Why I Wrote About Spontaneous Volunteers and aid budget cuts for The New Humanitarian

Across the sector, aid budgets are being cut. Multi-year grants are shrinking or not renewed, surge rosters are thinner, risk appetites narrow, and whole programmes close. None of this reduces need. It just moves it - towards neighbours, diaspora networks, and ordinary people who show up first. In that landscape, treating spontaneous volunteers as peripheral isn’t just out of date; it’s op

erationally costly.

That’s the backdrop for my analysis in The New Humanitarian: Amid aid cuts, regression & spontaneous volunteerism.

What I argue there, and why it matters now:

Boat arrival on lesvos, 2015.

The gap everyone can feel, but few plan for

In every major event I’ve worked on or studied - from Lesvos to more recent Nordic incidents - the same pattern repeats. Neighbours, tourists, diaspora networks, and local groups move first. They cover last-mile tasks, bridge communications, and keep people safe until systems catch up. Often they keep doing it long after headlines fade.

Why aid cuts change the equation

With fewer teams and tighter footprints, the informal side of response carries more weight. If plans ignore ad-hoc volunteers, capacity leaks: coverage drops, duplication rises, and trust frays. Recognising and designing for them isn’t a nice-to-have in this budget climate; it’s how you protect time to assistance and avoid preventable harm as formal capacity contracts.

The argument in plain terms

Spontaneous volunteers are not an anomaly; they’re a predictable part of crisis response. Treating them as invisible wastes capacity. Recognising them - lightly and pragmatically - improves coverage, safety, and the quality of information decisions are based on.

I call this controlled flexibility: enough structure to keep people safe and aligned, without taking away the speed and initiative that make their help effective. It’s not new bureaucracy. It’s good governance: clear contact points, obvious red lines, clean handovers, and a way for what they see to feed the shared picture.

Why this matters to me

I came to this through practice before research. On Lesvos I planned to stay a week and ended up coordinating hundreds of volunteers over four months. It was messy, human, and fast. Later I spent years interviewing volunteers, officials, and responders, trying to understand why some operations work with citizens and others work around them.

The uncomfortable truth is that we often default to control and call it safety. But when control closes doors, people help anyway - just outside the plan. That’s when risk rises and accountability blurs. Meeting citizens where they stand isn’t idealism; it’s how you shorten time to assistance and reduce preventable harm - especially under aid cuts.

What this asks of organisations

This isn’t about replacing formal response. It’s about supporting it by designing for the reality in front of us. That looks like naming ad-hoc volunteers in plans, making first contact welcoming and clear, and extending proportionate duty of care so people aren’t left to carry heavy moments alone. Done lightly, it frees specialists to do what only they can do - which matters even more when teams are smaller and stretched.

This is the work I do with VolunBridge: helping municipalities, agencies, and NGOs translate recognition into practice without new layers of bureaucracy. If you’re wrestling with how to do this in your context, the TNH piece lays out the logic. The implementation can be lean.

An invitation

If you read the article and it resonates - or if you disagree - I’d like to hear from you. If you’ve worked as an unaffiliated volunteer in an acute event (migration, flood, landslide, wildfire) I’m especially interested in how you organised, who you worked with, and where det skurret i møtet med systemet. If you lead preparedness or operations and want to test a lighter approach, let’s talk.

Designing for the people who always show up isn’t a side project. In an era of aid cuts, it’s how we keep responses faster, safer, and more human.