of hierarchical disaster response structures (McLennan et al., 2016; Whittaker et al., 2015), these groups may experience significant additional pressure trying to prove their value and legitimacy within disaster response environments (McLennan et al., 2016; Nissen et al., 2022).
Given these challenges, there is a need to better understand how informal volunteer groups might navigate support for volunteer well-being. In post-disaster environments, informal volunteer groups are recognized for often exhibiting improvisation and creativity relative to official response agencies (Kendra & Wachtendorf, 2003; Twigg & Mosel, 2017; Whittaker et al., 2015), and this innovation may extend to activities related to well-being. However, these efforts are likely to vary among groups, reflecting the diversity of informal crisis volunteerism (Strandh & Eklund, 2018). For instance, the pressures on well-being may be especially significant for groups that often experience exclusion and marginalization within post-disaster contexts, such as young people (Peek, 2008) and Indigenous communities (Yumagulova et al., 2019). Informal groups may also adopt varying approaches to well-being reflecting different resources (Whittaker et al., 2015), cultural practices (Yumagulova et al., 2019), and the demands of different types of disaster (Simsa et al., 2019).
Disaster Responses by the Student Volunteer Army
Background
On September 4, 2010, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake occurred 40 km outside Christchurch city in Aotearoa New Zealand, causing significant damage to land, buildings, and infrastructure, but no loss of life. That evening, Sam Johnson, a student from a local university, created a Facebook page to bring together students to help with the earthquake cleanup—the genesis of a group that came to be known as the SVA (for discussion, see Nissen et al., 2021). Over the weeks following the earthquake, the student-led volunteers coordinated an estimated 2,500 people to help clean up streets and residents’ properties. A few months later, on February 22, 2011, an intense aftershock struck close to the Christchurch city center during a weekday lunch hour, killing 185 people, injuring thousands more, and devastating much of the city. The SVA again mobilized, this time bringing together an estimated 13,000 to 15,000 volunteers for a period of 3 weeks. The work generally involved physical labor such as removing liquefaction from residents’ properties and assisting people, particularly those in the most badly affected suburbs.
Following this earthquake response, the SVA has persisted as a group that promotes youth volunteering, including through a student SVA Club (led by a team of students, the “SVA Club Executive”) (for discussion of this organizational structure, see Carlton et al., 2021). While youth volunteering remains the group’s primary aim, a number of other disasters have occurred in the region, and each event has drawn the SVA back into disaster response work. One such response was to the Christchurch mosque terrorist attacks on March 15, 2019, when 51 people were killed and many more injured during Friday prayer, and the murder livestreamed on social media. The terrorist attacks had a devastating impact, especially on local Muslim and migrant communities, and provoked displays of grief across Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. The disaster was completely different in nature to what the SVA had previously faced, as was its response: for the 3 weeks after the event, SVA volunteers provided a driving service for people affected by the attacks, such as to hospitals or funerals, as well as a range of other activities, including coordinating volunteers to “check in” on people and helping organize a vigil (see Carlton et al., 2022).
Research Methods
In this article, we examine the practices that developed within the SVA to support volunteers’ well-being through these disaster responses. We draw on 54 in-depth interviews, conducted between February and June 2020, as part of a wider study examining the long-term legacies of the SVA. Interviews were undertaken with people who were part of the SVA or interacted with it: volunteers involved in the 2010–2011 earthquake mobilizations as core team members or laborers (n = 19), students involved with the SVA Club in the decade since its establishment (n = 16), and people external to the SVA that interacted with the group across its 10 years, including officials in established response agencies, community leaders, journalists, and professionals in businesses or at the university (n = 19). An initial pool of respondents was suggested by SVA founder Sam Johnson, following which a snowball sampling approach was adopted. In taking this approach, we followed a purposeful sampling methodology with an emphasis on the information power of potential interviewees (Malterud et al., 2016), while also seeking out a range of perspectives to develop a rich perspective of the movement over its 10 years (Blee & Taylor, 2002). Participants were contacted via phone, email, and LinkedIn following e-introductions. Of the potential participants we approached, three declined to participate. The interviews were typically between 1 and 2 hr long, and conducted either face-to-face or via Zoom. Participants were asked a range of open-ended questions about their involvement or interactions with the SVA disaster mobilizations, the challenges they encountered, and their reflections on the groups’ strengths, limitations, and potential.
