Long Island N.Y. – On A recent weekend fire departments across Long Island and New York State carried out the FASNY Recruit NY initiative. Recruit NY is a program that is designed to to help fire departments gain new members and staffing. Across the state of NY the average age of volunteers is increasing and also some volunteers are moving away causing membership numbers to fall in recent years and departments to be made up of more older volunteers then in the past.

To help try to combat these issues that the fire service faces departments opened up their buildings and grounds for either 1 or 2 days of recruitment open houses. The open houses varied in nature from simply having members on hand to answer questions and hand out applications and recruitment materials to having apparatus and tools on display as well as doing demonstrations on things like vehicle extrication or car fires and the likes. We had the chance over the course of the initative to visit a few of these departments and see how they chose to make their recruitment drives a success.