The volunteer fire service is facing a staffing crisis that is well documented, widely discussed, and not getting better.

Recruitment is harder than it has ever been. Retention is harder than it has ever been. The demands on volunteer time have not decreased while the availability of that time has. Families are more complicated. Jobs are more demanding. The physical and emotional toll of emergency response is better understood than it used to be. And the pool of people willing and able to commit to the traditional volunteer firefighter model — always available, fully trained, ready to respond — is smaller every year in most communities.

The fire service’s response to this crisis has been almost entirely focused on the response side of the house. How do we recruit more suppression volunteers? How do we retain the ones we have? How do we get more people to show up when the tones drop?

These are legitimate and urgent questions. They are also incomplete.

Because the volunteer fire service is sitting on a CRR opportunity that almost nobody is fully using — and that opportunity, if seized deliberately, does not just add prevention capacity. It directly addresses the staffing crisis by reducing the call volume that is burning out the volunteer pool in the first place.

The Model That Has Not Been Built

The traditional volunteer firefighter is a remarkable person. They commit to training, to availability, to running toward emergencies that most people run from — without compensation, without the structural support of a career department, and increasingly without the social infrastructure that made volunteerism easier in previous generations. That commitment deserves genuine respect and should not be diminished in any conversation about what the volunteer fire service could be doing differently.

But here is the honest reality of modern volunteer fire service life: the traditional model asks suppression volunteers to do everything. Fight fires. Run EMS calls. Conduct public education. Install smoke alarms. Maintain equipment. Manage the station. Handle the administration. Run the fundraisers. Build the community relationships. Manage the social media. Review the vendor contracts. Track the budget.

Most of these things have nothing to do with why someone became a volunteer firefighter. And in an era when volunteer time is already scarce, asking the people whose primary value is emergency response capability to spend that time on administrative, educational, and community engagement functions is a poor use of a limited and increasingly precious resource.

The model that has not been built is the one that separates these functions deliberately — that keeps suppression volunteers focused on what they do best and what the community depends on them for, while building a parallel volunteer corps of people who will never put on a fire helmet and who bring skills the traditional model has never recruited for.

The Volunteer CRR Corps

Imagine a volunteer fire department that recruits not just for suppression but for community risk reduction — and that is honest with potential volunteers about which role they are being recruited for.

The retired teacher who has no interest in fighting fires but has decades of experience communicating with families and children and would be genuinely excellent at running public education programs. The accountant who cannot respond to alarms at two in the morning but can review vendor contracts, track prevention program budgets, and ensure the department’s financial management of CRR resources is sound. The attorney who can help the department understand its legal landscape around hiring, liability, and community partnerships. The contractor whose skills in carpentry or plumbing or electrical work map directly onto the physical hazards that home safety assessments identify — grab bars that need installing, ramps that need building, electrical panels that need attention.

The social media manager who can run a community outreach campaign with genuine competence rather than asking a suppression volunteer to figure it out between calls. The nurse or pharmacist who can provide medical expertise to a home safety assessment program serving elderly residents with complex medication needs. The graphic designer who can produce prevention materials that actually get read. The bilingual community member who can extend the department’s reach into households that standard English-language outreach never touches.

None of these people need to fight fires. All of them have something genuinely valuable to contribute to a CRR program. And almost none of them are being recruited by volunteer fire departments because the recruitment model was built for one type of volunteer and has never been seriously expanded.

The volunteer CRR corps is not a radical idea. It is how effective nonprofit organizations, community health programs, and social service agencies have operated for decades — recruiting people for the specific skills they have rather than expecting everyone to do everything. The volunteer fire service simply has not applied this model to itself.

The Station as Community Hub

The volunteer fire station is one of the most underutilized community assets in most jurisdictions.

It already exists. It already has a name, a physical presence, and in many communities a level of trust that took generations to build. Community members know where it is. They have driven past it their entire lives. In many rural and suburban communities it is one of the most recognizable institutions in the area.

And in most of those communities it sits largely empty between calls — used for training, for maintenance, for the occasional fundraiser — but not for the full range of community functions it could serve.

The volunteer fire station can and should be a centering and trusted meeting place for the entire community. Not just for firefighters and their families. For everyone.

This means something more than the annual pancake breakfast — which has value as a community tradition but represents a fraction of what the station could be doing as a community asset. It means formal and informal programming that makes the station a place community members want to come, feel welcome in, and associate with more than emergency response.

Formal programming might look like: hosting community meetings and neighborhood association gatherings in the station’s meeting space. Partnering with social service agencies to offer regular office hours at the station — a day each month when a representative from the Area Agency on Aging, the local housing authority, or a mental health services organization is available to meet with community members in a trusted and accessible location. Running community education sessions on topics beyond fire safety — home preparedness, weather emergency planning, medication safety for elderly residents, car seat installation, pool and water safety. Creating a resource center at the station where community members can access prevention information, safety equipment, and referrals to community services.

