Jurisdictions need to plan to utilize and document non-affiliated and spontaneous volunteers

Vulnerability is the combination of risk of an incident times the probability minus the mitigation efforts employed to reduce the impact of that incident. Regardless of the cause of a presidentially declared incident (Flood, storm, earthquake, or human incident, etc), under the Stafford act, all jurisdictions are vulnerable to the financial vulnerability of the non-federal share, or local match, of the FEMA Public Assistance Grant Program. The local match for FEMA category A and B subgrants can be mitigated against by training, coordinating and documenting volunteers to perform eligible emergency work during the incident response as Donated Resources. Pre-incident agreements for volunteer management are essential to ensure NIMS compliant interoperability of the volunteers responding within the incident. Additionally, the costs associated with managing volunteers are FEMA reimbursable under the Public Assistance Grant Program. Jurisdictions need to plan to utilize and document non-affiliated and spontaneous volunteers to mitigate their financial vulnerability of the local match under a presidentially declared event under the Stafford Act.