Welcome to iHeartRadio Communities, a public affairs special focusing on the biggest issues impacting you. This week, here's Ryan Gorman. Thanks so much for joining us here on iHeartRadio Communities. I'm Ryan Gorman, and we have an important conversation lined up for you for this episode of the show. We're going to talk to a humanitarian aid organization active not just across the country, but all around the world. They're on a mission to improve the health and lives of
people affected by poverty or emergencies. So for more on this, I'm joined now by Thomas Tide, the president and CEO of Direct Relief, which you can learn more about at direct relief dot org. Thomas, thanks so much for coming on the show, and let's start with how your organization first came about.
Well, first, thanks for having me Ryan, I appreciate it. And yeah, Direct Relief has been around since nineteen forty eight, originally founded by war immigrant refugees from who fled the kind of the Nazis in World War Two and ended up in California with some of their wealth intact, so it's now.
Direct Relief was originally just.
A private philanthropic effort of a guy named William Zimden, and he was a business person and he thought it was really important to engage businesses and people like himself to keep this humanitarian type of work outside of politics and government.
So it's still retained that basic thrust like what.
Is needed and how can we engage people in businesses in these events in the world and mobilized resources that people need to can afford and directly now focuses largely, almost exclusively on health related needs, whether it's access to medications or supplies or essentials, and a lot a lot of times the visibility arises for our organization when there's a car crash type wreck, or an international incident, a typhoon or a hurricane, or an earthquake or a fire.
Out here in the West.
But we really every day respond to this chrome of gaps that exist in society for people who need things they can't afford, and trying to mobilize in a private a political way resources to help them. And we do that in all fifty states providing free medications. We do it in about one hundred countries a year. And in those places that are that we work with typically at direct relief that are chronically resourced to prive. They tend to be the places that get slammed the hardest by
an emergency, whether it's of any type. I mean, poor people tend to suffer the brunt of these things with more severely because they have less cushion, it's harder to bounce back, and often in a weathery late emergency, live in kind of the most challenging places substandard housing, low floodplain.
So we've learned a lot along the way of what to.
Expect, how to anticipate, in how to respond in a way that complements the official actions of governments who play a huge role about mobilizing private resources efficiently, effectively and respectfully.
How did your time serving as a chief of Staff and chief operating Officer of the Peace Corps help you with the role that you're serving in today and direct relief?
Well, contrary to what the Peace Corps is, that's sort of the resource that the Peace Corps.
Provides is the human resource.
I mean when I was there was seven thousand people serving in ninety countries, and that is the means through which the objectives of the Peace Corps to do good work that's needed and requested by a country but also have an opportunity for Americans to work alongside people they probably otherwise wouldn't meet in places they likely otherwise wouldn't
go on vacation. So I think just the logistics of getting thousands of people, recruiting them placely and making sure there was they had their modest eighty dollars a year or a month's salary in their bank account and their medications. There was a big legition six element to the Peace Corps and navigating the unanticipated circumstances an outbreak of war or these emergencies is you make your plans and then
you adjust to reality. So that was good grounding for direct relief, which is primarily working with already trained people in a lot of these places and making sure that we're mobilizing stuff and money, not people as much as
which the Peace Corps did. But it was very helpful contextually just to understand the dynamics of how these situations unfolded emergency and also have an appreciation for how difficult circumstances are for many people in the world, in developing countries or poorer parts of the United States, that day to day isn't always smooth, and so there's these chronic challenges.
The more you see you just have a deep appreciation for how many severe challenges people face, and it's kind of compelling to want to do something to help them out. So the same spirit, much different approach in many ways, but I think the same underlying spirit of trying to help folks who have needs that are usually severe, trying to do it in a respectful way that's you know,
works for them in their country. And that's been a good reminder of Direct Relief as we end up working in a lot of places around the world where there's sensitivities and you know, mistrust or from whatever reasons, political or otherwise. So it's been a good grounding reminder for me personally as we travel around at Direct Relief and try to make sure that it's understood we have no other agenda other than helping. There's not a political or
governmental objective. It's purely humanitarian and that's worked well for us.
