When people need to evacuate, they often don’t have the opportunity to take with them the basics like shampoo, toothpaste, diapers and baby supplies. Learn how the Red Cross helped provide essential items to people impacted by flooding this spring.
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David Fraser has been a disaster management and communications volunteer for more than 10 years, providing comfort in times of emergency for many Canadians. Recently, he received the highest honour as a volunteer, the Order of the Red Cross, for his dedication in going above and beyond to help others.
Whether ensuring people are getting the equipment they need, or washing and maintaining returned equipment, the Red Cross Health Equipment Loan Program (HELP) relies on its volunteers.
To mark National Indigenous Peoples Day, we wanted to share some of the ways Red Cross is working in partnership with Indigenous communities across the country, in response to disasters as well as through programs to promote preparedness, safety, and wellbeing.
Omar Abdullahi, a social worker who lives in Winnipeg, volunteers with the safety and wellbeing team of the Canadian Red Cross. He is working with evacuees from the northern Manitoba wildfires.
Before coming to Canada, Omar and his family were refugees from the Somalian civil war. When he was about 10 years old, his family, including his six sisters and two brothers, fled Mogadishu for the Kenyan border.
At first glance, it’s hard to understand what Pat Alphonse Cox does for the Canadian Red Cross. Volunteering at the Winnipeg reception centre for wildfire evacuees, Pat chats for a few minutes with a large, boisterous family from Pauingassi First Nation; corrals a small, energetic child closer to her mom; and then sits quietly with a slouching teenager. It all seems a little random, but on closer examination, Pat’s role becomes clear and her work crucial. Pat is a Safety and Wellbeing responder with the Canadian Red Cross.
When a devastating tropical storm swept villages out to sea and killed hundreds of people in his Philippine city, Al Madale just knew he needed to return to Red Cross.
Left Fort McMurray today after an exhausting but incredibly satisfying experience. The emotion of what you do, see and hear each day during a disaster is not easily described. I saw the devastation and felt the void of an evacuated city but I was also moved by hundreds of remarkable people!