Our analysis in this article focuses on well-being practices related to two disaster responses: the February 22, 2011, earthquake and the March 15, 2019, mosque shootings. These were the two events for which interviewees raised the topic of well-being; while issues of volunteer well-being are likely to have been negotiated in the SVA’s other disaster responses, interviewees did not seem to need to consciously reflect on them to the same degree. The interviewees particularly talked of well-being when they reflected on their learnings, as well as the short- and long-term effects of their disaster response participation on their personal and professional lives. While it was common for interviewees to use the terminology of “well-being” and “mental health,” these issues were also often implicit. As such, our research took an interpretative approach in conceptualizing well-being so as to be attentive to the issues and approaches that interviewees raised as meaningful (Adams et al., 2015). All research procedures had ethics approval, and the interviews were audio-recorded and fully transcribed. Interview transcripts were uploaded into NVivo and the results were subsequently coded for descriptive, topic, and broad analytic insights, with these codes then discussed, synthesized, and refined by the authors. Numbers have been randomly assigned to interviewees to ensure their anonymity; however, where possible we have provided background information to contextualize their response.
There are some important differences to acknowledge between the two responses. For one, the responses centered on two distinct types of disaster, so-called “natural” and “human-made.” The scale of the volunteer responses were also very different, with the 2011 earthquake response involving far more people. The length of time between the disaster response and the interviews also varied, with the data collected nearly a decade after the earthquakes and only a year after the mosque attacks. This difference in temporal “distance” (Gemignani, 2014) meant more earthquake volunteers spoke of assessing their experiences with “the benefit of hindsight” than volunteers involved in the terrorist attacks response. The organizational structure of the SVA also changed between the two responses. For the February 2011 earthquake, the SVA was recently formed and had fluid structures reflective of an emergent or spontaneous group. For the March 2019 response, there was a more established structure within the SVA Club; however, the group retained many elements of an informal crisis volunteer group, in that the people involved in leading the volunteer response to the terrorist attacks had little to no experience with disaster situations (for further discussion, see Carlton et al., 2021, 2022).
Setting the Scene: Volunteer Perspectives on Well-Being During Disaster
In this section, we consider the well-being issues raised by interviewees when reflecting on their involvement volunteering during a disaster. They expressed mixed feelings. The 2011 earthquake response was described by one member of the SVA team as “simultaneously the best and worst three weeks of my life,” explaining “it was fun, it felt like it mattered, it was very social” but also that it was “very exhausting—we were just running on over-burners all the time” (Respondent 32). The overriding memory of another student volunteer was “tired, lucky and being just organised chaos” (Respondent 8), while another reflected it was “a really thrilling thing and I loved being a part of it, but I remember being exhausted” (Respondent 2). A member of the core team likewise explained, “We had some really fun times [but] parts of it were stressful; people were tired and overwhelmed and we were still having quite a lot of aftershocks as well, so people were anxious.” They summarized, “It was a great thing to be part of. I’d happily not go through it again” (Respondent 1).
Being embedded in a disaster environment had a significant impact on volunteers. For the February 2011 earthquake response, some volunteers were conscious that they were relatively “fortunate” in that most students resided close to the university—an “island of solid ground” (Respondent 8) in comparison to other parts of the city—and many students had neither family nor property within the region (also Nissen et al., 2021). Nevertheless, this was not the case for all volunteers; some had been directly affected by the earthquakes, including through loss of people or family homes. Members of the core team had tried to resuscitate a person who had been crushed by a falling building and later died, a “graphic” situation which these volunteers “carried” with them into their disaster response work. Alongside the anxiety that could come with constant aftershocks, interviewees spoke of their devastation seeing the damaged city—via the news, and firsthand as they went into some those areas to assist the response efforts. As well as seeing destroyed homes and neighborhoods, student volunteers directly dealt with traumatized people as they were “often the first point of contact that some of those residents had had” (Respondent 39). These experiences took a toll on the volunteers: as one interviewee reflected, a week into the response “I could feel that people were getting really heavy” (Respondent 33).
