A Volunteer Minister (VM) is a member of Scientology sent to a disaster zone to spread the doctrine of Scientology and provide disaster relief. The program was created in the 1970s by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. As of 2016, the volunteer ministers has a network of over 9,000 trained ministers. The Church of Scientology says that the program constitutes "the only effective steps to arrest and reverse the deterioration of [the] world", but critics argue that Scientology uses the program to gain positive media attention and recruit new members (known within Scientology as "raw meat"). There has been controversy over the group's goals and activities, although one local official in India welcomed their assistance. Objectives According to Hubbard, the objective of the program is to "put basic Dianetics and Scientology technology into view and into use at the raw public level." In Hubbard's words, The Volunteer Minister's Handbook "will be broadly distributed on Scn and non-Scientology lines, bought by the man on the street. He'll use some of the data, produce some miracles, save a marriage or two, rescue some kid from drugs, help his next door neighbor who's upset because her child's failing in school and couldn't care less, plus brighten up her yawning of Spring and teach him to study, and handle Aunt Martha's dizziness with assists." Each Volunteer Minister pays to attend a two-week course and purchase Scientology materials; in 1994, these materials cost $435. The book is called The Scientology Handbook and is 968 pages long. Scientology spokesman Eric Roux writes: “A Scientology volunteer minister is trained to bring spiritual assistance to anyone in any aspect of life, whether it is to increase his communication ability, his study skills, help raising children or save marriages, as well as dozens of other domains of intervention.” Origins The program is the successor to earlier Scientology outreach efforts, notably the "Casualty Contact" program for recruiting new Scientologists (called "preclears") from hospitals, the scenes of accidents and other places where people might have experienced trauma. As Hubbard put it, "One takes every daily paper he can get his hands on and cuts from it every story whereby he might have a preclear. [...] He should represent himself to the person or the person's family as a minister whose compassion was compelled by the newspaper story concerning the person. [...]." Hubbard advised that "using his minister's card, an auditor need