National Volunteer Week is coming up on April 10-16. This is a great opportunity to both recognize the achievements of your existing volunteers as well as alert the community to your department’s need for more recruits.

Volunteers are a crucial component of our nation’s fire service. 69 percent of firefighters are volunteers, and there are many additional volunteers providing support through local auxiliary programs such as Fire Corps or junior firefighter programs. However, a 2014 national survey by the NVFC showed 41 percent of respondents did not know if their local department used volunteers, and 79 percent did not know if their department was seeking new volunteers.

The National Volunteer Fire Council (NVFC) recently launched the Make Me A Firefighter recruitment campaign to help raise awareness among the public of the need for volunteers as well as provide departments with the tools and resources they need to recruit new members. Departments can register for free at portal.nvfc.org to post your volunteer needs and access customizable outreach materials, ready-to-use PSAs, a recruit tracking tool, and more. The portal is designed to be your one-stop shop to implementing and managing a local recruitment campaign...

Veejar Enterprises - Garland, Texas

What are your feelings about the IFSAC accreditation process? Now before you jump to your first thoughts of being “For or Against” IFSAC let’s take a few moments to look at the program as it stands in the State of Washington.

The IFSAC website relates this: IFSAC was founded in 1990 to establish a new national accreditation system for fire service certification programs. In 1992, the development of an accreditation system for fire related degree programs began...

In November, I came across a story that made absolutely no sense to me. A 33-year-old consultant named Niall Rice gave $718,000, little by little, to two Manhattan psychics who promised to reunite him with an old flame. How could someone be so gullible? Rice himself didn’t even seem to know: “I just got sucked in,” he told The New York Times later.

As it turns out, it’s much easier to fall for these types of cons than many people think. As Maria Konnikova, a psychologist and New Yorker contributor, explains in her new book, The Confidence Game, grifters manipulate human emotions in genius (and evil) ways, striking right when we feel lovelorn or otherwise emotionally vulnerable. I recently spoke with Konnikova about cons, why they happen, and if there’s any way to avoid becoming a fraudster’s next target. A lightly edited version of our conversation follows...