Blue Skies and Grey: Establishing Resilient Communities, Meeting the Moment during Disaster
Volunteering encompasses a wide range of activities, from mentoring students and serving on nonprofit boards to facilitating community clean-ups. Among these, disaster relief emerges as a distinct and critical category. In moments of acute crisis, including floods, wildfires, hurricanes or even pandemics, the established practices and systems for Volunteer Management are stress-tested and subjected to their most rigorous challenges.
These challenges reveal, in concentrated form, the same difficulties Volunteer Leaders encounter in our daily work: sustaining culture, managing resources, supporting volunteers and adapting to change. While most organizations will never face the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the devastation of the California Wildfires, the lessons forged in crisis prove transferable for community programs, guiding everyday operations and enhancing preparation for unforeseen challenges.
To better understand what those lessons look like in practice, I spoke with three leaders whose careers have been forged in disaster response:
- Mike Whitehead, National Disaster Planning Manager for the American Red Cross;
- Marcus Coleman, Vice President of Community Resilience Strategy at United Way Worldwide; and
- Kevin King, Executive Director of Mennonite Disaster Service.
Their experiences reveal patterns that apply in every setting, principles of culture, training, recognition, collaboration and care that can strengthen volunteer programs in both blue skies and grey.
Prioritize Culture Before Action
Volunteer programs are constructed upon expectations; in disaster relief, these expectations must prioritize empathy, presence and respect above all else. In grey skies, when systems strain and urgency overshadows procedure, it is culture that binds people together. More than completing assignments, effective volunteers operate in environments that emphasize humility and adaptability, where small gestures carry weight and where creativity and attentive listening are central to engagement.
King underscores how even small gestures matter, noting that a volunteer who kneels to meet someone at eye level communicates humility in ways that no checklist could. For King, the most effective volunteers cultivate a mindset of “what if” rather than “what is,” preparing themselves to adapt when circumstances change.
Create Entry Points for All
Whitehead recalls mothers bringing their teenage daughters to mop shelter floors during a disaster deployment. The work was not glamorous, but it was essential. More importantly, it gave people with no prior training a way to contribute meaningfully. He has seen this dynamic repeatedly: people will arrive, trained or not, driven by the simple impulse to help however they can.
Organizations that prioritize traditional lengthy training sessions may inadvertently suppress enthusiasm and limit volunteer availability. A more effective approach is to always provide some form of welcoming, low-barrier opportunities or tasks that require no credentials and are always available. When such roles exist, spontaneous goodwill in grey skies can transform into long-term engagement in blue. Whether unloading supplies, serving meals or assisting with logistics, these roles meet immediate needs while also providing new volunteers with a pathway into deeper engagement over time.
Conduct Training That Evolves
Volunteers rarely absorb everything they need to know in one sitting. Yet many programs still ask them to complete long training sequences before they can participate. The result is predictable: enthusiasm fades, and valuable capacity is lost.
Coleman offers a more sustainable approach. “What you need to know on Day One is not the same as Day 15 or Month Six,” he explains. By breaking training into smaller modules and delivering it just-in-time, often online, organizations keep volunteers engaged while building a culture of continuous learning.
Volunteer management software – such as the kind Golden provides to leading disaster relief organizers like the Salvation Army, Tsu Chi and CORE – can progressively qualify volunteers, deliver them essential training materials, capture their completion and certify them for the next activity from any internet-connected device, anywhere in the world.
Tie Recognition to Impact
The most meaningful recognition links volunteer effort to a tangible outcome. Hearing that they “fed 50 families” or “set up beds so 100 people didn’t sleep on the floor” tells volunteers their work made a concrete difference.
Whitehead has seen this in disaster deployments, where volunteers spend long hours in difficult conditions, often sleeping on cots, far from home. What makes those experiences rewarding, he notes, is not comfort or convenience but the knowledge that their contributions mattered in specific ways. A simple “thank you” offers encouragement, but recognition that ties action to impact affirms that time invested was time well spent.
Recognition expressed in this way does more than acknowledge service, it connects volunteers directly to the mission, showing them that their efforts matter in both immediate and lasting ways.
Plan for Surplus and Shortage
Crises often produce paradoxes. A community may face shortages of food and shelter while simultaneously receiving truckloads of unsolicited clothing donations. Without systems to process them, generosity can quickly turn into overwhelm or waste.
King describes how “express-lane” processes allow organizations to intake and redirect surpluses quickly. Whether the contribution comes from a corporation, a faith group or a local community drive, clear pathways prevent goods from being declined, wasted or left unused. The aim is to channel resources to where they are most needed, rather than letting them clog warehouses or strain staff capacity.
