A Select Few

Candidates in Serve On's latest selection weekend for would-be International Response Team members regroup while moving a 'casualty' on a long stretcher carry.

Serve On has an impressive new cohort of recruits to its International Response Team after they battled through 36 hours of a gruelling selection weekend, often in torrential rain.

The volunteers, keen to join our humanitarian response in the aftermath of global disasters, threw themselves into a series of tough challenges inspired by Serve On’s past deployments to natural crises.

Every one of the candidates who undertook the selection acquitted themselves well and our congratulations go to those were successful in meeting the necessarily high standards we were looking for and proved worthy of the opportunity to train as modern urban search and rescue responders.

The weekend pushed the would-be IRT members to their physical and mental limits as they took on tests which had been devised with the purpose of bringing out the best in them and showing what they are capable of.

Current IRT members, who all went through a similar selection process, know how hard the process is but how it teaches you things about yourself and brings out strengths you did not know you had, as well as building great camaraderie.

The success of the weekend owed much to the hard work of dozens of Serve On members from across all of our teams who came together to meticulously plan the selection process; to devise scenarios; to get resources for multiple tasks and to carry out risk assessments for all of those tasks; to man the control room night and day; and to give up their weekend, and sleep, to marshal the selection event from start to finish.

Now, for the successful candidates, they can look forward to starting their equally rigorous training.