Students vs. The Machine: Lessons Learned in the Student Community following the Christchurch Earthquakes
By Sam Johnson
When massive earthquakes hit Christchurch, New Zealand in February 2011, university students wanted to help in the clean-up. But established first response agencies were wary of these young volunteers and too harried to work with them, so they turned them away. Sam Johnson, a student leader, would not take no for an answer. He turned to Facebook and put out a call to his friends. Within hours he had recruited both a team of workers and enough loaned equipment to go out and simply start “mucking out.” Over the next several days, his social network spread the word and hundreds, then thousands of students stepped forward.
They called themselves the Student Volunteer Army (SVA) and eventually fielded 9,000 volunteers, earning the respect and support of the local authorities along the way. SVA continues its work today, as the Christchurch area experiences aftershocks and further quakes even now. Because of the media attention SVA received, they were invited to Japan after the tsunami to work with a like-minded team of students and Johnson recently returned from presenting on the role of Youth in Disaster at the World Summit for Youth Volunteering in Colombia, South America.
In this article, Johnson shares his experience of being at the centre of the growing emergency response momentum and how he had to learn “volunteer management” instantly. He describes how he used the tools of social media and how others can connect to young people through online networks. He explains his strong vision for “the positive change that can occur if technology at our fingertips is harnessed by Gen-Y to build stronger community relationships.”
Introduction to Our Team
In September 2010 I was an undergraduate student reading law and political science at the University of Canterbury. Now, in 2012, together with a close group of my friends, we are the founders of the Student Volunteer Army (http://www.facebook.com/StudentVolunteerArmy) and the Volunteer Army Foundation. Jade Rutherford, Chris Duncan, Gina Scandrett, Thomas Young, Sam Gifford and I worked together with countless other socially conscious young people to help communities by organising volunteering in response to the earthquakes in Christchurch.
At heart we are a group of young people who care about our city, and who were prepared to stand up and do what we felt was right after a dramatic and terrifying natural disaster.
The Earthquakes and Formal Emergency Response
At 4.31am on September 4, 2010, thousands of people’s lives dramatically changed when a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck Christchurch, the largest city in the south island of New Zealand. Since that moment they have failed to cease; Christchurch has suffered over 7500 earthquakes and aftershocks since September 2010. We have had a major seismic event every two to three months, complete with incomprehensible aftershock sequences which continue to erode the confidence we have in the land beneath our feet. In fact, as I sat to write this article, another sizeable aftershock hit sending glassware flying, heightening nerves and unsettling communities -- again and again.
The most significant damage was caused on February 22, 2011, when 182 people lost their lives, homes were destroyed, and the central business district (CBD) was cordoned off for 12 months due to severe destruction.
Emergency management in New Zealand is coordinated and staffed primarily through the local government. An emergency operations centre is established, and a swift response set in motion.
My immediate assumption after the first major earthquake was that local government would also coordinate the volunteer response to support communities in need. How wrong I was. I rang and offered to my assistance to the Civil Defence and, after a lengthy phone interview establishing I have no ‘skills’ to offer, I was advised that this was a situation for ‘experts’ and that it was best to remain at home and keep checking on my neighbours. That was not a response I could accept.
Using the ‘Tools in Our Pockets’
I was amazed at the level of activity on social media sites immediately following the earthquakes. After each quake and aftershock, countless people began to share their real life, real-time experiences to Facebook and other social media outlets. Very quickly self-journalism rivalled the mainstream media. The common topic was the liquefaction process which created thousands of tonnes of silt that literally choked half of Christchurch. Immediately following the earthquakes I was invited to to attend three ‘earthquake after parties’ on Facebook, and also enticed to buy a t-shirt reading ‘I survived the Christchurch earthquakes’.
Given the antisocial behaviour that is commonly attributed to students in New Zealand, I decided it would be a wise move to attempt to direct this energy towards something positive. Initially, I started a Facebook event called the ‘Student Volunteer Base for Earthquake Clean up.’ I invited 200 friends to the event and asked them to invite their friends. The viral campaign began! The Facebook page was used as the primary information source to communicate and coordinate residents, students and resources to areas most in need.
