There are many ways you can help your brigade and the community, from volunteering your time – either to train as a firefighter or for support roles within the brigade – to supporting the brigade financially by making a donation or sponsoring it, to ensuring the contact information we hold for you is current, to keeping your property ‘bushfire-ready’.
Volunteering
All members of the Yass River–Nanima Rural Fire Brigade are volunteers. We depend on volunteers from the community to provide an effective, year-round firefighting capability. The brigade is only as strong as the community that supports it.
We require assistance with a wide variety of roles ranging across firefighting, administration, catering, fund-raising, communications and community engagement. No prior experience is necessary for many roles and training that can lead to nationally-recognised qualifications is provided.
For information on how to join the brigade, see our Guide to joining the brigade.
For our active firefighters, continuous training is provided through monthly training sessions that close with a supper. This regular training allows you to consolidate skills, learn new ones and get to know the members you will join when you crew a truck in an emergency.
For information on the various qualifications available, see the see the Training page or click here for Membership and RFS Course forms or click here for Membership and RFS Course forms
For further information on volunteering with our brigade, please contact the Captain on 6100 6252 or .
Making a Donation
Rural fire brigades are more than just an emergency fire service. They also provide significant community services, such as assisting the SES and police in search and rescue operations, helping with flood cleanups and biosecurity exercises, or assisting with non-emergency roles, such as helping landholders with pile and hazard reduction burns. The brigade fireshed provides a community meeting point, especially in our area where there is no central village to gather at.
For all these reasons, many people choose to donate to their local rural fire brigade.
Our brigade requests an annual donation (currently $50 per household, a figure unchanged since the annual request was introduced late last century) from all residents in the brigade area. We welcome donations at other times of course, and every donation helps the brigade deliver a better service to our community.
How to donate
If you would like to support our brigade, click on the donation link below to use the secure RFS Westpac page.
• Select the second option, ‘Make a donation to a Local Brigade’
• Type ‘Yass River’ into the search box
• Complete the remaining fields and you’re done.
Every cent donated this way comes to our brigade.
Sponsorship
Our brigade is also supported by a number of generous business sponsors. Sponsoring our brigade is an effective and visible way to support your community. If you are interested in sponsoring the brigade please contact our president via email, to discuss how you can support us.
Maintaining your contact details
Providing us with your contact details and keeping them current can help the brigade help you.
The brigade recognises that the register we maintain with the personal contact details of our members and other residents of our community is private and confidential.
We collect this information and possibly other details of your property for the brigade’s use in:
1. Communicating with you about brigade and RFS business
2. Managing fires in our brigade area
3. Helping secure your safety during fires or other emergencies in our brigade area.
We restrict use of your information to these purposes, and keep it confidential and secure, managed by the secretary.
To this end, all bulk communications using the mailing list derived from the register are issued by the secretary, even when on behalf of other members of the leadership team.
Where you choose to provide it, we also keep such information as your emergency contact (stored on our register), and details about your property, particularly water sources (dams) and the code to locks on your gates, stored separately.
Executive committee members (captain, president, secretary and treasurer) and some members of the operations leadership team (particularly deputies) have access to some or all the register and other information in specific circumstances, for example, deputies when fire is threatening a part of our area and they need to contact potentially affected residents quickly or access your property for water.
Bushfire Preparedness
Everyone in our region can help the brigade by being bushfire-wise, fire-safety conscious and ensuring that your property is well prepared. Further information is available in the Community section of this website.
Created 30 September 2023