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>>GEORGE DRAKE: Our honorees today are Jacob Wood, a 29 year old and William McNulty, a
35 year old so they easily fit within the parameters of this award which his capped
at ages 40. If you see Jacob stand up it won't surprise you to learn that he was a linebacker
at the University of Wisconsin. He got away from us in that regard. Both are Marine Veteran
and since 2012, 2010, that's not very long they have worked in 35 different disasters,
both domestically and internationally.
They have deployed over 800 veterans in this service, they said 7500 in their database
and they told us again on Friday how much social media and rapid communication today
is key to their work and their organization of their veterans. They're hoping today to
build a cadre of about 10,000 veterans. So what they're doing is serving the world in
the world in their most dire need and also in the process giving great meaning to the
lives of veterans.
So it is with a sense of honor and humility that I asked President Kington to come forward
and award the Grinnell Prize to Jacob Wood and William McNulty.
[Applause]
>>GEORGE DRAKE: We'll now allow you to hear from them.
>>JACOB WOOD: Alright. We're going to actually start our presentation with a short video
that really will
>>VIDEO: On January 12th 2010,
>>WOOD: Now we're going to start with a video that really demonstrates our organization,
what we do, and more or less where we came from and the humble beginnings that launched
our organization and then we'll start the talk.
>>NARRATOR IN VIDEO: On January 12, 2010 a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast
of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. It was also the day Team Rubicon was born and called into
action. As a fleet footed group of veterans and medical first responders, we triaged thousands
of Haitians, took over management of the general hospital and listed the help of a dozen enlisted
veterans and medical volunteers and coordinated thousands of pounds of medical supplies from
the Untied States. All before the major aid organizations were fully operational on the
ground.
We knew at the time that we had set in motion a new paradigm in disaster relief and unexpectedly
we found a new method of veteran reintegration as well. When we took off the uniforms, we
did not shed our desire to serve. We also did not forget the skills we developed during
our military service. Volunteering with Team Rubicon gave us a new purpose and filled a
void we had in our civilian lives.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: I think a lot of people too after we left the military a feeling that
we wanted to do something that is I guess constructive rather than destructive.
>>MAN IN VIDEO: When you get out, you kind of have that feeling of I guess resets your
self worth and what are you really doing that's important in the world.
>>MAN IN VIDEO: We're out here, helping people and at the same time you know it's giving
back to us. It's something that obviously a lot of our veterans need.
>>MAN IN VIDEO: I have in the short time that I've been here that I still have something
to give, so there's still something there, and I didn't know that.
>>NARRATOR: This purpose, community and an improved sense of self have become the core
values of Team Rubicon and they have guided us on launch of our domestic operations in
2011, beginning with the damaging tornado in Tuscaloosa and followed by the devastation
in Joplin, we began to enlist of the services of military veterans and aid immediate disaster
relief at home. And with new disasters like Hurricane Sandy, we've taken on new responsibility
in leading civilian volunteers in the field and coordinating response with local and federal
agencies.
>>MAN IN VIDEO: What they did in a week, would have taken me 8 to 9 months to do, tens of
thousands of dollars. It was just incredible.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: Anyone who wanted to volunteer, they just grabbed them off the street, gave
them a lesson in what they needed to do and those guys just came and just did it. It was
outstanding.
>>MAN IN VIDEO: And I had forgotten that it was veterans day until I realized that veterans
who had a choice or marching in a parade choose to come to Rockaway instead.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: It just gave me a whole new perspective on what those guys are doing
and how they operate so kind, so empathetic and just so mobilized.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: They've been nothing but generous supportive and I guess I say a godsend.
We couldn't have made it through without them.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: Thank you so much for helping us at a time when we didn't know who would
help us, they were there.
>>NARRATOR: Moving forward, Team Rubicon plans to expand regional offices for domestic response
efforts, broaden veteran outreach and support programs and implement new technologies and
communication tools like those utilized in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. These technologies
have become instrumental in tracking the destruction, the needs of home owners and the efficiency
of our response team.