On the morning of February 22, the day the large earthquake hit, we had launched our new Facebook page and dubbed our effort the Student Volunteer Army (SVA). The SVA started with very few followers but strong future ambitions. As the crisis grew, our team members encouraged their friends to like the SVA page, post the event on other people's walls, and participate in person to support our city.
Three weeks after the February earthquake. our Facebook page increased in ‘likes’ by 47,157%, up to nearly 27,000, and our ‘updates’ were viewed a total of 10.6 million times (see the graph below). For a group of young students, this type of social media influence was unprecedented in New Zealand, an achievement we reached only through hard work and by learning ‘on-the-job’.
We found that the biggest benefit of using Facebook as our means of communication was its instantaneous nature – we could make updates and get information out to thousands of people whenever we wanted. Our system worked by posting each evening with the plans for the next day. This meant that our volunteers knew to check our Facebook page at 8 pm each night for details about the following day. It also meant that they could ask questions and, as the page was constantly managed, get an answer very quickly. The other benefit of this system was the ability for volunteers to interact with one another, telling stories from their experiences which helped to maintain enthusiasm. Beyond this, as anyone could view and post on the page, people from all over New Zealand and internationally could post messages of support and encouragement. This built a sense of cohesion, support, and energy which I believe greatly helped us achieve.
How It Worked
The Facebook page was leveraged to communicate with the volunteers. As just noted, every night at 8 p.m. we would update the page with the information on the coming days volunteering. Volunteers would be given the time and location of where to meet, information on what to bring and what to wear, and were also surveyed about their enjoyment of the day before. One of the greatest challenges we faced was ensuring students not only volunteered for one day, but sufficiently enjoyed the experience to want to bring their friends along for a second day. The organisation was built on a team approach.
At the peak of our operations in February 2011, over 1800 volunteers were being coordinated, fed and watered each day – all very organically. We trained our team leaders to use their common sense, prioritise safety, and ensure that the volunteers enjoyed themselves. Most importantly, we gave individuals responsibility and trusted them to make the right decision, and we accepted that this wouldn’t always happen. We would encourage young people to identify needs and take responsibility for an area of their interest. Working organically and establishing new teams for different purposes (equipment, funding, welfare, food, logistics).
Each morning, volunteers would scan their student ID or driver’s license to register, rather than pen and paper, and were dispatched and relocated via text message through mobile management software, Geoop.com, as the operation grew. At the highest point, 1800 volunteers were being coordinated to various areas.
While the initial priority was the cosmetic clean-up, the impact on community mental health and wellbeing was phenomenal. The physical volunteering helped the grieving process, and allowed individuals to feel that were contributing to the recovery of the city. Each day volunteers were encouraged not only to focus on manual labour, but to spend time listening and talking to residents, strengthening intergenerational connection and recreating physical, not only virtual, communities.
At the very core, Student Volunteer Army is a platform that utilises a pattern of communication to discover who needs help, and who wants to help, together with the flexibility to do whatever is needed to help those people.
The SVA worked very closely with hundreds of farmers from neighbouring regions. Named the ‘Farmy Army’, the farmers brought a strong practical, common sense, no-nonsense approach to volunteering. John Hartnell, the generalissimo of the Farmy Army described the response accurately: “We did what comes natural to most Kiwis and that’s to head to where help is needed.”
One of the benefits of social media is the ability for long-distance communication, and the support we received from fellow New Zealanders and other nationals was incredible. Two of my personal favourites among comments we received on our Facebook site are:
We had a 'dress as your hero' day at school this week, and among the children dressed as police officers, fire fighters, rugby players and batman, there was a collection of 5 year olds wearing their gumboots and carrying spades, dressed as the Student Volunteer Army... you guys are fantastic! – Carolyn Gregg, June 18, 2011
Just wanted to let you know, we had a man stand up at church on Sunday, who hasn't come before and he said he was really struggling after the earthquake and he prayed for help and the student army turned up and he said he sat there watching you work and that it was like you were angels and it bought a tear to his eye, he was so grateful and wanted to extend a big thank you and he doesn't know how he would have done it without you....
– Ruby Knight, March 8, 2011
These are the reactions and the support which made all of the long hours achievable, and the fact that New Zealand as a whole country was trusting in a group of students and other young people to bring hope to those in need made it all worthwhile.
