Volunteer Resilience and Burnout: Psychosocial Factors

Background: Community-based volunteer emergency teams increasingly serve as frontline responders in disaster-prone and conflict-affected regions, yet little is known about the psychosocial resources sustaining their functioning under prolonged armed conflict. Following the October 2023 escalation of the Israel–Hizballah conflict, Local Emergency Response Team (LERT) volunteers in northern Israel operated under chronic threat and shared collective trauma alongside the communities they served. This study examined how psychosocial resources jointly shape volunteer anxiety and burnout. Methods: A cross-sectional survey of 106 LERT volunteers across 33 communities in northern Israel assessed sense of coherence, self-efficacy, individual resilience, community resilience, emergency training history, anxiety, and burnout, using hierarchical regression analysis. Results: Psychosocial resources were closely interrelated and, together, were linked to lower anxiety, supporting their role as an integrated coping system. Sense of coherence, particularly its comprehensibility component, stood out as the strongest resource linked to lower burnout. Unexpectedly, emergency training was linked to higher anxiety and lower self-efficacy and resilience. Conclusions: Here, we show that volunteer well-being in prolonged conflict depends on an ecology of psychosocial resources spanning individual, relational, and community levels, and that burnout reflects a loss of cognitive coherence rather than exhaustion alone. Training that neglects meaning-making and emotional regulation may unintentionally heighten psychological risk, underscoring the need for psychosocial support in training design, volunteer support, and responder sustainability planning worldwide.