In the summer of 2023, the Bush Creek East wildfire was raging through the Shuswap region of British Columbia. Over 3,000 properties were under evacuation orders. The BC Wildfire Service had crews on the ground, helicopters in the air, and a carefully coordinated plan for fighting the blaze. And then the plan fell apart – not because of the fire, but because of spontaneous volunteers.
Residents who had refused to leave, or who had returned against orders, began confronting RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) at highway checkpoints. Protesters blocked access routes. Reports emerged of people removing sprinklers that had been placed to protect a wooden bridge. Finally, the BC Wildfire Service (BCWS) temporarily pulled its crews out of the area, stating publicly that “the environment is unsafe for BCWS operations.”
Sit with that. Professional firefighters stood down because the people they were trying to protect had made it impossible for them to do their jobs.
Now hold this alongside that story: every single person who stayed behind, who blocked the checkpoints, who pulled out those sprinklers, every one of them believed they were helping.
Sound familiar?
If you’ve been working with volunteers for any length of time, you’ve almost certainly had spontaneous volunteers in your organisation. The person who decides to reorganise the storage room without asking anyone. The one who sends their own email to your client list because they thought it would be helpful. The one who shows up on a day they weren’t scheduled, because there was a need and they wanted to help.
The scale is wildly different. But the underlying desire: “I see a need, I want to help, and the official process is too slow or too complicated, so I’m just going to do it” is identical.
Researchers in emergency management call people who self-deploy in disasters Spontaneous Unaffiliated Volunteers. And there’s a lot of research on them, because they show up at every single major disaster, in every country, without fail.
It’s the “on-demand” impulse.
We live in a world where “ease” has become the norm. You can order dinner, download a movie, or transfer money in the time it takes to read this paragraph. That has rewired people’s expectations. When they encounter processes that require waiting or effort, many people just go around them.
In lower-stakes contexts this shows up as the volunteer who skips training because they’re in a hurry to get started. When the stakes are high – a wildfire bearing down on your community – it shows up as someone deciding that their own judgement, right now, matters more than the coordinated response that professionals have spent years preparing for.
Research on spontaneous volunteers during disasters suggest that the more chaotic and uncoordinated an official response appears to be, the more people will self-deploy. The system’s apparent dysfunction becomes the justification for avoiding it altogether.
This matters, regardless of your mission, because it makes prospective volunteers wonder if the delay is worth it. Or is it just a barrier in their eyes?
There is a cost to going it alone.
Back in the Shuswap, when the professional crews stood down, homes burned that might have been saved. In the 2021 White Rock Lake fire near Monte Lake, when residents who had ignored evacuation orders found themselves trapped, the BC Wildfire Incident Commander said publicly that his staff had been put “at tremendous risk in the path of the fire” to get them out. Resources that should have been spent fighting the fire were redirected to rescuing people who had, with the best intentions, made the situation worse.
This is the hard truth about spontaneous volunteers: they consume resources, divert attention, and can actively undermine the efforts of the people who are trained, prepared, and positioned to do the work effectively. Good intentions are not the same as good outcomes!
The lesson emergency management learned.
Effective emergency management organisations have quit trying to simply stop spontaneous volunteers. They’ve started designing for them instead.
You can’t eliminate the impulse to help. What you can do is channel it. That means having pre-designed roles for spontaneous volunteers, just-in-time training that can be delivered in minutes rather than weeks, and clear communication about what help is actually needed and how to provide it safely.
The research suggests this, too: when disaster response feels organised and accessible, fewer people self-deploy. When there’s an obvious, low-friction way to help that’s sanctioned and supported, most people will choose it over going rogue.
Think about it. If your onboarding process takes three weeks and involves four forms, a reference check, and a mandatory full-day training before someone can help serve food, you should not be surprised when people just show up and start serving – or don’t show up at all.
So, what can you do about it?
Start by asking what your onboarding looks like to a complete stranger. Not from the inside, where you know all the reasons each step exists. From the outside, where all they can see is the hassle.
Then look at your roles and identify which ones genuinely require the full process, and which ones could be done faster. Certainly, not every role can or should be simplified. But they don’t all need a huge amount of preparation either, and treating them the same is a choice that will cost you volunteers.
Be light-touch for lower-risk, lower-complexity tasks. Make it easy to get started. And make sure that people who come in through that way are welcomed, supported, and pointed toward deeper involvement if they’re interested.
Because here’s the other thing the emergency management research tells us: spontaneous volunteers who have a good experience, and who feel that their contribution was valued and well-used, are significantly more likely to join an organisation and come back in a more structured capacity. The person who showed up wanting to help immediately, and found a way to do that, is your best possible prospect for a long-term volunteer.
The impulse to help is an asset. Don’t extinguish it. Give it somewhere useful to go, before it finds its own way there.