Informal programming is equally important and sometimes more powerful. A station that is genuinely open to the community — where the doors are not always closed between calls, where neighbors feel welcome to stop in, where the crew is visible and approachable rather than sequestered — builds the kind of ambient trust that makes every formal program more effective. Community members who know the firefighters, who have had positive interactions with the station outside of emergency contexts, who see the department as a neighbor rather than a government agency — those community members are more likely to engage with prevention programs, more likely to share safety information with their neighbors, and more likely to support the department when it needs community backing for resources or programs.

The station as community hub is not a new idea in the abstract. What is new is applying it deliberately, with intention, as a CRR strategy rather than a peripheral community relations activity.

The Call Volume Argument

Here is the argument that should resonate most directly with volunteer fire service leaders who are skeptical about investing in CRR when the department is already stretched thin responding to calls.

The call volume is already too high for the dwindling volunteer pool.

That is not a reason to deprioritize prevention. It is the most compelling possible reason to prioritize it.

Every preventable call that does not happen is a call that does not drain a volunteer who is already stretched. Every residential fire that a working smoke alarm catches early — before a full structural involvement that requires a sustained response from an exhausted volunteer force — is a call that takes thirty minutes instead of three hours. Every fall that a grab bar prevents is an EMS call that does not happen at two in the morning when the volunteer roster is thin. Every carbon monoxide incident that a working detector catches before it becomes a mass casualty event is a call that does not require mutual aid from the career department forty minutes away.

CRR investment in a volunteer community is not a luxury for departments that have their staffing problems solved. It is a direct operational strategy for departments that do not. Reducing preventable call volume is the most direct possible response to a shrinking volunteer pool — and it is the response that most departments are not making because the connection between prevention investment and call volume reduction has not been made explicitly enough to change organizational behavior.

The Career Department Partnership

There is one more dimension to the volunteer CRR opportunity that deserves specific attention — and it involves the career departments that are already providing mutual aid to volunteer agencies with increasing frequency.

Career fire departments, particularly those adjacent to or surrounding volunteer jurisdictions, often have CRR infrastructure that volunteer departments do not. Established home safety assessment programs. Public education curricula. Community chippers and defensible space programs. Smoke alarm installation programs. Partnership networks with public health, social services, and other community agencies. Staff with prevention training and dedicated prevention time.

These resources sit largely within the career department’s jurisdictional boundaries — used for career department communities and not typically extended to the surrounding volunteer jurisdictions that those career departments are already supporting on the response side.

The opportunity is to formalize what is already an operational relationship into a resource-sharing partnership that benefits both. A career department that shares its home safety assessment platform with surrounding volunteer agencies extends its prevention impact into communities it is already serving on emergency calls. A volunteer department that gains access to established prevention curricula, assessment tools, and community education resources does not have to build those things from scratch with no dedicated prevention staff.

This is not charity from career departments to volunteer agencies. It is a logical extension of a mutual aid relationship that already exists — applied to prevention rather than just response. The communities being served overlap. The risk reduction benefits flow in both directions. And the career department that helps a surrounding volunteer community reduce its call volume is also reducing the mutual aid burden on its own resources.

What This Requires

Building what is described in this article requires something that does not cost money and cannot be purchased — a willingness to expand the definition of what a volunteer fire service member is and what a volunteer fire station is for.

The suppression volunteer remains the foundation. The call response capacity that volunteer departments provide to their communities is irreplaceable and must be protected. Nothing in this article argues otherwise.

What this article argues is that the suppression volunteer should not be asked to do everything — and that the community contains people with skills and time and genuine motivation to contribute to public safety who are not being recruited because the recruitment model has not been designed to find them.

It argues that the volunteer fire station is a community asset that is being significantly underutilized — and that using it more fully as a community hub does not require a large investment, only a deliberate intention.

It argues that CRR investment is not a luxury for volunteer departments that have their operational problems solved — it is a direct response to the staffing crisis, because fewer preventable calls means less pressure on a shrinking volunteer pool.

And it argues that the relationship between career and volunteer departments is an untapped resource-sharing opportunity that benefits both — if someone is willing to make the first call and ask what a more formal prevention partnership might look like.

The opportunity is real. The model is available. The community is waiting for someone to build it.

Brent Faulkner, MAM, FO, is the CEO and Founder of Virtual CRR Inc.
A retired Battalion Chief from Anaheim Fire & Rescue, Brent brings 28 years of fire service experience, including leadership in structure fires, wildland operations, hazardous materials response, EMS incidents, and specialized rescue operations. He also served 17 years on a Type 1 Hazardous Materials Response Team.

A defining moment in Brent’s career came while leading Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) efforts at a DHS-recognized Terrorism Fusion Center. There, he oversaw initiatives to safeguard critical infrastructure from terrorism, natural disasters, and emerging threats — an experience that shaped his passion for Community Risk Reduction and ultimately led to the creation of Virtual CRR.

Brent holds a Master’s Degree in Management, a Bachelor’s in Occupational Studies, and Associate Degrees in Hazardous Materials Response and Fire Science.