Following the trio of storms that impacted the United States during the 2017 hurricane season, a flood of individuals looking to help contacted National VOAD to volunteer in Puerto Rico, Texas, Florida, and the US Virgin Islands. This wave of goodwill overwhelmed our systems as well as our members’ ability to deploy unaffiliated volunteers. Seeing a gap in current tech offerings in the disaster field, National VOAD set out to create a system to manage not only volunteers, but many other aspects of the disaster cycle that saw serious problems during the 2017 hurricane season as well.
That being said, National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (National VOAD) is pleased to announce the deployment of the Disaster Agencies Response Technology (DART) Volunteer Management module in support of our member organizations responding to Hurricane Florence.
The Volunteer Management module of DART is part of our community approach to disaster. Enabling National VOAD members to harness the public’s desire to help those in need is an impactful resource we are excited to share. This system allows individuals or groups to offer their assistance in a highly effective and organized manner by identifying their skills, availability, licensure, and location. Additionally, since many roles in disaster operations require background checks, this system provides access to National VOAD partner Verified Volunteers, who offer portable background checks which then become part of the volunteer’s profile.
Privacy and security of information is always important, but especially when it comes to volunteer management. In order to safeguard personal information, only approved representatives from National VOAD agencies will have access to the system. National VOAD will grant other agency staff access to the system on a case-by-case basis.
Many volunteers have already come forward to assist in just the last 24 hours. We encourage those who want to help current response efforts to go to the following sites to register. Please feel free to share these links, as well as the DART website, within your trusted networks. We were prepared to launch the system in 5 states for the recent response to Hurricane Florence, but only deployed in North Carolina based on need.
North Carolina VOAD: https://dart-ncvolunteer.communityos.org/
National VOAD would like to thank our partners Visionlink Disaster Technologies and Verified Volunteers for their continued technological support as we look forward to launching more modules of the DART system.
For questions please contact: [email protected].