Veteran-Led Disaster Relief Gets Its Day

What do you get the veteran-led disaster relief organization that’s busy tuning up saws and taking down trees in tornado zones? Perhaps a couple of .days. 

When Google launched the new .day domain on January 25, Team Rubicon was one of the first organizations chosen to get .days—go.day and veterans.day, to be exact. 

The two .day addresses have special meaning for the veteran-led disaster relief organization, which mobilizes a volunteer corps of veterans, first responders, and civilians to help people prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters and humanitarian crises. Disasters may be Team Rubicon’s business, but veterans are its passion. A great number of Team Rubicon’s volunteers are themselves veterans. To further serve many of those veteran volunteers Team Rubicon even offers a fellowship, named after one of its founders, Marine veteran Clay Hunt, which equips veterans with tools to redefine their purpose and self-identity and support their lives of service.

Go.day also has special meaning for Team Rubicon and its volunteers—known as Greyshirts. At 4:53 pm on January 12, 2010 a 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti. By the next day Marine Corps veteran and Team Rubicon co-founder Jake Wood had decided he couldn’t sit by and watch: he would go to Haiti and render aid. It was Go Day, a day recognized annually by the organization that resulted, Team Rubicon. 

Now, 12 Go Days on, Team Rubicon has swelled to more than 150,000 veteran-, first responder-, and civilian-volunteers. Holding the veterans.day and go.day will allow the organization to further recognize the efforts of those veteran and civilian volunteers, and to serve even more people enmeshed in disasters and humanitarian crises at home and around the world.