The energy required to run the February 2011 volunteer effort put further pressure on the “core” and “wider core” teams of volunteers. Interviewees described the response as a “dense,” “intense,” and “all-consuming” period of their lives; for example, for Respondent 32 the situation was “really, really full-on, high emotion, high energy,” which was echoed by Respondent 7 who reflected that “it was full on; it was busy as hell.” Interviewees spoke of “running on adrenaline” (Respondent 6), being in an environment of “go, go, go, go” (Respondent 40) and putting in “massive, massive days” (Respondent 32). This effort was suggested by one interviewee to be critical to the SVA achieving what it did as a volunteer group: “We could not have completed the innovation and been able to roll things out so quickly if we hadn’t had that commitment and we didn’t have the continuity of staff in the same roles all the way through” (Respondent 43). However, the demands of the volunteer effort also brought stress, exhaustion, and burnout. One interviewee spoke of going “pretty hard” and doing “stupid-hour days” until they had been told to take some time off, following which they “lost all motivation” and did not have the energy to “come back and deal with all the problems” (Respondent 6). These issues could endure beyond the immediate post-disaster recovery phase, with two interviewees mentioning experiences of anxiety and PTSD in the years following the event and a further three noting mental health issues among their peers. One interviewee explained, “I think a lot of people think it was a lot of fun—and to be honest with you, it wasn’t. [. . .] Afterwards I was on sleeping pills to try and get back to a normal routine.” They clarified, “I don’t feel bad about it, it just was” (Respondent 7).
The response to the 2019 mosque terrorist attacks likewise provided distinct challenges for the SVA volunteers. From the outset, the attacks were recognized as “a whole different kettle of fish” to the SVA’s previous mobilizations in being “a crime scene in action” and something which was “deeply personal” (Respondent 22). Within the large SVA Club Executive, Some people were really feeling the emotions of it, some people were in shock still, some people were so busy caring for their friends [. . .] but then there was some people who just were feeling quite removed from it as well. (Respondent 22)
Like the earthquake response, the volunteer effort itself “was exhausting [. . .] I didn’t go to uni for two weeks after March 15 because we were so flat out” (Respondent 22). Yet being able to help at that time was described as “humbling” (Respondent 27). An SVA member who had driven Muslim students to and from funerals and hospitals described it as “life-changing week” and “something that’s quite hard to comprehend unless you actually experience being there” (Respondent 21).
Practices to Support Volunteer Well-Being Through Disaster
In this section, we now turn to consider how volunteer well-being was supported through these responses. Interviewees identified a series of interconnected practices, which we group as “action” (enabling opportunities for people to engage in the act of volunteering); “reflection” (facilitating processes of discussion and debriefing); and “connection” (creating physical space and internal practices to enhance social interactions). As can be seen in Figure 1, these approaches worked to reinforce one another: for example, supportive physical space encouraged greater reflective practice, which in turn encouraged people to continue engaging with the act of volunteering. In addition, both of the SVA’s disaster responses generated and relied on multiple layers of support. Volunteers working directly with affected communities (casual laborers in the earthquake response, and some of the wider SVA Club Executive for the terror attacks) were supported by volunteers who coordinated the response but also sought to mitigate pressures on well-being (the “core team” during the earthquake response, and senior members of the SVA Club Executive during the terror attacks). Then, supporting these volunteers were an array of external individuals and agencies.
Practices to support volunteer well-being through disaster.
Action
In the traumatic aftermath of disaster, the opportunity to engage in the act of volunteering was described by many interviewees as an important means to cope with disaster. Reflecting on the February 2011 earthquake response, a volunteer commented, There’s been a massive issue with PTSD [among my peers]; I think SVA has saved me from that. [. . .] It gave me something . . . it put a silver lining on what could have been an incredibly negative time of my life. (Respondent 12)
The idea of a “silver lining” was reiterated by another member of the earthquake response core team who recognized that being able to volunteer made them “lucky in the sense of we had this opportunity to direct our nervous energy and stuff in a positive way” (Respondent 8). Another interviewee emphasized that “if anyone is ever in that situation questioning whether or not they should [volunteer after a disaster], it’s a no-brainer,” elaborating that this experience “helps you make sense of the world and also brings you down to earth and helps you get through stuff yourself” (Respondent 7).