I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by Thomas Tie President and CEO of Direct Relief. You can learn more about the work they do and support that work at direct relief dot org. Since we're in the middle of hurricane season, I want to go back to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in twenty seventeen, tell us about your response to that disaster in Puerto Rico.
Yeah, and with Hurricane Maria, it was interesting, kind of not unusual for Directoria because for the ten years prior to Maria occurring, directlif had been assisting in Puerto Rico, working with the local community health centers and basically providing essential medications and supplies that their patients needed but couldn't afford.
So we had a structure, we have a protocol, and because we deal with prescription medications, I mean were licensed in all fifty states to provide prescription medications, we had a protocol. So we received in a ten years prior a total of zero contributions for Puerto Rico.
I mean, it was just one of the things we did.
It wasn't a focused effort, it wasn't a fundraising effort. But after Maria, when all attention was riveted on Puerto Rica, go Basically what direct Relief did at the time was what it had already been doing.
We just did more of it faster.
We knew there was a crisis, there was a loss of all the medications on the island that required cold storage when the power went out, So we mobilized and flew in a lot of material through the same protocol, and then we were fortunate enough to receive financial support from the public who saw what Direct Relief was doing and put money towards us. But we basically put that money in trust and told the Puerto Ricans like, look, this money came to Direct Leaf, but we recognized it's
for you, how should we spend it. It's we're focused on the health needs. And what they told us was that what really crushed them and amplified the problems was the loss of power because they couldn't function, that the health facilities, the electronic records for patients weren't available, that
drugs were lost. So kind of surprisingly to us at the time, we ended up providing a lot of the funding support to do is to build solar and battery storage microgrids at these facilities so that they wouldn't go down and they could continue to operate in this environment where power does go out when they're storms and it's very expensive. So that ultimately led to a whole initiative of Power for Health that we're doing in the Gulf States.
In California and other places for.
The same reasons that if the power goes down these days, we are all so much more dependent on that for everything, but including in healthcare, where you know, everything from your patient records to getting an X ray or having a vaccine that requires cold storage. Power is just kind of a prerequisite for the delivery of health services, and direct Leaf has tried to lean into that and has done a lot in Puerto Rico, now Texas, Louisiana, California, North
Carolina because it's a recurring pattern. So that was one takeaway that you can't separate the power availability from the livay of health services anymore than you can.
Divorce it from anything else.
And we're highly dependent on power for functioning in day to day lives, and that's equally true in healthcare and in emergencies as it is on a day.
To day basis.
So that's that was a big takeaway that was, of course followed by COVID. We're kind of reinforced the need for having a proper cold storage facility for vaccines, you know, which was the way to prevent COVID and treating COVID actually at the time required medical oxygen.
Because it was a respiratory disease.
So again, some of these infrastructure investments, so for power to generate medical oxygen which is in the kind of essential medicine actually that you can't substitute anything for. And maintaining cold storage what they call a cold chain supply chain is something that we've been leading into ever since Puerto Rico, and thankfully, with Winternesta recently blew through and knocked out half the power in Puerto Rico, each one of the facilities that Directli had provided a small microgrid
to did not go down, did not lose power. We're able to stay open and serving their patients, which was sort of the whole point of it. But yeah, we've learned a lot the hard way, I think, just responding to these emergencies that are statistically becoming more frequent, more severe and lasting longer. And out there in the East Coast and the Caribbean it's hurricanes.
Out here in the West, it's wildfires.
That have similar crippling effects on society, and so we're trying to from a health perspective, how can we make the resiliency better upfront so the consequences aren'ter severe and have a much better, more informed rapid response based on the information we've learned, and unfortunately that's really much of it started with Puerto Rico, and we've learned a lot and try to apply it wherever we can.
That regional disaster response hub that you set up in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, how vital has that been because you know, when we track these storms that come through that region, obviously there's always a huge focus on whether or not it's going to make landfall with the continentally United States, but you have a lot of countries, a lot of islands along the way that don't necessarily have the infrastructure that we have here in the United
States and can get hit really hard by these storms.