There will always be veterans in this country and there will always be natural disasters
and that's why Team Rubicon will always be there. Whenever, wherever.
>>JACOB WOOD: So, I would like kind of take everybody back to January 2010. And you all
saw the same images across the screen in the middle of January when we saw the devastating
images of what had transpired in Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas. I think many of
us thought the same thing: what can I do to help? I mean certainly this was possibly the
most devastating natural disaster that had happened in recent history and anybody with
sense of human compassion thought, what could I do, what could I do to help?
And the majority of the American population, of the population around the world they texted
ten dollars at a time, they gave incredible amounts of money to organizations the world
over. Literally billions of dollars were pouring in from both nations and individuals, but
there were some people including a lot of NGOs and the Untied States military that decided
they needed to get boots on the ground. And as I sat there and looked at these images,
I thought to myself, this all looks really familiar to me.
In early 2010, I was only three years removed from the Marine Corps and this isn't me, this
is William, but I spent 4 years in the United States Marine Corps and I deployed to place
all around the globe to included a tour in 2007 to Iraq's Anbar province and second tour
as a scout sniper in 2008 to the Helmand Valley of Afghanistan.
So when I saw the images coming across the screen out of Port-au-Prince, I thought, this
is no worse than Fallujah, this is no worse than Baghdad, this is no worse than Kabul,
Afghanistan. And if we're seeing all of these supplies, all of these materials pile up at
the Port-au-Prince airport, its not getting to the individual citizens of Haiti, there's
a problem with that, there's a problem with making excuses like unstable populations to
not get these supplies where it was necessary, where it was needed most.
So William and I thought to ourselves, we need to get down there, we need to use the
skills that we learned in the military. Skills like leadership, skills like risk assessment
and emergency medicine and we can go out and we can have a real impact. So we called a
number of organizations and they all said the same thing: we're not taking spontaneous
volunteers. At the time I didn't understand why, but the why didn't really matter to me.
It was the fact that they weren't allowing us to go and so we said we're going to go
anyway. We believe in ourselves enough, we believe that we can have an impact, so we're
going to do this.
So we organized a team of 8 people and we found ourselves in Port-au-Prince three days
after the earthquake. We were going all across the city, working out of a Jesuit Novitiate
camp and we were conducting medical triage clinics around the city in parts of the city,
in portions of the city that no other aid organizations would go. We would go to the
places deemed too dangerous, too inaccessible and we would treat those people on scene.
And we had a number of ah-ha moments while we were running through Port-au-Prince, but
there's one that always sticks out in my memory. We were driving through the city in a caravan
of trucks that were renting from locals. We came across this sign, if you can read the
sign, it says, help more than 6,000 people, the forgotten valley. And we saw this and
we pulled our cars to the side of the road and we got out and we looked down into the
valley and sure enough we saw that the steep valley walls had cascaded down in an avalanche
of cinder blocks and corrugated tin roofing and bodies and settled down at the very bottom
of the valley.
Now I'm certain, I'm sure that a lot of people passed by this sign and looked at that same
imagery and said it's impossible to get down there. We looked down there and said we have
to get down there. So we put our packs on our backs, we got out our ropes and we found
a way into the bottom of this valley and we treated the people at the bottom. Now, it
wasn't quite 6,000, they habit of overestimating, it was maybe more like 150, but regardless
these people had not seen any medical care and were talking 9 days after the earthquake.
And it was at this moment we kind of thought to ourselves, veterans are really good at
this. This is what we can do. We can have an impact here. We spent at this time 10 years
in combat zones perfecting small unit leadership, emergency medicine, team work, how to follow
orders, how to *** risk, how to mitigate risk. And that's all that this is.
And so whereas we went down to Port-au-Prince with no expectation of starting an NGO or
starting a non-profit organization, we left Haiti with the realization that if we started
one could actually make a tremendous difference in the world. And what we decided to do, is
that we realized we had two problems: the first problem was inadequate disaster response.