While some members of the February 2011 response framed their volunteering as taking action to support their own well-being, others additionally viewed their action as supporting the well-being of the community. In part, this community well-being came through the receiving and accepting of assistance, via the physical labor of clearing properties but also the psychosocial support provided when volunteers “go and sit down with an old lady and have a cup of tea with her” (Respondent 6). However, interviewees additionally believed the SVA supported well-being through enabling people within the community to volunteer (anyone could show up and volunteer) and therefore contribute to the post-disaster response. As one member of the core team explained, in a traumatic and stressful disaster situation, “the best thing you could do for someone is give them an opportunity to help someone else—and I felt that was really the role we played” (Respondent 8). Thus, members of the SVA deliberately sought to give people the chance to act: “People would come up to me with these ideas and we’d be like, ‘Yeah, just do them, go for it’” (Respondent 8).
Action following disaster could be empowering, but also placed significant pressures on volunteers. As such, across both disasters, some volunteers took on the role of trying to ensure other volunteers did not burn out or become overwhelmed. Following the mosque attacks, a SVA leader reflected, “it sort of came down to the leadership team to make sure that we bore the lump of the continuing work and that [the rest of the volunteers] went back to uni and didn’t work themselves to exhaustion.” Likewise, in the February 2011 earthquake response, Respondent 40 spoke of “doing the work but also keeping an eye on everybody and making sure everybody kept an eye on themselves to an extent.” This monitoring role was demanding in itself, especially as it was usually supplementary to other commitments. Recognizing these risks, some people external to the SVA spoke of their role during their 2011 response as providing a further layer of support to the core team to enable them to continue their work. Often unsolicited or even unseen, these efforts took a variety of forms, including removing logistical barriers, such as providing office and storage space, equipment, and “services and infrastructure, water, power, internet” (Respondent 5), or bureaucratic obstacles, for instance, enabling permission to access a disaster site (also Nissen et al., 2022). The core team also received advice and shared professional knowledge to help the mobilization. As Respondent 8 summarized, “I just wanted to block them from getting tripped up by any bollocks.”
Also important for volunteer well-being was the decision not to act. Particularly following the mosque attacks, and recognizing that this was “a pretty horrific crime” and that “some people on our Exec were pretty closely impacted” (Respondent 27), the SVA Club leaders were explicit in encouraging members to consider their own well-being before signing up to help with the response: “There were no, sort of, pressures on people to do more than they could do because people have different responsibilities and people responded differently and people were affected by it quite differently” (Respondent 22). As a result, a “couple of pretty dedicated” members of the SVA Club Executive were supported to “sit this one out for the next week and focus on yourself for a while” (Respondent 27). These considerations were also present in the February 2011 earthquake response. For some volunteers, the decision to step back could be in the midst of the disaster response. One interviewee recalled a friend who had helped dig people out of rubble after the February 2011 earthquake, and then volunteered with the SVA for only a few days before deciding, “‘I’m out, I can’t do this, I’ve got to go home’ and that was kind of her tipping point” (Respondent 40). Cognizant of the fact that the volunteers could not continue indefinitely, the SVA core team also decided to set an end date for the group’s cleanup work: “I remember there becoming a point where, purely for self-harm, I offered to the group, ‘Let’s put a date on it’ and we agreed maybe ten more days” (Respondent 33).
Reflection
In addition to action, interviewees spoke of reflective practices that helped support volunteer well-being. For casual volunteers during the earthquake response, this could take the form of informal peer-to-peer support through the act of volunteering: “You just chatted with the people who were standing next to you; it didn’t really matter if you didn’t know them because you got to know them pretty quickly” (Respondent 38). Some interviewees also spoke of having “our own little debriefs at the flat every night [. . .] We’d kind of come back and, I guess, everyone would kind of say if anything went wrong that day” (Respondent 15).
