By David Murphy, Red Cross Volunteer
The Red Cross has weathered many storms over the course of its history, but the COVID-19 pandemic brought challenges unlike any in a hundred years. Blood donation centers were shuttered, resources cut off, volunteers and donors off-limits and out of touch. The most basic components of the Red Cross mission – the tools with which to relieve the suffering all around us - were ripped away. How do you reach out to those in need when the act of reaching out is suddenly scary, even dangerous?
When a home fire and other local disasters strike, Red Cross Disaster Action Team volunteers answer the call for help, responding to the scene of a disaster to provide comfort, guidance, and financial assistance to help those impacted by disaster meet immediate needs for food, clothing, and shelter.
“We were willing to go out, but we had no understanding of what was going on,” says Riksum Kazi. Kazi is a Disaster Action Team program leader for New Jersey who has spent nearly a decade as a volunteer, most of it responding out of the northern part of the state. “We were trying to be as safe as humanly possible. But at no time did we change our posture to: we're not going to go out to help.”
For Red Cross leaders and volunteers, the mission didn’t change, but the methods by which it had traditionally been accomplished had to be reimagined – quickly. At a fire scene for example, “We have a lot of people milling around…people come toward us for assistance. How to do that while social distancing was difficult.”
As the pandemic spread, Red Cross disaster services pivoted to remote casework and trained volunteers in delivering services in new ways to protect the safety of clients and volunteers. Ted Smith was at the forefront of that effort. As a disaster workforce engagement manager, his job is to help bring volunteers on board and make sure they get the training they need.
“We did a lot in terms of enabling people to do things remotely that they were used to doing in person,” he says. In-person visits shrank, video chats and phone calls increased. Training programs went from 60 to 70 percent in-person, to almost entirely virtual. With concerns about health and safety driving decision-making, new protocols were drawn for the increasingly rare instances where in-person visits were needed.
Technology played an increasingly important role in bringing people together. “We helped the entire region adapt the technology,” Smith recalls. For example, “we had a large response where we were preparing comfort kits for health care workers who were working 24/7 - and then when the vaccine became available, we staffed vaccination centers with volunteers to help welcome and guide people prior to vaccination. That was in addition to everything else that we were already doing for the Red Cross.”
“The balance was that we were serving our clients while minimizing our exposure,” Kazi says. “We wanted to continue the mission, but we wanted to make sure we were safe.” Even so, the number of volunteers dwindled.
“We were losing volunteers for fear of getting sick,” Smith remembers. “Right before the pandemic, we had 900 volunteers. During the pandemic, we dropped to 600 and a lot of those were inactive. People were worried.” But, he says, those that stayed found a new sense of urgency and purpose. 2021 marked one of the country’s most active years for severe weather.
As thousands of people found themselves at the mercy of natural disaster, the Red Cross launched a new major relief effort every 11 days to provide refuge, food and care. In New Jersey, some of the largest responses were for those impacted by heavy rains from Tropical Storm Henri and the massive flooding that swamped the state thanks to Hurricane Ida last September.
“Naturally, we took a look at a number of positions we would normally have in-person at these disasters and tried to figure out how we could do that remotely. Instead of sending 100 volunteers, we would send 20 and keep the other 80 remote. But there were a lot of people willing to take the risk - people said ``if this needs to be done, I'll do it.’” In fact, Smith says, “Many of our volunteers are older - the same people that needed to be more conscientious. The fact that many of them said ‘nope, we want to go’ that was really heartwarming.”
Throughout the pandemic, Red Cross volunteers not only continued their regular duties but added some new ones as well – from supporting quarantine shelters to staffing vaccination centers, like the mega center that was set up at the Meadowlands. Dozens of Red Cross volunteers staffed the center daily, as well as others like it.
Smith says he was encouraged by the number of people willing to pitch in and learn on the fly. “It was great to see people saying, ‘Hey this isn’t what I signed up for’,” he says. “’But it’s something that needs to be done and I’m willing to do it.’”
As the pandemic moves into its third year, the Red Cross is constantly refining the way it accomplishes its mission, but the mission itself never changes. For volunteers, some aspects of the job, like in-person training, will never go back to the way it was, but the Red Cross is working to meet those challenges, and there is a steady stream of new volunteers are eager to meet them as well.
As Kazi describes it, the pandemic hasn’t lessened the desire to be present for those in need. If anything, it’s made it stronger. “We want to be able to make a difference when people are having the worst day of their lives,” he says. “That’s what drives us.”