The association has been working very hard to plan a number of very exciting pro-active campaigns and projects in order to increase the breadth of our members services.
One issue that we regularly face is a lack of real life “stories” to help explain the motives, challenges and rewards of our amazing volunteers. So many of our most important messages revolve around the enormous value emergency service volunteers contribute and why they do it. Often, it is clear that a personal, real-life story would explain issues far better than clinical or hypothetical descriptions but we simply haven’t had the resources to collect them, until now.
After a fair bit of planning and development, we’ve decided to run a series of campaigns to try to collect stories, memories and photos from our diverse membership to help deliver particular messages to particular groups of stakeholders.
The first “demographic” (see, clinical words are awful) we would love to hear from are women who have, or currently are, volunteers in Bush Fire Brigades or support roles.
The idea is to develop a bit of a library of “stories” from different volunteers that we can deploy when it would help explain something to a stakeholder. We will not use any identifying information you share with us without first making sure you are 100% comfortable and will always take care to capture the essence of what you tell us to your satisfaction.
So if you think you might be interested, please send an email to [email protected]. Leah will answer any questions you might have and if you would like to go ahead, collect and collate any photos you might have then help write your “story” for your review and approval before we send it anywhere. If you don’t like what we create or change your mind, just let us know and we will tear it up. Easy – and perhaps a really helpful way to get a keepsake for your family too!
We will be calling for stories from other emergency services volunteers in the coming weeks, so please keep an eye out and join in when appropriate.
Thanks for helping us help you!