Reflection could also be formal. During the earthquake response, the core team was under intense pressure and came to adopt daily debrief sessions with the support of an external person. Each evening, the group met to develop a “very pragmatic” (Respondent 33) plan for the next day’s activities, yet these meetings often became “so emotionally charged [as] everyone was just exhausted and breaking down” (Respondent 8). To help the process run smoother, an external facilitator was brought in to run the meetings, who implemented emotional check-ins at the start of each meeting. One of the participants recalled strong initial resistance to these practices, because “pretty straight-edge” students “don’t really want to talk about their feelings” to a “hippy” facilitator who “wasn’t wearing shoes” (Respondent 33)—yet the practice continued every night of the 3-week response. Despite check-ins not being “something we would have really given any thought to” (Respondent 1), interviewees spoke of the enormous value that these sessions brought in terms of enabling the volunteers to be “vocally present and emotionally aware” (Respondent 33). The check-ins provided space for volunteers to “get their emotions out and then we could move on to business” (Respondent 8) and offered “the opportunity to unwind, get it off your chest so you could get up in the morning and not still be annoyed” (Respondent 1). One interviewee credited the check-ins with “keeping everyone friends when emotions were running high” (Respondent 1).
Establishing prescribed moments for reflective practice was especially significant as many of the volunteers were themselves processing the impacts of the unfolding disaster. In the 2011 earthquake response, volunteers noted various points when the disaster “got” to volunteers. One student volunteer noted that “nobody had really stopped to process what had just happened. You sort of had that adrenalin rush,” but then a few days into the response someone mentioned a traumatic experience during one of the check-in sessions and “everybody [began] sort of vocalising what had just happened and talking out loud” (Respondent 40). Likewise, another spoke of “going maybe ten days, non-stop, everywhere there was pressure; and yeah, [it] just felt like that was what was needed at the time was for people to just let go of some shit” (Respondent 33).
Check-ins were also adopted following the mosque attacks. Because of the sensitive nature of the event, before the SVA began discussions about how it might respond, members of the SVA Club Executive “one-by-one, went around and shared how we were feeling and how it had affected us, because everyone obviously was so different. [. . .] It was about giving people the platform to share that” (Respondent 22). Following this initial discussion, the group’s processes were more informal, but nevertheless maintained the multi-layered support for volunteers: “We did it very ad hoc, just checking in on people, seeing how they were, making sure they were looking after themselves” (Respondent 22). While it was noted “in hindsight, we probably could have had more formal debriefs” (Respondent 22), volunteers working directly with affected communities considered this informal support network hugely important during such a time. For one interviewee who had driven members of the Muslim community to hospitals and funerals “full time for that full week,” it was reassuring to have their peers “being there and checking up on us and how we’re doing. [. . .] Having the support of everyone else, it makes a big difference.” This support was especially critical because, in carrying out this service, “there was probably quite a lot that I saw and heard that some of the other Exec wouldn’t have had.” Interviewees also noted that they were aware of having access to university counseling services, should they need it.
Besides “check-ins,” interviewees described a process of “checking-out” of volunteering. As the SVA’s earthquake mobilization wound up, the facilitator ran one long debrief session during which members of the core team were encouraged to think about what the movement had brought to them. Volunteers also talked about needing to consciously disengage mentally from the SVA and that period of their lives. One student volunteer from the 2011 response explained they cut all ties with the SVA at the end of the response because they felt “it was never going to be the same as what it was during those times” (Respondent 15). While this volunteer opted to disengage to preserve their positive memories of the earthquake response, other interviewees talked about stepping away for their well-being. For example, Respondent 1 admitted, “to be honest, after 2011, I didn’t really want to talk about it at all, it had been such an all-consuming part of my life.” Respondent 6 was similarly disinclined to continue their association with the SVA: “For the longest time after the earthquake response happened, I refused to have any part of it because I was, like, just absolutely drained.”
Interviewees also noted that debriefing about the experience was not limited to the timeframe of the disaster response. Through support of a lecturer at the university, some members of the earthquake response core team were able to engage in reflective processes as tutors in a university course developed about the response. While the course fulfilled an educational role, it was considered a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” in that it provided space for the volunteers to “lead and facilitate reflective discussions” (Respondent 32). A decade after the event, several interviewees commented that they still reflect on the earthquake mobilizations, in forums ranging from “job interviews” (Respondent 6) to “informally over drinks” (Respondent 15).
