BATON ROUGE -- With hurricane season less than a month away, the American Red Cross is rallying its leaders and volunteers long before the season starts or a storm could enter the Gulf.Saturday afternoon, the Red Cross's Capital Area Chapter held a summit in Baton Rouge to sharpen its response plan . At the summit, the Red Cross trained volunteers, discussed strategy for how people would be deployed if a disaster happened, and finding ways to ensure a clear network of communication.The Capital Area chapter told WBRZ that the summit was the first time in five years that they held a summit like Saturday's, long before the start of hurricane season. One of the reasons for it was new preset shelters.nbsp;"For any pre-hurricane landfall, we plan on opening about 20 shelters," Red Cross Disaster Specialist Keith Alvey said.The Red Cross told WBRZ that the 20 pre-set shelters would be placed around the state and would be activated if a hurricane emergency were implemented.nbsp;However, to run those shelters, many volunteers are needed.nbsp;"We do not have 20 employees who work in disaster services in the American Red Cross in Louisiana," Alvey said.Volunteers make up around 90% of the Red Cross' workforce."The work that we do takes 100s of volunteers," Capital Area Chapter Executive Director Micah Nicholas said.The Red Cross partners with volunteers from churches, community organizations, and more."We work very closely with organizations like the Southern Baptist. When we have a large shelter, we have hundreds or thousands of people in it. When we bring them in, they have expertise in preparing meals, and if we're serving five thousand meals a day, they will come in, set up in the parking lot, and we provide the food."All volunteers have to go through a training process in order to participate."It's super easy. A lot of it's done online, modules that you listen to, some of it's hands-on, and it's something that can be done during the time of a disaster," Kathleen McGlone, who's volunteered for the Red Cross for three years, said. "A lot of times, people come in from the communities themselves, and we're able to do just-in-time training with them."Other Volunteers, such as Jack Whitehead, who has volunteered for 14 years, have been using their own experiences to find new ways to help.nbsp;"I was over in Oakdale, Louisiana. We loaded up a huge fan, a big old truck full of diapers and wipes. You cannot buy diapers and wipes after a hurricane. We're trying to get something underway called Operation Clean Hiney, where we can use part of the foodbank to have these prepared and ready to go at a moment's notice," Whitehead said.Nicholas says the chapter is finding ways to understand the gaps in a community's service and find ways to leverage its resources to help with it."One of the things that we've really worked on this year is working with our partner organizations in blue skies, before disaster even happens. To understand community capacity, to understand what the community can already do for themselves, but how the American Red Cross can pitch in and help communities as well," Nicholas said.The American Red Cross recommends that citizens start finalizing their own emergency plans, whether it's building an emergency kit or having a plan for evacuation if a storm were to hit.The ARC also says it is looking for more volunteers. If someone is interested in becoming a volunteer, the Red Cross says information can be found on their website atnbsp;www.redcross.org/volunteerThe American Red Cross is also holding a summit in Alexandria on Sunday at 4 p.m.nbsp;Permalink| Comments ...read more read less