Join Us

Why join us?

Search and Rescue teams join the ASRC because they want to be among the best search and rescue organizations in the mid-Atlantic region.  They share our core values,  want to practice their craft at a higher level, and enable themselves to offer the best services to their clients (the lost person AND the responsible authority).

Review our governing documents to see if your organization’s philosophy is a match for ours.

Benefits of Group Membership

Membership within the ASRC offers many benefits including:

  • Access to up-to-date and high quality training standards and credentialing system;
  • Specialized interest groups who continually work to advance the state of the practice of search and rescue;
    • Wilderness medicine;
    • Unmanned aerial vehicles;
    • Remote support;
    • Use of geographic information systems in search and rescue;
    • and many more.
  • Centralized multi-agency coordination – a group of commonly trained search and rescue teams you can call on immediately for mission support and who call on you to support them;
  • Inclusion on our pooled insurance policy that includes operational liability as well as accident and sickness for use during your events and missions;
  • Access to our annual (and soon to be more frequent) search and rescue exercises which test your abilities in all operational areas including incident management, canine, sign cutting, wilderness medical care, and rescue scenarios;
  • Access to our annual Winter Retreat which is our forum, akin to a conference, where we share our knowledge with each other on both search and rescue and Group management strategies;
  • Delivery of conference products including white papers, best practices, training materials, and more!

We are regularly adding benefits and looking for ways to increase the value of membership to our Groups.

How to Join

If your Group is interested in joining the ASRC, we would like to hear from you – Contact the Membership Coordinator

If you are not affiliated with a Group, contact one of our Groups to get involved in Search and Rescue. Even if there isn’t an ASRC Group near you, you’re welcome to download and read our free Essentials for Search and Rescue. It’s a short text containing things you should know for your safety and efficacy before you start field training with a search and rescue team.