How is your membership doing?
Hello firefighters, I hope all of you had a great holiday season and your New Year has started well.
As I was getting ready to write this article, I kept thinking about a subject that is talked and written about often, yet we all need to keep working hard on it:
How is your membership doing?
As I talk with firefighters throughout the state, a lot of them say their departments are still struggling with recruitment and retention. Nothing new, right? Is this going to get better? I find that hard to believe unless we all are in on this together.
First, I would like to ask, “Are you as a department doing enough?” As each year goes by, the active members gain another year toward their end-of-service. If you are not doing enough to stay on pace with memberships, or are already short on members (like my department), who will take it on? Do you have someone within the department who has enthusiasm and a drive to put effort into recruiting? We cannot wait until it’s too late; you owe it to the community that you serve to keep your staffing levels up.
Do you have the population to reach/recruit? Maybe not. Then it’s up to the leadership, along with help from its members, to brainstorm other options to help make operations work. (For instance, an idea our department has implemented is adding people working in town who are members on other departments, plus some of our retired members, to assist with weekday calls. This has proven to be really effective, especially when our regular membership is short due to out-of-town employment.) Auto Aid can be implemented, especially if your department has low membership numbers. Mutual Aid has been used effectively for quite some time. Hopefully you have good relationships with your surrounding departments, and you do not follow the old mentality of “we can handle this by ourselves” (and if you still do, work on changing that).
Options for recruiting and retaining members may include implementing incentives, such as members earning extra pay for making higher percentage marks for calls/training/community events; and/or offering supplemental insurance. You may have found that other incentives have worked really well within your department; it’s good to keep sharing these ideas with each other, so we can support one another in this continuing area of challenge. Obviously, these may come with additional financial costs to your departments. So, ongoing communication with local officials is critical in maintaining good working relationships to help navigate through this.
Call volume is up all over the state. If your calls have gone down over the past years, you are one of the lucky ones, but that doesn’t mean you should stop reaching out for new and more members. If you are short-handed, you put strain on your members and their families. Just like it takes a team to manage fire, rescue scenes, and recruitment, it also takes teamwork to help with families. The days of firefighters leaving for calls, then hanging around the station for a long time afterwards while their spouses handled the busyness at home on their own, are probably pretty much gone.
Once again, I encourage department leadership and members, along with city officials, to continue the difficult, but crucial tasks of recruiting and retaining members. You can search the MSFDA www.msfda.org and search Fire Hire, National Volunteer Fire Council www.nvfc.org for more information on recruitment and retention.
Stay safe my fellow firefighters.
Dale Grochow,
MSFDA President