How We Dealt with the Bureaucracy of the ‘Machine’
It was sheer persistence, compromise and cooperation – and occasional blind disregard for ‘the rules’ – that ensured that SVA, and many other groups in Christchurch operated. Breaking into the bureaucracy for many organisations is always the greatest challenge, and it certainly took time to alter the attitude of officials towards the power of volunteerism and community engagement.
I have publically expressed my disappointment in the Civil Defence Response around its volunteer management, which John Hartnell and I agree as being a “healthy disrespect of those who tell you what you can’t do in the face of common sense.” The entire volunteer operation was on the brink of evaporation because the local government and New Zealand Army were deeply concerned about the perceived associated health, safety and liability issues. This is the area which is of most contention, and requires serious debate; in a heartbeat over 100,000 hours of organised volunteering would have been quashed!
While New Zealand’s Accident Compensation Scheme limits ambulance chasing lawyers and private law suits, we appointed all liability and risk to the individual volunteer, which each person acknowledged when registering and receiving a volunteer task from SVA.
We were advised of the importance of recording where volunteers were placed, contact information for each volunteer, and any medical health issues. We accepted these and other rules of operation to mitigate the liability from local government and to ensure we were doing everything reasonable to support the wellbeing of the volunteers. But we found existing processes for managing spontaneous volunteers to be stagnant and irrelevant to our generation’s impatient ways. Whether it was the lines of communication, the registering of volunteering, tracking of volunteers, mapping or reporting systems, we saw the systems in the manuals as outdated. The tools in our pockets – cell phones, Google maps, Facebook, Twitter and everything in between – were the key to our success,, yet there was staunch resistance from those in authority to letting common sense trump bureaucracyLessons Learned about Gen-Y Volunteers
We learnt a lot over the time we spent running the Student Volunteer Army, and these are some of the lessons we want to pass on so that other volunteer groups do not make the same mistakes as we did.
We found that:
1. Students need a leader at each level of the organisation. Any volunteering needs leadership, but every single leader is as important as the next. Volunteers all want to help but the average person is not interested in being the one in charge. We always attempted to appoint a leader of the smallest group of people to break any friction that can exist when someone is self-appointed in charge of other people. The leader didn’t necessarily have to do much above directing when it was time for that team to move to a new property, but it was vital for leadership to minimise wasted time.
2. Students work effectively in large teams. The decision had to be made at the beginning whether we would send 5 students into a property for half a day, or send 15 students into a property for half an hour. While the number of people varied from property to property depending on the access space and equipment available, many hands make light work. The work was hideous, and there was nothing glamorous about shovelling thousands of tonnes of endless silt from house after house after house. The trick was making it simple, and make it social; large teams problem solve better, and get work done faster, boosting moral.
3. Student need instant gratification; they like to see themselves making a difference. This was essential in maintaining motivation and enthusiasm, and ties into large scale team work. Clearing a property with 3 or 4 people would have been depressing. You would dig all day, and still make no substantial progress. With team work, we powered through properties which allowed students to see themselves making a difference to not just a single property but to an entire suburb.
4. Students need feeding. The amount of time different volunteers would commit naturally hinged on their energy levels. With the amount of work that was being completed and the effort that was required, we felt it was the least we could do to repay them to provide them with food and drinks. Feeding up to 1000 people each day was the most complex element of this entire operation as we had to blindly guess at the number of volunteers we were expecting to feed. The challenge in the end wasn’t paying for the food or preparing it, but finding enough food in the supermarkets!
Similarly we discovered the things that student volunteers are not interested in or not particularly good at. Student volunteers:
1. Are not good at logistics, nor are they interested in them. We tried our level best to make things very simple so people didn’t have to think about anything but the task at hand.
2. Are not free labourers. The work which volunteers undertook was to help individual households out of the situation that they were in caused by the earthquake. Anything above this, we discovered, lead to protest and resentment. There was a direct correlation between the cause they were volunteering for and the task they were actually completing. If the two elements were not aligned volunteers, felt exploited and used which dissolved any enthusiasm they may have had in volunteering. For example, there was resentment over handing out flyers with emergency information on it, digging holes to check the status of sewer pipes, or especially clearing garden waste that was not created by the earthquake. This comes down to the difference between volunteer work, and work that one should be employed to do.
