The Clermont Citizen’s Corps is hoping for a rousing turnout of potential volunteers for a training seminar March 10.
The seminar, which will be held at the Clermont County Fairgrounds beginning at 10 a.m., would be the first in what the corps hopes will be an ongoing effort to organize and promote volunteerism in the county.
“Citizen’s Corps is actually a national push, not just something happening in Clermont County,” said Clermont County Health Commissioner Marty Lambert. “The idea is to get citizens organized so they can help out in a timely fashion in case we need to respond to natural or man-made disasters, including terrorism. It comes from Sept. 11, 2001 when President Bush called for citizens to action. Certainly, we saw in New York that many people tried to come and help and it was chaos. There was no way to organize them easily. We saw that in Katrina as well.”
Lambert said that the organization is basically an effort to take the average citizen’s desire to help out in the event of an emergency and organize it, train it and utilize it better. Past emergencies, such as hurricane Katrina, saw a leap in volunteerism, but little organization.