Haiti proved that it was really easy to get supplies and equipment to Haiti, it was really
hard to get it to Haitians. It was slow, it was ineffective, it was outdated. It doesn't
use the best technology and we saw it wasn't using the best human resources.
And the second problem we came across was inadequate veteran reintegration. And that
might be something you've only read of on the front page of the New York Times or the
Washington Post, but there's a huge problem that we're experiencing in this nation as
2.5 to 3 million veterans are coming from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after repeated
deployments to combat zones that are fragmented and 360 degrees at all time where driving
down the road no longer feels normal because you're an explosion away from losing your
legs.
We have a serious problem bringing those troops back and reintegrating them into civilian
life. And that's manifesting itself in a number of different ways. Veterans have higher unemployment
rates, veterans are suffering from things like post-traumatic stress, perhaps the most
damning statistic that we have is that 22 military veterans a day are committing suicide.
So we said, ok we have this problem, but perhaps we don't have two problems, we have two solutions.
Disasters often provide opportunities for service for our military veterans and veterans
offers skills and services and experiences that can have a tremendous impact on disaster
response. So what we did is we continued to explore this model and shortly thereafter
we went to the tsunami in Chile, we went to Burma to train medics on the Thai-Burma border,
we went to Pakistan after the devastating floods in 2010, in South Sudan in early 2011.
And we were conducting and perfecting this model of using military veterans to improve
disaster response, but our organization had a major road block, a major tragedy in early
2011.
This is Clay Hunt. Clay was one of the founding members of Team Rubicon, he was with us in
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he went with us to Chile after the tsunami there. Clay was also
one of my best friends. You see, Clay and I served in the Marine Corps together, we
served in the same platoon together when were deployed to Iraq where Clay was wounded by
gunfire, and we went to sniper school together where he was my partner and we deployed to
the same sniper section when we went to Afghanistan.
Clay was a national advocate for veteran reintegration. He participated in Team Rubicon, the Iraq
and Afghanistan veterans of America, he lobbied Congress, he worked for the ride to recovery
and he worked for the mission continues and all of these organizations that worked to
bring veterans home. He did a service announcement about how to go and find mental health when
you needed it.
Clay committed suicide in March, 2011. And, that was a tragedy for our organization, it
was a personal tragedy for me, and many others. And when the dust settled from Clay's suicide,
we realized we were at an inflection point in our organization. Where as originally,
we saw ourselves as a disaster response organization that was using veteran service, we realized
that disasters is just what we were doing, our real passion was veterans and after Clay's
suicide, we saw ourselves now as a veteran's service organization that was using disasters
as an opportunity to continue service. That might seem like a very subtle shift, but it
had a profound impact on our organization.
So moving on after Clay's memorial service, we launched our domestic program, and you
saw that in the video. We were provided with an opportunity almost within a month of his
funeral service when the tornadoes hit Tuscaloosa, Alabama. We deployed a team of military veterans
to Tuscaloosa and the impact was profound. It allowed us to get more veterans involved
more often and these men and women were coming together and they were, you could see the
bonds that were forming, you could see this idealism of common service and the opportunity
at finding a new mission and finding a new community and feeling like yourself again
is exactly what these men and women needed.
We really had boiled it down to three things: the first thing is purpose. Imagine you're
an 18 year old boy who graduated from high school, you join the army. The army gives
you a rifle, they train you up and they send you to Iraq. And every day you leave the wire,
you have a purpose. You fight for your country, you're leading a team of 13 men on a squad,
on a patrol, and you're responsible for them, you come home, you get out of the army, you
go back to Omaha, Nebraska wherever you're from originally. Maybe you get job, maybe
you go to school, maybe you get a family, but there's a little hole inside there that
can't be filled by anything in civilian life. You lack that service. We can provide that
Imagine that same 18 year old boy graduates from high school, he joins the army, the army
gives him a rifle, ships him off to Iraq and everyday for 12 months he has the same band
of brothers around him and he looks them all in the eye before he leaves the wire and he
knows that they're all responsible for each other and he knows that each one of them will
die for him and he'll die for them. And that 18 year old boy comes back, he's now 21 gets
back from the army, he goes back to Omaha, his high school friends have moved on, now
what? Maybe he's got some co-workers, maybe there's some students at the college that
he's going to, but its not the same. It doesn't really replace it. We might be able to do
that; we might be able to provide that community through continued service for that veteran.
