2018 State of the Volunteer Fire Service Report

The International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) has been working with a SAFER (Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response) grant focused on improving national volunteer recruitment and retention. This effort led to a summit in September 2018 involving leaders from around the fire service community who gathered to examine the current state of the volunteer fire service and forecast what it might look like in the future. The IAFC and its Volunteer and Combination Officers Section (VCOS) partnered with the International Association of Women in Fire and Emergency Services (iWomen), the IAFC’s Volunteer Workforce Solutions, the Council for Future Volunteer Firefighters, and other national interest groups to create a solutions-based framework that will offer combination and volunteer fire departments throughout America a means to improve their leaderships’ ability to recruit, retain, and manage the volunteers of the future. This report is born from that summit and will focus on specific areas that were identified as being crucial to reversing the negative trends that have been experienced.

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