Greg Goodman, senior regional philanthropy director with the American Red Cross, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about helping others.
Goodman has been volunteering for a long time.
He said, “When I say I’m a volunteer, it’s just, I always tend to raise my hand when somebody needs support or when there are fire alarm installations, which we call Sound the Alarm. I tend to like to get on a team and do that. I teach hands on CPR. I have taught young people how to cope during emergencies, and I’ve actually been deployed to disaster areas too. So I’m a paid employee, but I also certainly volunteer for opportunities as needed. It really makes you feel rewarded. In the end, understanding that you’ve helped people in various ways and that makes a difference to people in their heads and their minds and sometimes it’s sad, but when you’re dealing with people who’ve lost everything, or families who’ve lost lives, lost loved ones as well, but you’re there and you’re there for support, and you’re there for services, that’s really important. It’s important to me. It’s important to all of our volunteers, really, throughout Florida and throughout the country.”
National Volunteer Week is coming up.
Goodman said, “National Volunteer Week is April 19 through the 25th and we see this as an opportunity to pay tribute to volunteers who really are the true lifeblood of our organization, who make our mission possible every day. Well over 90% of our workforce is volunteer. This goes way back to 1881 when we were founded with volunteers responding to crises, whether it’s on the local level, like home fires or hurricanes, disasters, whatever, or on the national level, assisting veterans and military families. We have people that, like me, that train to teach people how to save lives, like CPR and first aid and overall, that’s what we do. And we also have volunteers that help with blood drives as well. That’s part of our Disaster Services. We respond to about 65,000 disasters per year, and some of them, the variety of them, are home fires. But when there is a disaster we know about, we prepare ourselves in advance. We mobilize our volunteers to get ready. We go to our warehouses and get what we need and saddle everything up so that we can provide services once something happens, including manning our shelters and things of that nature and making helping people at times of their own disaster.”
Anyone can volunteer to help.
Goodman said, “It’s willingness to serve people. You do have to apply to be volunteers, but actually, there are some roles that do require training. There are some roles to get people to understand how to deal with people at time of crisis and shelters, teaching CPR first aid. You need to understand how to do that. Almost every role needs some sort of training, and then just our volunteers go out and do it and that’s why we’re so appreciative of these people. On the national level, there are more than 325,000 individuals who volunteer their time to support the mission of the American Red Cross. And they join about 17 million Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers who work in more than 191 countries across the globe. So there’s a lot of people out there that are willing to make the commitment to volunteer, and we’re so appreciative year round. During National Volunteer Week, it’s an opportunity to pay tribute to them as well, even though we pay tribute to them year round. We cherish them so much. I’m here to say, if you want to volunteer for the Red Cross, please, please apply to volunteer.”
Volunteers can be as active as they want and it can be built around their schedule.
Goodman said, “We can be flexible as well, but typically you’re committing to a couple of weeks, and it’s really rewarding work. One of my deployments was to Nashville a few years ago when they were hit by a tornado and I volunteered right away to help with fundraising initially, but then I was asked to do other things too, and I found myself working in a shelter in Nashville. And I remember I had some bottles of water on a cart to put into a refrigerator. So I was just walking doing that, and while I was doing that, the bottles of water, some fell, and this nice gentleman came up to me and said, oh, let me help you with that. And he did. And he helped me throughout the whole process, and I finished that, and I went up to a staff member or another person at the shelter, and I said, oh, that gentleman over there really helped me. Is he a volunteer? And they said, no, he’s a homeless person. And I said, my God, oh my are we doing something for him? Because typically, when there’s a disaster like that. Are there shelters open? That’s an opportunity for homeless people as well as everybody else, to get shelter, and it’s also our opportunity to provide case management, and ideally strive to get somebody in crisis like that, more in crisis, not just in losing a home, but not having a home to get. And I don’t know what happened in the end, but I know that the person that helped me was helped, so I’ll always remember that time.”
For more information, click here: https://www.redcross.org/local/florida/south-florida/about-us/locations/greater-miami-the-keys.html?srsltid=AfmBOooYPCKhcwXwuaqVCtB8yg79g_VmtJsLvWWSCFXHZ_6JaSRvirdr