On 10th and 11^th of September 2020, the country research workshop for Georgia has been organized in a full on-line mode with twelve local and four remote participants.

The goal of the workshop was to discuss the findings of the international research and national research carried out under the leadership of the Resilience Advisers Network. These findings were put in perspective in order to identify main directions for the elaboration of a volunteer development plan and cooperation model to be signed between Emergency Management Service - Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia and the Georgian Red Cross Society.  

The Georgia group was composed of staff members and volunteers of the Georgian Red Cross Society and representatives of Emergency Management Service – Georgia, all from Tbilisi and Samtskhe/Javakheti regions. International participants belonged to the Austrian Red Cross and the Resilience Advisers Network.

Sofio Beriashvili, Chief Specialist at Emergency Management Service, started the session by presenting the EMS Strategy to develop CP voluntary system in Georgia. Then the Georgian Red Cross Society and the Austrian Red Cross introduced the main lessons learned from past DRM projects they implemented in the country.

The following six sessions were organized according to the six processes defined by the capacity building process model selected for the research methodology; Business (B), Customer (C), Integration (I), Operation (O), Delivery (D) and Regulation (R).

During the discussions the following issues were highlighted by the participants:

• Georgia has the Law on volunteering which is an important factor. The Law includes different parts on volunteering and for the hosting organization which is responsible to cover the expenses that the volunteer may have (including health expenses). 
• Emergency Management Service is in the process of the recruitment of the volunteers. The trainings of volunteers have not started yet, that is why the financial plan and business continuaty plan is not defined and elaborated yet.
• The station with volunteers which will be under the subordination of EMS will be financially supported by EMS.Other financial sustainability factors will be addressed throughworking with intl. donors to develop volunteer systemwhere thepriority is on professional fire fighter and rescue system.
• GRCS is the necessary volunteer management support for the self-organized community-based volunteer teams.
• The GRCS has the experience of coping with spontaneous volunteers according to their skills and experience as usually their resources are used in the safe place where their and beneficiary’s safety is ensured.

The outputs of the workshop have been used to finalize the Georgia country report and the guiding principles (to upload in the page ‘’resources’’ of this website) and should be used by project team to elaborate the volunteer development plan and cooperation model/cooperation agreement.