The power of volunteers (Lesson 6)

I am getting very tired of hearing the misrepresentations some people have about the Red Cross. Last night on MSNBC a woman was complaining that she had not seen the Red Cross in her neighborhood. I’m sitting there as exhausted as a whipped dog from nearly three straight days of intensive case management and the Red Cross is being criticized.

What people do not understand is that the Red Cross receives no government money. Its paid staff is miniscule. We have two paid staff at our office. No secretary. The program is run by volunteers. Sometimes we know what we are doing; sometimes we do not. But we try. I do not know how many volunteers are working at Red Cross now but they must be way over 100,000. Who manages the volunteers, sets their schedule, screens them, hugs them when they feel overwhelmed, give them encouragement? Volunteers. The paid staff are wonderful people but they have important administrative stuff to do (find shelters, authorize credit cards, deal with the pointy-heads in DC, etc). Red Cross is amazing because it’s life blood in a great crisis is given by volunteers.

I took a significant amount of time yesterday afternoon helping a local minister’s wife who is working with an extended family of eleven. What a wonderful person who is a determined advocate for these five households. Like most other people, I don’t think she arrived understanding what the Red Cross can and cannot do. So we talked about her families and about the resources we can make available to them in our community. It’s possible that these families have already registered with the Red Cross elsewhere. That limits us in what we can do. Even so, they are settling here and we want to do all we can.

So the next time you call the Red Cross for information and get a slightly different answer the second time, think “different volunteer.” Of if your house is ruined in a community of 750,000, don’t get too upset that there is no Red Cross truck with coffee on your street. (Yes, I understand that people deserve to be angry and upset with the tragic consequences they face.)