Connection
Besides action and reflection, interviewees described proactively trying to create environments, through the deliberate use physical space and cultivation of practices, to foster social connection to support volunteer well-being. Initially, these efforts focused on meeting the practical needs of volunteers to sustain action. In the earthquake response, interviewees reflected that the old saying “An army marches on its stomach” is especially true of students (3 respondents), and that “our offering from day naught, really, was come and volunteer and we’ll give you lunch” (Respondent 13). This emphasis on food took on particular momentum when many external companies, communities, and individuals donated food to the relief efforts—including at one point “a whole busload of baking” (Respondent 8).
Soon, however, meeting the needs of volunteers working directly with affected communities went beyond the pragmatic. Noticing that when the buses of volunteers returned from the disaster sites at the end of each day, “no one wanted to leave and they’d just, like, hang around the carpark” (Respondent 8), the core team began organizing hot food and live entertainment for the volunteers, including concerts with some of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most famous musicians. These evening “celebrations” (Respondent 33) helped address an unease within the core team that volunteers needed something more than a packed lunch to enable them to keep coming back to undertake demanding physical labor day after day: “We had the lunches; we were keeping people safe—so the question then became, ‘What else can we do to make [volunteering with the SVA] cool and fun and good?’” (Respondent 43). Moreover, it was recognized that providing space and compelling reasons to “hang around” provided an opportunity for volunteers to informally “debrief” each day with their peers, given they had been working in devastated parts of the city and with traumatized residents. This space—even if a car park—was considered especially valuable in supporting the well-being and morale of the SVA’s volunteer cohort at a time when other gathering places were closed and many of the volunteers were potentially living in “houses that weren’t in great shape” (Respondent 8).
There were also conscious efforts to create welcoming physical space in the post-disaster environment to support volunteer well-being. In the earthquake response, the SVA’s canvas tent headquarters had couches and hot drinks for volunteers, which fostered an “amazing culture [. . .] a feeling of hope and good and everyone was friendly. There was a very good vibe and I think that’s what they did so well so that students actually wanted to come back” (Respondent 15; see also Nissen et al., 2021). The physical environment of the SVA also played an important role after the mosque attacks. In this case, the space was a small house within the grounds of the university which the group had been gifted a few years earlier. The space bore the imprint of successive generations of SVA Club Executives, with comfortable couches and posters on the walls of past events; thus the significance of this space stemmed not solely from its functionality as an operations center but also from its symbolic value—“it’s cool, I love that space” (Respondent 22) declared one interviewee—where members of the SVA Club Executive could spend time with each other socially. The space took on particular significance over the course of the attacks because several members “were sitting in the SVA office when it happened, so we had a whole group of us locked down in there with the data projector on, just watching everything unfold” (Respondent 22).
Creating a supportive environment was also recognized as necessary for reflective practice among volunteers. In the debrief sessions among the core earthquake team, one interviewee believed it a “breakthrough when someone decided to start providing hot food” considering these sessions occurred among “people who probably hadn’t eaten all day, hadn’t slept in days” (Respondent 8). Food also enabled check-ins among other groups within the SVA. In the earthquake response, a member of the “wider core” team explained the importance of the people in their flat coming together each evening to eat: “We needed to have dinner anyway and it just provided that cohesion [. . .] Listening to each other’s challenges and problems means that you can start to think outside of your role” (Respondent 43). Likewise, with the terrorist attacks response, food constituted both a means of sustenance and an opportunity for communal gathering. Volunteers who had been driving Muslim community members to funerals spoke of their appreciation that “we had someone on the Exec who made us lunch a couple of days so we didn’t have to worry about that, we came back to the office and lunch was already made for us” (Respondent 21). In addition, in the weeks after the attacks, food was able to “foster quite an internally supportive environment,” with members coming together to “cook random things on Friday and [. . .] have a communal lunch” (Respondent 27). These meetings fostered the opportunity for informal debriefing.
Discussion and Conclusion
This article has analyzed 54 interviews to examine how an informal volunteer group negotiated issues of volunteers’ well-being through two disaster responses. Interviewees who responded to the February 2011 earthquake or the March 2019 mosque attacks tended to emphasize the significance of the experience while also acknowledging the significant pressures and challenges that it brought to bear on their well-being. As such, the case of the SVA lends weight to calls to be attentive to well-being issues for informal volunteer groups during disaster response (e.g., Adams, 2007; Twigg & Mosel, 2017). Reflecting Thormar et al. (2010), these pressures for the SVA were twofold, relating to both the trauma of the events and the particular demands associated with organizing and participating in an informal volunteer group.