Japan
When the huge tsunami attacked Japan in mid 2011, SVA was invited by Global DIRT (Disaster Immediate Response Team, established from the United States) to travel there as advisors. Jason Pemberton and I spent two weeks in Japan, first working with groups of students in Tokyo and then going to northern Japan near Ishinomaki, where we physically volunteered with different organisations each day in the disaster zone. Our trip was publicized back home, too, with articles such as ‘Japan to use Christchurch volunteer model’.
We placed only one condition on our trip to Japan: that we would work with students and student communities only. We were not fixated on leveraging our ‘experience’ onto already burdened authorities; we wished for students to establish a volunteering system of the own, and to support those most in need by assisting with the simple tasks. While Japan was dramatically different from New Zealand, with cultural differences playing a major role, what was successful was the support our small group of volunteers were able to offer quite spontaneously to a local community. Wakana Fujiti used the lessons we learned in New Zealand to build a strong team of university students from Waseda University.
The SVA team now understand how disaster volunteering operates in Japan, they use social media to promote volunteering causes and have travelled back to Ishinamaki to support a local community. While the nuclear crisis curbed the operation’s success in our eyes, the more organic approach to volunteering continues to support the community there with students offering their assistance, doing anything that is necessary of them. Most importantly, they are prepared to organise a volunteer force in the future and have an established relationship with volunteer centres.
Where to Next?
There is a clear desire in our community to ingrain a culture of volunteering amongst young people in New Zealand. We have established the Volunteer Army Foundation whose purpose is to further the opportunities for young people to be engaged in volunteering and to build on the lessons learned and opportunities realised from the volunteer response to the Christchurch earthquakes and other disaster related experiences.
We are creating a version of RockCorps in New Zealand. Focused on a give-and-get-back philosophy, the program seeks to broaden horizons, and empower youth with event management and leadership skills by utilising social events as a reward for selfless behaviour and community contribution. It also hopes to institutionalise the momentum and desire to volunteer, and importantly create a positive physical and emotional connection between Generation Y and a dramatically changing city.
Schools, churches, community groups, individuals and corporations are welcomed to organise and participate in a volunteer programme that we will guide. SVA will oversee its development, essentially clearing the roadblocks to make it happen. We incentivise the volunteering by producing a Rock Concert to which every volunteer receives a ticket. The great irony in this project is that the reward a volunteer gets from their ‘first time’ service is not the concert at the end. It’s the process along the way, and the fulfilment deep inside.
Together with RockCorps, we're also focused on developing and sharing our knowledge of disaster youth volunteering. To this end Jason Pemberton and I travelled to Colombia, South America to speak at the Partners of America World Summit for Youth Volunteering in late 2011. In Colombia we shared our experience of youth volunteering and most importantly the vital role that younger generations can play in the response and recovery to a disaster. What was evident from the Summit was the lack of exploratory planning in many counties to engage and utilise the youth resource that is available, the technology at their fingertips, and the community’s willingness to support authorities through a disaster.
Conclusion
Grassroots, self-coordinated disaster response is in perfect alignment with the New Zealand culture and instinctive nature to ‘get the job done.’ This attitude, combined with Gen Y’s skills, allowed us to organise, coordinate and dispatch volunteers through simple self-managed systems quicker than officials know which room to have a meeting in.The student response has been internationally recognised by politicians, academics, celebrities and disaster experts for utilizing the desire to volunteer from the community. I was privileged to meet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her visit to Christchurch. She spoke of our operation in the most appropriate way, applauding our team for not being fixated on inventing a product to market or sell; rather, for utilising the technology at our fingertips and strong practical leadership to affect positive social change and build stronger community relationships.
We hope this base concept and lessons learned can be used in the future to help inspire and empower youth leadership, creativity, organic processes, and to encourage calculated risk taking by officials. Student Volunteer Army had the ability to do whatever was required, the organic processes to complete the impossible, and the willingness to break all the rules for the greater good.
When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
It’s incredible what can happen if you understand but destroy bureaucracy and replace it with concerted action focused leadership.
He aha te kai ō te rangatira? He Kōrero, he kōrero, he kōrero.. The translation of this Maori saying is: “What is the food of the leader? It is knowledge. It is communication.”
Kia Kaha,
Sam Johnson