Right now, I think that having a hub there so we can stage material that's likely to be needed, I mean taterintitively. We think that of an emergency is you know, my gosh, there's a lot of traumatic injury, which does happen occasionally, but really a lot of the displacement.
Or loss of power.
Who actually statistically gets into a health crisis are people who are managing a chronic condition on a day to day basis, say asthma, or diabetes or hypertension. But when things you know, go awry, that they become unmanaged conditions. You can't get your insulin. If you're a personal diabetes, you can go into crisis. If you don't have access to your medications. If you have hypertension, you have chest pains,
that's going to put you in the hospital. And if you have asthma, don't have access because you had to flee your home and you don't have it Inhaler. Simple though it may seem that is who ends up in the hospitals, I mean because they're in these emergent crises.
So those are the types of things that we've been trying to.
Stockpile locally in secure facilities with reliable power and make them available as well as also responding to neighboring islands. Quet Becau's a bit of a hub for the Caribbean, as is Miami, but I think we've worked with a lot of the smaller Caribbean nations that you know, Hurricane Beryl just pummeled, you know, went through Jamaica, went through Grenada, picture Mexico when they came up to Texas and two million people without power and that was you know, an
early storm this year. We can't stop them, but we can anticipate what is likely to happen and move as rapidly as possible and ask more focused questions for the things that we're in a particularly good situation to help with. It was just really access to the medications and medical
essentials increasingly power. It just comes up all the time, which is why we've tried to lean into that in places likely to be hit and provide funding so that they can have their health facilities or distribution facilities powered up. And that's I think there's going to be more of that in the features as we project out and see the patterns are pretty clear.
Is there a difference in your response at direct relief to a hurricane as opposed to a wildfire situation out west?
You know some significant differences.
I think the risks from wildfires and they both cause can cause mass evacuations, But wildfire, as we've seen, provide a particular risk for people.
Who have compromised breathing.
If you have the asthma, for example, all that fine particulate matter in the wildfire smoke.
Can again put people in a crisis.
So we have a lot of ppe and even before COVID, we were manufacturing our own N ninety five masks really for wildfire relief for people who were found themselves in
a zone affected by wildfires. But I think you know mass movements, if there's a mass evacuation, that in itself has a similar health risk, whether it's from a hurricane or from a fire, because people often flee without access to their basics and find themselves in crisis because of that in managing their condition, so some of the circumstances
are obviously different. The risks of crossing flooded waterways are high, similar to trying to get out of a place like in Paradise, California, where the access is limited from the fire itself, But we're less involved in that direct management of the crisis. I mean, thankfully, the emergency response capability the United States is getting better and better and more tech enabled, and we work closely with them, but they're trying to save.
The people and get them to safety.
I think director release role is really beyond the emergence of immediacy of the search and rescue or evacuation and then trying to stabilize and make sure resources that are appropriate are available for the people wherever they happen to be, and then staying with them because as you know, I think you're in Florida, I believe and.
I think these things.
The coverage often is as a weather event that then ends, but these can be five or ten years of social reconstruction. I mean the infrastructure, the loss of jobs, and so all the pressures that result from these major natural disasters are not over when the headlines fade, and sometimes they're just beginning. So we're trying to be sensitive to that and he continue to have a private philanthropic channel for
medical help and health related support available for people. And we're still very active in Puerto Rico because many people still haven't bounced back fully from seven.
Years ago when Maria happened.
You can start an extraordinary social event that these events have and with a significant effect on people's health and well being.
I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by Thomas Tide, President and CEO of Direct Relief. You can learn more about the work they do and support that work at direct relief dot org. We've been talking about your work in response to natural disasters, but tell us about the work you've done in Ukraine following the Russian invasion that led to so many Ukrainians being displaced.
Right, I mean to your last point, I mean that's a much different cause, right, the Russians attacking in this invasion, but many the same effects.
I mean, mass displacement of people.
