The future of 'non-traditional' emergency volunteering: what will it look like and how can it work?

The future landscape of emergency volunteering and volunteer management in Australia is not going to be the same as the landscape of the past.Overlapping and interacting developments taking place both within the emergency management sector and external to it are likely to lead to forms of volunteering, and volunteer management and engagement, that are 'non-traditional' for the established emergency management sector becoming much more prominent in the future alongside more traditional emergency management volunteering. This paper considers the questions of what this non-traditional volunteering is likely to look like in the future and how EMOs can successfully engage with it. It outlines seven types of non-traditional emergency volunteering that are likely to feature more prominently in the future ('what will it look like?'). It then considers how EMOs can engage with it. It suggests in particular that the idea of 'coproduction' is a powerful way for EMOs to think about engagement with non-traditional volunteers that is aligned to a resilience-based approach in emergency management. It illustrates how coproduction can work, and the utility of the concept in this area, using the example of a community-led bushfire preparedness project in Victoria, Be Ready Warrandyte.