Germany, shared purpose
THW, volunteer civil protection as a federal institution
Germany's federal civil-protection agency trains and equips a volunteer force that reached about 88,000 people across 669 local units in May 2025, supported by about 2,200 paid staff.
88,000 people, volunteer thw members, 2025-05. 669 local units, local thw units, 2025-05. Bundesanstalt Technisches Hilfswerk, agency overview, retrieved 2026-08-30.
The move, and what it needed
The federal government supplies equipment, doctrine and a small professional backbone while local volunteer units recruit, train and retain the people who operate it, turning civic participation into standing disaster-response capacity.
Preconditions
- Local associations able to recruit and hold volunteers over many years
- Federal finance for specialised equipment, training and paid coordination
- Employers willing to release volunteers when an emergency triggers deployment
Where it travelled: Volunteer fire and civil-protection systems exist across Europe, but the German combination of a federal technical agency and locally embedded unpaid units is unusually institutionalised. A copy has to fund readiness between disasters, not just recruit after one.
Limits: Membership in one emergency-service organisation is not the share of adults who volunteered in the last month, which is what the indicator asks for, and it cannot be compared directly with countries that organise civil protection through paid services. The agency reports its own membership, the count includes more than 17,000 youth members, and it does not show how often each member trains or deploys.
This record describes what Germany delivered. It is linked to Volunteering because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.
More from Germany
3 other deliveries from this country.
The Fraunhofer contract-research model
Germany funds the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft's institutes in proportion to what they earn from industry, and in 2025 the society performed 3.2 billion euros of contract research, 966 million euros of it paid by industry.
Kurzarbeit in the 2008-2009 crisis
Germany answered the 2008-2009 collapse in manufacturing orders by paying firms to cut hours instead of jobs, and short-time work covered 1.44 million workers at the May 2009 peak, about 5 percent of insured employment, while unemployment barely rose.
Federal siren warning network, and its dismantling
West Germany built a federal warning service after 1955; after the Cold War the federally owned service was dissolved, its ten warning offices were abandoned and the nationwide siren alarm network was dismantled or transferred to municipalities, ending a system that had relied on about 1,700 volunteer helpers.
The same gap elsewhere
2 deliveries linked to Volunteering in other countries.
Rwanda requires a morning of community work on the last Saturday of each month, and the government's own assessment reports average participation of 91.3 percent of adults countrywide in fiscal year 2015-2016, up from 87.8 percent two years earlier.
Volunteer fire corps, and its membership erosion
Japan's Fire and Disaster Management Agency reported 732,223 volunteer fire-corps members on 1 April 2025, a fall of 14,458 in one year in the local disaster-response corps that it describes as a core of community resilience.