Crossing the Rubicon – Britain’s extraordinary virus volunteers

Nearly three quarters of a million volunteers are now working with the NHS, and another two million or so people have come forward to work with charities and community groups across the country to help out with the virus crisis.

The national response has been extraordinary in its generosity and kindness. At the grassroots level, more than 3,000 ad hoc community have sprung up over the last few weeks to help neighbours on a local basis while the big charities such as Muslim Aid, the British Red Cross, Barnardo’s and the Royal Voluntary Service have attracted thousands more volunteers to help.

Playing a key role in coordinating their volunteers and those of other groups is Team Rubicon UK, one of the country’s most specialist charities working in disaster relief.

As Lizzy Stileman,  who is coordinating the volunteers with the regular forces at the Covid Force headquarters at Aldershot, puts it:  “We are here to fill the gaps.”

Stileman, who served 20 years in the Army’s Royal Logistics Corps, specialises in disaster relief and recovery, is a major in the reserve, and runs her own business of training courses for hazardous environments.

Team Rubicon works with specialist volunteers to help in specific disasters, starting with the Nepal earthquake of 2015 and the floods in the north of England that year.

It grew out of the American Team Rubicon, founded by General David Petraeus, and a group of officers to help military veterans.

The UK version is taking a different direction, and is not exclusively military.  “We are asked to do a range of jobs, which the military can’t take on at the moment,” says Stileman.

Richard Sharp, a former Royal Marine and now chief executive of Rubicon, heads its operations at Chilmark in Wiltshire.   “We find out where there is a surplus of volunteer capability in one area, and move it to another.”

Over the past week, Rubicon has been asked to provide 800 drivers for shipping specialist medicines and supplies, and food to clinics and hospitals across Wales. They have also found volunteers to man mortuaries across the country, especially the Nightingale Hospitals, including the Excel Centre in London.

“The demand is enormous,” says Laura Perry,  one of 15 regional liaison officers and organisers, now working with three Local Resilience Forums in the North East.

Perry, whose background is in events management, is calling on the services of 500 veterans and 750 local government officers in furlough. They are needed for driving, helping out in mortuaries, and distributing and training in the use of PPE protective gear.

Perry, who organised the Hyde Park British Summertime festivals, adds:  “Managing events and rescue and relief are very similar – you need to be flexible and be able to react quickly.

As well as festivals, she has led a team specialists for UNICEF in the recent Mozambique floods after completing three specialist training courses with Rubicon.

But Team Rubicon prefers for volunteers not to just turn up on the doorstep. General Sir Nick Parker, the visionary founder and now senior trustee, explains: “In the floods we had people just turning up, but now we know how to prepare, and call for, volunteers with specific skills.”

And Team Rubicon manages its work on a shoestring. It has only 10 permanent staff, with ten emergency backup helpers running the Chilmark HQ, where they run the nationwide data base and tasking centre. They have 15 volunteer liaison officers.

In the military operations, Rubicon appears to be a vital lynchpin. The way it works maybe be a lesson for the future as they have proved to be an essential part of the national effort, liaising with anything up to 200,000 volunteers through various groups and alliances, particularly the British Red Cross and Royal Voluntary Service.

One of Perry’s colleagues, Paul Gudonis, works with three Local Resilience hubs and calls on help from the 4th Infantry Brigade in York and volunteers from four regimental associations, including the Parachute Regiment, with which he once served. Gudonis has been asked specifically to help with mortuary assistants, amongst myriad tasks with distributing food and kit to the NHS.

There are lessons for the future, he suggests. “We need to build better communications and coordination, not just for now. We also need more people – those who have just left the services can bring badly needed skills. I hope celebs like Jason Fox can get the word out.”

The volunteers say they are working on a “wave of kindness” from the public. The volunteers led by Gordon Mackenzie, are distributing 12,000 meals a day to NHS workers, staff and paramedics – some as specially designed on-the-go grab bags. They come from a £1 million donation by Ron Dennis of Maclaren.

At the British Red Cross, Norman McKinley, Director of UK Operations, manages a huge supply of meals to the food banks of the Trussell Trust.

McKinley can call on a core of about 60,000 volunteers to help out, and to find other helpers with shopping for the vulnerable and lonely, for instance. “We have to ensure we get the right information – we must play our full part in reaching out to the most isolated.”

“It shouldn’t be a case of chuck in and check out, when we visit them. We are facing a challenge on a scale we’ve not met before.”

The Royal Voluntary Service, which complements the Red Cross in helping the elderly and housebound, are looking after one and half million shielded people. Rebecca Kennelly, Director of Volunteering at RVS, says:  “We send our volunteers to take food and medicine, and to people who are destitute. They are socially isolated , with not a soul to look after them, to bring them food and medicine. The whole impact of loneliness and isolation lack of company has the effect on health, by our calculations, of smoking 40 a day.”

Kennelly says RVS has been boosted by the donation of 70 vehicles for food distribution teams. In Scotland a group of EasyJet cabin crew and staff sent on furlough, went back to their company and collected thousands of inflight meals, which they then distributed through the NHS, and then repeated  with surplus pizzas from local eateries.

Yet despite the astonishing efforts by the charity and volunteer sector, there are concerns about the demands to be put on their services over the coming weeks, and months should there be a second surge in the virus.

There is a growing view that future governments will need to put more effort into building a stronger frontline resilience team of civil and military experts in preparation for future pandemics or other natural crises. And that this could be best done by creating a professional non-political resilience and civil support bureau, run by professionals, and for professionals.

While governments have spent hours on documenting ‘resilience planning’ and ‘civil contingency’ over the last decade, many insiders are concerned that there was not enough preparation for an event such as this pandemic.

Indeed, detailed exercises have been carried out in the past five years, specifically Operation Cygnet, scoping the effect of a major pandemic. But even this contingency plan was unprepared for the enormity of this crisis.

For now, the volunteers, private and public, sung and unsung, are more than doing their bit. For the mandarins and politicos of Whitehall and Westminster, the jury will have many questions to answer. As one resilience expert on the frontline of this crisis, says: “Running and organising volunteers is not an amateur business.”