The last one is self-worth. You got that same 18 year old boy, graduates high school, army
gives him a rifle, sends him off to Iraq. He wears a uniform with pride, he comes home,
they pin a medal on his chest, everyone slaps him on the back and says thank you for your
service, you're a hero. He takes that uniform off, now he's just Joe. Maybe he's Joe the
mechanic, maybe he's Joe the barber, maybe he's Joe the college professor, but now he's
just Joe. Where does he find that sense of self again? Well I think that we can do that.
I think that we can give that person a uniform again. I think we can give them an opportunity
to serve, an opportunity to be a part of the fabric of the community again, to be a part
of a team, to have a new mission. For us, that mission is disaster response.
>>WILLIAM McNULTY: So, the first inflection point of the organization as Jake talked about
was Clay's suicide. That caused us to shift the focus from the disaster victims to the
veteran to give him those three things: purpose, community and self-worth. The second inflection
point of the group was Hurricane Sandy, the reason why we couldn't be here in November
to accept the prize.
Hurricane Sandy was an inflection point because it actually changed our model. So while in
the past we would deploy these very small, 8 to 10 man teams in order to bridge that
gap in the interim period between a natural disaster and conventional large scale aid
response. Well, when Hurricane Sandy happened and we established our selves at this forward
operating base in the Rockaway, during the week, hundreds and during the weekend thousands
of civilians spontaneous unaffiliated volunteers, we call them SUVs, showed up and asked to
be involved in our mission.
And so we took a look at our model of what was the 8 to 10 man team of military veterans
and we said, you know what, that's 8 to 10 potential leaders. And so we broke down those
teams and we took one to two military veterans and we attached 20 to 40 civilians, we gave
them personal protection equipment, safety brief, the work orders and those teams lead
by veterans and those civilians or SUVs became force multipliers, so while we deployed over
300, we managed over 10,000 civilians who showed up at the Rockaway offering to help.
The missions, the type of work that we conducted was actually not dissimilar to what we had
done in the past: initially search and rescue, route clearing, debris removal, home mucking,
these are things we had all done before, we just were just able to do it a whole lot more
by adding civilians to our operations.
We conducted over 900 work orders, saving the community over $4 million. The level of
support we received for Hurricane Sandy was unprecedented for our missions. Goldman Sachs
gave us a two million, quarter of a million dollars to finance our operation. Home Depot,
Jet Blue provided over 150 free round trip flights, all of our equipment was provided
for by our partnership with the Home Depot Foundation.
But perhaps most impressive was the incorporation of particular piece of technology that I had
used when I left the intelligence community or when I was serving in the intelligence
community and this is my background. As a civilian I served in the intelligence agency
at the Undersecretary for Intelligence and with the Department of Treasury. One of the
tools we used to discover latent connections between terrorists and IED explosions was
called Palantir.
Now Palantir came to us before the response and they said, hey we think we can help you,
we think we can help you manage your workflow. So they deployed with us and we didn't know
how this was going to work out because we hadn't worked with Palantir before Sandy so
we were literally making this up on the fly. But we used it to manage our workflow, so
what we did is we took all of the work orders that we were taking and this was pen and paper
and Palantir digested that information and they displayed it on a map and we looked for
clusters of activity on that map and we assigned work order based on those clusters of activity.
It was truly revolutionizing our process and today President Clinton is trying to take
this software program that's now being used for disaster response that was once used for
catching terrorists.
Now, let's go back to Clay. When we showed up at Clay's funeral, there were three marines
who were living near him that didn't know that he had recently moved to Houston and
those three Marines had actually served with Clay. And so it got us to thinking, how do
we solve this problem of veteran reintegration. Military units are piece-mailed together and
they come, they work together in the military, but when they leave the service, they go back
home, they lose that connection, they lose that camaraderie, they lose that core. Well,
at Team Rubicon, we're trying to solve that through continued service. Continued service
is our way of building community.
