Hall junior brigade / Hall Volunteer Rural Fire Brigade.

Entrant: Pre-disaster Category, Volunteer Organisation Stream, Safer Communities Awards 2005.

Includes bibliographic references.

In the mid 1990s the Hall Brigade Executive felt there was a need to establish a Junior Brigade to provide a focus for young people in the area between the ages of an 15 years and to help them develop a sense of community awareness and spirit. On 25th March 1996 Hall Brigade officially launched its Junior brigade with the Executive noting that "a major aim of [this Brigade] should be to encourage its members to participate in community-support activities including training in bushfire behaviour and suppression to help develop team spirit and an awareness of safety on the fireground. The goal of this Junior Brigade is to train in most operational aspects of bushfire fighting so that members can progress seamlessly to the senior ranks of the brigade at age 16." Just over ten years later this commitment to juniors was vindicated in the ACT Taskforce to Moruya fires in 2002 with 22% of the Hall crew ex-Hall juniors and more recently during the January 2003 bushfires with 73% of the Hall RFS crews previously trained as juniors within the brigade. These percentages actually represent a retention rate of almost 80%, a very real achievement when the average senior's retention rate in the ACT is 20% after 2 years of service.