Everyday programs encounter smaller-scale versions of this challenge – a holiday drive, sudden media coverage or a local campaign that delivers more resources than staff can handle. Crisis magnifies this imbalance, but the same principle applies in quieter times: only by planning for both extremes can generosity remain an asset rather than a liability.
Foster Collaboration Over Competition
Disasters reveal the limits of any single organization. Opening shelters, distributing donations and supporting survivors requires many hands and no group can manage all of it alone. What determines success is the ability to coordinate strengths among diverse actors, aligning resources in ways that minimize duplication and maximize impact.
King calls this “meta leadership,” the practice of linking federal, state, local, nonprofit and faith-based actors in shared responsibility. Coleman describes how United Way’s federated network embodies the same principle: each local chapter brings its own expertise, while drawing strength from the whole. For Whitehead, the key is referral systems that let staff direct people quickly to the external partners best equipped to meet their needs.
Volunteer programs outside disaster zones face similar dynamics. Challenges like homelessness or food insecurity rarely fall neatly within one organization’s scope. Those that thrive are the ones that recognize their own strengths, rely on the expertise of others and build ecosystems rather than silos.
Practice Trust-Based Philanthropy
Coleman has seen firsthand how technology is reshaping disaster response. After Hurricane Ian, local pastors used WhatsApp groups to coordinate needs in their communities. TikTok and YouTube shorts spread real-time updates that mobilized donations, while GoFundMe gave small donors the chance to play a significant role (Note: please be sure to double-check that online fundraisers do not state specific uses of proceeds that might duplicate and potentially disqualify a survivor from receiving insurance benefits).
But Coleman cautions that digital tools alone are not enough. What made these efforts effective was the presence of trusted local leaders who guided how technology was used. He points to trust-based philanthropy (giving local practitioners the authority to direct resources) as the reason aid aligns with cultural realities and community priorities. Social media and digital platforms such as WhatsApp, TikTok, YouTube and GoFundMe have indeed revolutionized volunteer mobilization and communication, but in the end it is trust that ensures people come together to meet real needs, whether in the urgency of grey skies or in the steady work of blue.
Support the Hidden Weight of Mental Health
In Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, Whitehead confronted the reality of unmet needs – a weight, he admits, that stayed with him even more than his military service in Iraq.
Disaster work demands not only physical endurance but emotional resilience. For this reason, organizations embed mental health professionals into their operations to care not only for survivors, but also for volunteers and leaders who carry the invisible weight of what they witness. Integrating mental health support and offering spaces for reflection enables volunteers to process difficult experiences and helps sustain organizational capacity over time.
The same truth applies outside disaster zones. Volunteers in community programs may not face collapsed infrastructure, but they do encounter stories of poverty, injustice, illness or loss. Without space to process those experiences, the weight builds quietly. Recognizing and addressing that burden is what allows volunteer programs to remain sustainable over time.
Prepare for the Unknown
Even the most detailed plans cannot account for every turn a crisis will take. Systems break, needs shift and circumstances change with little warning. What matters is not predicting every scenario but building the capacity to adjust when surprises arise.
King captures this mindset: “There are known knowns and known unknowns, but it’s the unknown unknowns that surprise you.” His point is not that planning is futile, but that its value lies in strengthening the muscles of adaptability.
For Volunteer Managers in any context, the challenge is similar. Careful preparation, including rehearsing responses, clarifying roles and setting priorities provides the foundation to pivot when the unexpected arrives. Grey skies reveal how quickly people pull together to adapt, but the resilience that makes this possible is built quietly in blue skies.
Conclusion: Carrying Lessons from Grey Skies into Blue
Disaster relief scenarios magnify both challenges and solutions relevant to the broader field of volunteer management. By cultivating flexible cultures, lowering barriers to participation, tying recognition to specific impact, supporting emotional well-being and prioritizing collaboration, organizations enhance their readiness not only for crisis conditions but for the demands of ordinary operations as well.
Drawing on the lived experiences and strategic insights of disaster response leaders, Volunteer Managers across contexts can strengthen present-day initiatives while building the capacity to meet whatever uncertainties lie ahead. When the storm passes, what remains are the practices that carry organizations forward: cultures rooted in empathy, open doors for newcomers, recognition tied to impact, care for emotional well-being and preparation for the unpredictable. These lessons, forged in crisis, remain vital in ordinary times, equipping leaders to help their organizations thrive in both blue skies and grey.
Editor's Note: For Ahead of the Curve Editor Sam Fankuchen, disaster relief is professional and personal. Earlier this year, during the California Wildfires, Fankuchen was both an orchestrator of preparation, response and recovery activities for nonprofit, faith, government and corporate organizations while also experiencing the event as a survivor displaced by the wildfires. More broadly, he holds other board level positions for global institutions who think about disaster management, and spoke at the United Nations this past summer about these same topics.
