About
What We Do
What is "Administrative Infrastructure"?
Infrastructure is a fancy term for "the system or structure in which internal actions go through". You and your agency run calls day in and day out. How those calls are ran, who they are ran by, what truck goes in what order, and so on all make-up your Operational Infrastructure. Those trucks need maintenance, and so does the equipment your responders use. How you schedule maintenance and inspections, keep inventory, and your vendors all make-up your Logistical Infrastructure.
But what keeps all of these moving pieces in order so that your agency can operate? You'd be correct to say that it is up to the leadership (most often Chiefs) who are responsible for this. The system a Chief or leader runs their agency through and how they keep everything in order is the Administrative Infrastructure.
What does it mean to work on Administrative Infrastructure?
In the modern era, technology and efficiency are crucial in all aspects on running an emergency services agency. Redundancy takes up valuable time and resources, and moving to a "single point of data entry", for example, can reduce the amount of paperwork done by a three-fourths on average. Social Media has proven to be one of the best outreach strategies for younger adults and junior members. The ability to work from anywhere has become essential when leaders don't live close enough to the agency office or when they are constantly busy. These are some of the technological changes involved in working on Administrative Infrastructure.
Additionally, we can provide valuable manpower to assist with these tasks. The cumbersome, boring, or complicated tasks that have been piling up can take a toll on the efficiency and moral of leadership. Having extra hands to handle this, while not going through the work of putting more people on the roster, can make for a major turnaround!
About the Owner
Austin C. Love founded Nxt Gen Response in early 2023 in response to a growing recruitment and development crisis growing amongst the Rescue Squads and Fire Departments in Surry County, NC.
Austin started with Mountain Park Rescue Squad in November 2017 as an "outsider" at the age of 18. Prior to being invited to apply by a friend, Austin had no experience with emergency services and had minimal connections to anyone in Surry County, being a Stokes transplant himself. This was a sharp contrast to others he met, who's members were generational and bound by families, friends, and tradition. To end up in first response was more-or-less a matter of chance.
He soon went on to get his EMT and later his TR, and since has had the chance to serve as a paid member of various emergency service agencies both inside and out of Surry County. Spending time as an EMT, 911 telecommunicator, technical rescuer, and being a part of an Incident Management Team, Austin picked up on common trends and themes as to how agencies operate and the challenges involved in making the much needed change to make them effective. Once elected chief of Mountain Park Rescue Squad in June of 2021, he sought to model what that change may look like. Previously, everything was on paper and required his physical presence to complete any of the administrative tasks that were constantly building up. Grants, budgets, truck-check-offs, and more were not only difficult to organize and store, but were nearly impossible to index (or search) to find in a timely manner. This wasn't sustainable; Austin was financially independent and living on his own, balancing a number of jobs, classes, and personal items that many people today also have to do. But he couldn't neglect his agency, and so he immediately set-off to completely restructure the squad.
Over the years since then, the squad was moved to a digital, remote infrastructure. With as much as a search bar, documents can be retrieved. Truck check-offs and meeting sign-ins are digital and can trigger reports. Emergency Reporting, once only used for incidents, is now utilized to a much greater extent and enables training, maintenance, inventory, and personnel to all be managed from anywhere at anytime. Any project needed to be accessed is stored on a cloud-based server, and can also be accessed at the squad or on any computer, phone, or tablet at any location. The number one cost of it all? Time.
An estimated 2,200 hours was invested into the overhaul over the span of a year and a half. For reference, if you worked 40 hours a week all 52 weeks a year, that would be 2,080. This was over two-thousand hours on top of school, training, calls, and multiple jobs.
Recognizing that this wasn't feasible (and definitely not healthy) for anyone, especially someone trying to volunteer, Austin launch Nxt Gen Response. Using tools he used previously, this kind of infrastructure overhaul can now be provided to any volunteer first response agency, saving countless precious hours volunteers desperately need to rest.