But when we showed up at Clay's funeral, we were just surprised that there were three
Marines that he had served with that lived within ten miles of him, but Clay didn't know
it. So the fact that he had a community. So we developed and launched a program called
pause-rep and pause-rep is designed to maintain that community. So imagine if Clay had been
using this program, this app that is now available, if he could have taken all of those Marines
that he had served with and put them into what's called a squad on this app, he would
have received a push notification when he came within a set distance of him. So this
is our way of using technology to help solve the problem of veteran reintegration and how
to maintain community in this post 9/11 world.
So, Jake and I are members of the American Legion. I served in Iraq as a civilian so
I'm not actually not allowed to be a member of the VFW but Jake is and Jake is a member
of the VFW as well. But the larger problem is that our generation is not embracing the
American Legion and the VFW. So that's why we came up with this model based on continued
service.
So, I want to give you guys a quick brief about why we chose Team Rubicon to close out
this presentation as well as end on a very upbeat video about our work during Hurricane
Sandy.
So, first the logo: the reason that we chose the logo is because if you think of the current
model or the current symbol of the medic being the red cross, turned on its side because
the current model of disaster relief needs improvement and broken open to represent the
river Rubicon. Now Team Rubicon the name is important because the term Rubicon is a term
used by journalists to mean you're past the point of no return, harks back to the small
river in northeastern Italy called Rubicon that when Caesar crossed it, it was considered
an act of war.
Well our point of no return was the Artibonite River separating the Dominican Republic and
Haiti on our very first mission. And at that point when we crossed that river, we were
delivering these doctors and supplies to Port-au-Prince, we weren't turning backing and returning to
the Dominican Republic. That was our point of no return. And team because of the small
units, the small teams that we worked with in the Marine Corps in special operations
community, hence the name Team Rubicon. Now to finish the presentation, we're going to
show a short presentation about our response to Sandy.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: I walked out just as the sun was coming out, just around 7 to mayhem.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: we lost just about everything in our basement and garage to about 6 feet
of water, devastation all over the town and the bright light was Team Rubicon.
>>MAN IN VIDEO: We were standing there looking at everything and thinking what are we going
to do? And they just came in like a swarm of locus and took over.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: My basement was flooded. Some men came in, they ripped out sheet rock,
flooring, carried everything out to the curb.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: Team Rubicon was standing on the corner these guys in grey t-shirts
and you know that these are the people that are going to help.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: From day one, they've been here every day, helping, shoveling, digging,
offering support, a shoulder to cry on, supplies, food, anything that we needed.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: Volunteers came over and helped us take out all the trash, now trash,
all of our belongings, our personal items.
>>WOMEN IN VIDEO: I said, look I need some guidance here because I don't know what to
do. And she totally got me focused, snapped me out of my daze.
>>MAN IN VIDEO: And what they did in a week, would have taken me 8 to 9 months to do, 10s
of thousands of dollars. They're just absolutely incredible.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: Anybody walking down the street that wanted to volunteer, they just
grabbed them off the street, gave them a lesson in what they needed to do and those guys just
came and just did it. It was outstanding.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: The fact that so many Team Rubicon members are veterans just makes it
that much more special.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: So, I'm feeling as though they're giving twice to the community. Not
only to the country but also to the community.
>>MAN IN VIDEO: And I had forgotten that it was Veterans Day until I realized that veterans
who had a choice of marching in a parade chose to come to Rockaway and chose to help us instead.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: It just gave me a whole new perspective on what those guys are doing
and how they operate so organized so kind, so empathetic, and just so mobilized.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: They've been nothing but generous, supportive and as I say, a godsend.
We couldn't have made it through without them.
>>MAN IN VIDEO: They gave us a light at the end of the tunnel and that light is getting
brighter every single day.
>>WOMAN IN VIDEO: Thank you so much for helping us at a time when we didn't know who would
help us, they were there. Thank you.