Notably, especially in the earthquake response, a significant pressure related to disaster management structures themselves. Like many informal crisis volunteer groups (McLennan et al., 2016), the SVA was on the “outside” of disaster response, generating additional pressures of “proving” to official response agencies the group’s responsiveness, adaptability, and legitimacy. While some interviewees suggested this pressure enabled the SVA to achieve what it did, it also contributed to fatigue, stress, and burnout among some volunteers. The pressures faced by SVA earthquake response volunteers is suggestive of the toll that exclusionary practices can have on informal volunteers (also Yumagulova et al., 2019).
Informal crisis volunteer groups are often thought to lack the organizational support and structures perceived to help alleviate psychological distress present in more “formal” disaster response agencies (Thormar et al., 2010; Twigg & Mosel, 2017). Yet across both disasters, members within the SVA were conscious of and proactive about catering to the well-being needs of the group, initiating practices which we have identified as “action,” “reflection” and “connection.” There are strong interrelationships between the practices: action could led to reflection (e.g., through formal and informal check-ins) and connection (e.g., social interactions among volunteers); reflection engendered further action (e.g., talking through their emotional response enabled volunteers to continue to act) and connection (e.g., debriefs helped forge and maintain friendships); and connection underpinned action (e.g., food and positive environments enabled volunteers to keep returning) and contributed to reflection (e.g., hot food ameliorated the debrief sessions). There was also multiple layers of support present, with volunteers working directly with communities supported by a core group of volunteers, who were in turn supported by external parties.
The strong parallels between the practices adopted by volunteers responding to both the earthquake and the terror attacks suggest that participants in informal crisis volunteer groups may adopt similar practices to bolster well-being regardless of the type of disaster they encounter. However, the SVA is only on group, and given the diversity of informal crisis volunteerism (Strandh & Eklund, 2018) there is need for further research across different informal volunteer groups and disaster contexts to identify alternate practices that might be individually and collectively developed. It is also likely that our sampling approach in focusing on volunteers within the group did not encompass those who experienced major burnout or stress responses and actively disengaged, as alluded to in some interviews.
In addition, across both responses, the SVA proved capable of mobilizing support from external individuals and agencies, not least because it was able to leverage the considerable pre-existing networks of its key members and use the extensive positive media coverage to its advantage (Carlton et al., 2022; Nissen et al., 2022). Other informal volunteer groups may lack access to, or be unable to mobilize, these important external supports within disaster contexts, particularly groups which are marginalized during times of “normalcy” (see Yumagulova et al., 2019). From a practical stance, then, the case of the SVA suggests that informal volunteer groups can benefit from a number of externally provided supports to enable them to cater to the well-being of their volunteers during disaster. This may include the provision of practical resources for volunteers such as food and facilities; the sharing of knowledge through positive working relationships with emergency management bodies; support navigating issues of permission and access in the post-disaster context; and assistance of an external—but trusted—facilitator. In addition, there is scope for informal crisis volunteers to be able to access professional counseling services should they need them.
To conclude, our study furthers calls for exploration of the well-being implications of informal crisis volunteer groups (Thormar et al., 2010; Twigg & Mosel, 2017). In particular, there is scope to explore under what conditions practices to support volunteer well-being emerge, how these practices might be similar or different across various forms of informal crisis volunteer organization (e.g., convergence or existing community organizations), various socio-cultural contexts (age, ethnicity, race, socio-economic status, religion), and relationships with official response agencies. Our research suggests that informal crisis volunteers can continue to reflect on their engagement and its impact on well-being long after the disaster phase, pointing to the potential value of longitudinal perspectives that are attentive to how these approaches might evolve through the course of a disaster response and beyond. With the increasing prominence of informal volunteerism in disaster response efforts, the well-being of these volunteers remains an important “gap” that needs further attention.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the research participants for generously contributing their time and reflections to this project. They also thank Emma Hall for her research assistance, and Sam Johnson and the Student Volunteer Army for their support for the project. The comments from the anonymous reviewers were also very beneficial in revising this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a grant from the Marsden Fund, administered by Te Apārangi—The Royal Society of New Zealand on behalf of the Marsden Fund Council (MFP-LIU1801).
