EMS could learn a huge lesson here. Firefighters march in parades, stand on street corners with a boot collecting donations, visit schools and sick children and what do they get for it? Respect, and money lots and lots of money. Until EMS learns the art of self promotion aka PR it will always take second seat to Fire and EMS when the money is doled out.
1) many non-private EMS agencies do march in parades. they use taxpayer dollars to buy dress uniform and take (usually) a reserve piece to the parade to show off. All too often EMS doesn't have the spare trucks or budget to afford dress uniforms that aren't worn on a truck, or the higher ups won't justify paying for the fuel
2) many of those times they are collecting donations, they are either volunteer firefighters collecting to have money to put fuel in the trucks, on duty career or volunteer FFs collecting for a cause (who leave if an alarm comes in), or off duty career FFs (the rare ones). EMS to too busy to do that, because we are usually begging for operating money (the first one), or if the 2nd option, too busy because the truck will go on a call, and as for the 3rd one, many of our families don't want to us doing work related stuff after our 2nd job when we should spend time with them.
3) visiting schools and sick children. yes, we should be doing this. true, if you are in the 4th floor of a hospital, visiting sick kids and you get a call, someone will complain that your response time is too extended (running though the hall, waiting for the elevator, looking up the address, etc). But we should definitely visit schools more, if we can get the staff who aren't tied up on waiting EMS calls.
4) we need more PR staff. Big EMS agencies need a full time dedicated public information officer, small ones need a Part time PIO who dedicated 20 hours a week just to interactions with the public. We need more positive PR, more coordination with the media, more friends in the media, more media coverage of what we did, more action shots of EMS in action. I've been saying it for years, but most won't allocate funding for it, or refuse to see the value of a good PIO.