Red Cross Central Otago service centre co-ordinator Richard Garden, based in Dart House at Remarkables Park, said the team had been operational for almost a year, but its budget had suffered during the global economic downturn.
"Being a charity and a humanitarian organisation, we rely on donations for a lot of our income and people's finances being stretched affected their ability to give.
"We're still very happy with the more than $3 million we received for the Samoan tsunami appeal and every cent goes to emergency support and the rebuilding effort, not on our administration."
Mr Garden said it would cost more than $25,000 to fully equip the team's trailer with radios, ropes, more stretchers, generators, lights, a global positioning system and dedicated laptop.
NZ Red Cross is training nine Wakatipu residents in providing welfare support, evacuee handling and first aid in the event of a disaster.
They are being trained in a series of modules under the NZQA certificate in emergency management.
Modules in pre-hospital emergency care and urban search and rescue were to come.
Red Cross volunteers were in the field wearing their distinctive red overalls and high-visibility vests during Winter Games NZ in August.
They will attend the Motatapu 2010 mountain bike race in March for the third year.
Mr Garden said the aim was to recruit 16 to 20 volunteers.
The nine so far included a firefighter, civil engineer, air-sea rescue worker, youth worker and retailer.
"The wide variety of backgrounds we have is a huge strength because they have that life experience," Mr Garden said.
"As part of the Red Cross's national activities, we have a number of key areas and one of them is emergency response.
That is responding to major disasters where the normal emergency services are stretched; floods, earthquakes, flu pandemics, rural fire, anything of a major scale."
Although the Queenstown team has not been called out yet, Mr Garden was called out 20 times in one year when he was part of the Christchurch emergency response team.
Emergency response teams have been long established in Christchurch, Dunedin and Timaru and a team of about a dozen launched in Invercargill earlier this year.
The organisation's ambition is to draw from the teams around the South Island to create an advanced level response team, to match the two teams planned for the North Island.
A New Zealand emergency response team would be created from those three teams and would augment the existing information technologies group, which supported International Red Cross activities in the aftermath of hurricanes in Haiti this year.
In a major crisis, emergency management officer Brenden Winder, at the Queenstown Lakes District Council, would contact Mr Garden, who would mobilise the team.
"Once we do our next block training in rescue and get the rest of the equipment in the next financial year, we'll be liaising closely with police, fire and ambulance because we do respond to things which are not civil defence and if people want our help, we're here to help."
Residents interested in volunteering with the New Zealand Red Cross can email Richard Garden on centralotago@redcross.org.nz
