About IERF
Service before self.
United States Air Force core value
Our founder served under it in uniform, then carried it through a career in public safety. IERF is what that value looks like out of uniform.
Why we exist
What we kept seeing.
Anyone who has worked in public safety or served in uniform has run into the same wall: there are times when emergency resources simply cannot reach you quickly.
From Katrina to Helene, nineteen years apart, the pattern repeats. Standing up a coordinated response takes time. Roads close and access becomes the binding constraint, not willingness. In that gap, communities hold themselves together and survive until help can get through.
IERF partners with other nonprofits on that response, and we will keep doing it. But the conclusion we kept arriving at is that teaching a community to carry itself through the first 72 hours does more good than anything we can deliver after the fact.
A community that can hold on for three days does not need to be rescued. It needs to be resupplied.
It also opens a conversation that rarely happens in time: water purification, solar and backup power, and the supplies a neighbourhood should have staged before the road closes rather than after.
Time with Joint Task Force-Bravo at Soto Cano showed our founder the other half of it: what it looks like when the United States works alongside Central American partners instead of arriving to take over. Training their people, in their communities, so the capability stays when the aircraft leaves.
IERF is that model at a scale a small charity can sustain.
Mission
“IERF strengthens community resilience by providing lifesaving training, emergency preparedness, and support to underserved communities.”
Our programmes exist for the moments where the system has not arrived yet: a cardiac arrest in a kitchen, a bleed at a roadside, a storm that has cut the road. In places with fewer resources and longer response times, those moments last a great deal longer.
So we teach simple, effective skills that reduce panic and improve outcomes, the kind a person can actually recall when their hands are shaking. And where a local service is already doing the work well but short of equipment, we supply it rather than duplicating it.
Empowerment through knowledge saves lives. Everything else we do follows from that sentence.
Accountability
Don’t take our word for it.
Every claim below can be checked independently, by you or by a funder. Here is where to start.
Gold Transparency 2025Click for our profile- Legal status
- 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 33-4658339
- Governance
- IERF's board members serve as volunteers.
- Where we work
- Statewide across Florida; based in Río Hato, Panama, with work across the country
- Transparency
- Gold Seal of Transparency, verified on Candid
What we hold to
Seven commitments.
Preparedness saves lives
Training before the emergency, not sympathy after it.
Service with integrity
Honest about what we have done, what we have not, and what your money bought.
Community first
We build capability inside a community rather than arriving to perform it.
Excellence through experience
Our instruction comes from people who have worked real incidents, not from a slide deck.
Global commitment, local impact
Underserved and remote places get the same standard as anywhere else.
Veteran leadership
Founded and led by people formed in military and public safety service.
Collaboration over duplication
We back organisations already doing the work instead of competing with them.