by Miwa Ichijo
(will not be taking 2nd
module)
Overview
In Japan, there were a
big earthquake and following tsunami on March 11 in 2012, attacking northern
part of the country (Great East Japan Earthquake). Over 15,000 died and over 330,000
people lost their home due to the earthquake. To deal with this catastrophe, so
far, about 860,000 people including several NPOs and NGOs have come to the devastated
areas from all over Japan and foreign countries to engage in volunteer work
such as distribution of fuel and food, cleaning up rubbles and medical activity. Around 25,000 volunteers are still working in the devastated areas to put the
evacuating people’s lives back. However, although the municipalities (Miyagi prefecture, Fukushima prefecture, Iware prefecture) are in charge
of organizing and dispatching the volunteers, they have difficulty in managing
it effectively due to lack of their capacity. As a result, reconstruction of
the devastated areas is not being conducted as expected.
The study
The problem is that
municipalities cannot organize the volunteers (including the members of
existing NPOs and NGOs) efficiently and cannot draw out their high performance
fully. Here I assume that municipalities can use SNA to organize volunteer
groups. While the municipalities try to send information to all the volunteers
and to manage every volunteer work by themselves, they should leave some
responsibilities to organized volunteer groups to have them work efficiently.
Required data
The municipalities
will need to gather the following data of volunteers to analyze the skills of
each volunteer and specify the people who play central roles.
(1)
What is
your gender?
a.
Female
b.
Male
(2)
What is
your age?
(3)
What is
your primary language?
a.
Japanese
b.
English
c.
Others
(Please specify)
(4)
How long
have you engaged in the volunteer work for Great East Japan Earthquake?
a.
more than
6 months
b.
more than
3 months
c.
more than
1 month
d.
1 month or
less
(5)
What kind
of skills do you have?
a.
Medical
services
b.
Driving
trucks and cars
c.
Carpentering
d.
Others
(6)
Do you
belong to any NPO or NGO?
a.
Yes (Which
organization?, What is your role in the organization?)
b.
No
(7)
How long
more are you going to spare your time for the volunteer work?
a.
more than
6 months
b.
more than
3 months
c.
more than
1 month
d.
1 month or
less
(8)
Who are
the top 3 people among volunteers you often ask for advice?
Hypothesis
Volunteers with longer
experience and the higher position in any NGO or NPO can be assumed to be playing
the central roles and connecting other volunteers: they must have high
betweeness and centrality. These volunteers have high potential in organizing
most of the volunteer work to rebuild the destroyed areas on behalf of
municipalities.
Benefits to Municipalities
Once municipalities
can specify the volunteers playing the central roles, the municipalities can
convey the necessary information only to the key volunteers and leave the most
of the responsibilities in organizing the volunteer work to them. Only thing
that municipalities should take care of is that most of the volunteers are
engaged in their work just temporary. So how smoothly these key roles are taken
over is important fro the sustainably effective volunteer work.
1 comment:
Excellent idea. I suggest that you either substitute or add a network Q. asking the 3-5 people they've collaborated most closely with during some period after the disaster. In either case, you should ask for the service the collaborators or info-givers work for. This will give more meaningful results,as you'll have nets of both people and services. Useful perhaps for planning purposes.
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