Less paperwork.
More life-changing work.

Empowering California Volunteers

Merit is powering the California For All Emergency Preparedness Campaign by helping to deploy a network of volunteers and transform how Californians get ready for the next disaster.

By leveraging Merit, California Volunteers will, for the first time, have a standardized view of their volunteer capacity around the State, and a uniform view of the specializations the CERT volunteers possess. Furthermore, in disaster situations, where information and trust are most needed, Merit provides a secure, interoperable system for verifying every volunteer on-scene, allowing groups and agencies to better work together, without having previously met or collaborated.

Read more about our partnership with California Volunteers here >

Saving time & lives for Florida CERTs

The Florida Department of Volunteer Emergency Management Services uses Merit to track and manage its Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) responders for disaster planning. Previously knowing which volunteer attended what training, or has expertise, was a messy mix of paper-based documentation, emails, and spreadsheets.

Florida took its 9,000 volunteers from around the state and surrounding communities that had a combined set of 100,000 skills and issued merits, so that the state and local disaster response teams would have clear visibility into who does what. This matters when it comes to deploying volunteers. Knowing that someone has a language skill or a certification to do CPR is essential in an emergency. It can save the state time, and time can save lives.

States are responsible for submitting their total volunteer hours to FEMA to get reimbursed for out of pocket expenses during a disaster.

Those spreadsheet-based and analog records often don’t get recorded correctly, or not at all, and states end up losing millions of dollars in potential lost reimbursed money.

In fact, the state of Florida estimated that they lost more than $75M in total funds due to inadequate record keeping and time tracking for volunteer hours during hurricane Irma, which caused more than $50B in damage to the state.