Our core disaster relief project is our annual 9/11 Anniversary “barn-raising” where we empower survivors of 9/11 and disaster survivors from across the United States to help rebuild and strengthen communities recovering from their own tragedy through large scale community-wide volunteer projects.
Our core volunteer group consists of FDNY firefighters (many of them survivors of the World Trade Center attacks), as well as Ground Zero construction workers, 9/11 family members, and volunteers of all ages from the New York City metropolitan area. We are also joined each year by a growing group of disaster survivors from all the communities around the U.S. who have assisted on previous anniversaries of 9/11 and who continually volunteer at subsequent rebuilding projects as their way to “Pay It Forward.” This group includes California wildfire survivors, Hurricane Katrina survivors from Louisiana and Mississippi, tornado survivors from Illinois, Indiana, Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Arkansas, Georgia, and Missouri, flooding survivors from North Dakota, and Hurricane Sandy survivors from New York City and Long Island.