Red Cross Chief: Keeping Volunteers Motivated After a Trauma

On the day of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, more than 1,000 people showed up at the offices of the local Red Cross to volunteer to help in the relief effort.

The job of taking charge of these “spontaneous volunteers” — whose numbers eventually swelled to 9,700 — fell to Debby Hampton, the American Red Cross of Central Oklahoma’s personnel director.

Ms. Hampton says that after the initial phase of disaster aid ended, most of the volunteers were no longer needed. The Red Cross did hire a handful to stay on and help families deal with the long-term effects of the terrorist attack.

Still, Ms. Hampton saw an opportunity to try to encourage those who first responded to stay involved in charitable work in some way. Several months after the disaster, “we called all the spontaneous volunteers and asked them if they were still interested in volunteering,” says Ms. Hampton, who is now the organization’s chief executive officer.

For those who said they were interested in continuing to work with the Red Cross, Ms. Hampton put them in touch with their nearest chapter. Others “didn’t want to volunteer for the Red Cross because it brought back bad memories of what happened that day,” Ms. Hampton says. She referred those people to other nonprofit organizations. A few people said they didn’t want to volunteer at all.

Although she hasn’t kept track of how many of the volunteers contacted signed up to help the Red Cross or another charitable group, Ms. Hampton fears that most have now stopped giving their time to charity. She says that, while it is important for charities to follow up with volunteers after a disaster, “what I have found is that people tend to want to volunteer for that disaster and that disaster only.”

Ms. Hampton says she feels some guilt for sending in volunteers to the disaster site immediately after the bombing, saying that many of them helped rescue workers look for survivors and carry out bodies. “My job was to send people into that awful site and, at the time, I had no idea what they were running into,” she says. After the disaster recovery, some volunteers sought mental-health therapy, she says.

Ms. Hampton says her Red Cross held a ceremony commending the efforts of volunteers. With most of the public praise directed at firefighters and police officers, she stressed that charities need to make sure the volunteers also feel appreciated.

Advice for handling volunteers was just one of the topics Ms. Hampton discussed with the head of the American Red Cross in Greater New York, Bob Bender, when she met with him immediately after September 11. “What I was able to tell Bob was: ‘This is going to be very long-term. Be prepared for that.’” She adds: “There are truly needs still here in Oklahoma City. I can’t imagine how long New York will go.”

Every year on April 19, the anniversary of the bombing, Ms. Hampton says, her Red Cross sees a rise in the number of people seeking mental-health counseling.

Connecting Victims

Ms. Hampton’s disaster aid for the September 11 terrorist attacks went beyond advice. She helped organize a trip to New York for about 15 people who had lost family members in the Oklahoma City bombing to provide help to families of victims of the World Trade Center attacks.

As New York and other areas adopt strategies from Oklahoma City charitable organizations, Ms. Hampton credits the connections local nonprofit groups and government agencies in her city had before the disaster as the key to success. “Everybody knew each other and there was a trust level that makes a response so much easier.”