Everything I just said about people having to flee and not being able to manage their health or manything's hugely traumatic in many ways. So we have tried to essentially build a private channel to bring in and subsidize the Ukrainian healthcare system for people who still need the basics as well as the traumatic care, and have a channel that is efficient and transparent, and it's also heavily regulated because we're managing with drugs but bringing in medications. So
that's been the largest thing directlyif has ever done. It's exceeded at one point three billion dollars of material flow. But basically setting up a structure is a philanthropic effort that is trying to model on what a commercial company would do if they were selling it, because all the
same functional activities are the same. It's warehousing, distribution, inventory management, tracking, inventory controls, and so we've been doing that at scale with the both the Ukrainian government and many of the Ukrainian NGOs that are trying to pick up the slack as the government has focused its efforts on defending the country.
You know, it's in a survival mode. So a lot of the local ngeos, non governmental organizations have tried to provide the social services for people, whether it's proma counseling and we've been able to provide funding for that or even mobile medical units because of the need for you know, moving populations.
The fixed sites for hospitals.
Don't always correspond to where people run to for safety. So I think building in that flexibility and providing the financial resources with the funds that have come in for Ukraine, as well as an ongoing effort to fill the gaps that exist in there just their medical supplies, which are significant because of the priority that just needs to go defending the nation and its people. So it continues to be a high pace, high volume activity and still very fluid.
The just tragic state of the ongoing war. It's just caused so much trauma. One of the other things we've done with the primarily with the funding that's coming in to directly is funding some of their prosthetics and general occupational rehabilitation that comes along in people who suffer serious injury or loss of a lamb, which is a long, hard slog and deeply dedicated people, and they just did not have a whole lot of capacity to deal with that.
There are more people with amputations, it is said, in Ukraine than have existed in Europe since World War One, so this is not something they were set up to
manage or deal with. So that is a good case we believe for use of the philanthropic money that directlyief is received, and we're working carefully with some of the leaders, both private and in the public sector in Ukraine to get some of these areas, these of specialty care stabilized and funded, and then the supplies and even the tools and the prosthetics manufacturing industry set up as best we can.
But that's not something that we're had a lot of experience with, but it was relevant to the circumstances and just an unfolding tragedy that I've had the opportunity to see a dozen times so far.
One note that you have on your page on the website at Directrelief dot org about Ukraine, but I'm assuming this holds for the other situations that you respond to. You know, we think of medical aid and sometimes it's prescription drugs, trauma kits, things like that, but you list things like cancer drugs, insulin. There are people in the aftermath of what Ukraine has been facing, or what Puerto
Rico face in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. These storms, when they hit the wildfires, their cancer battle doesn't just stop because there has been this life changing event that has happened around them. And so that's where it seems like, you know, in addition to everything else you're providing, that is just so crucial and potentially life saving.
Right, Yeah, we've seen that, and I think the interruption of cancer care can really diminish a patient's prospect. So I think we see this often where it's naturally think trauma and you know, all the crush wounds and trauma care, but there's also people who the day before were undergoing managing a health crisis or trying to tackle cancer in treatment and all that gets interrupted. I mean, the whole
status que gets blown up when these things happen. So again, trying to mobilize the resources that are some of these are very specific specialized medications, so working with the Center of Cancer Care, the referral centers to make sure that they have access to medications that we can mobilize because again I think the whole country is the old classic economic choice between guns or butter. You know, you can spend on limited amount of money goes to one or
the other. Well, they're definitely a gun's first, trying to defend themselves, and so the resources available for just general care of the citizens is obviously compromised, and that's where we're trying to provide the support with recognition that it doesn't matter if it's a hurricane that interrupts your care or the Russians invading and bombing the facility. The effect on the person is the same.
They don't have access to what's needed to maintain their health.
So in any ways, it's similar to what direct lief experiences, but the cause of the human cause buying with tension to inflict suffering for whatever the Russians warrims are define me. You know, our activities are very similar. We work with the people who are well placed and experts. It gets very specific, very quick, and we have to have very strong controls and manage the transport and provision of prescription
or specialized medications very very carefully. So that's been a higher degree of difficulty than is the norm, just because of the circumstances. But the basic underlying activity is the same mobilized private resources. As best we can stay out of politics and make sure that the help gets the people the most efficient way we can possibly function.
I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by Thomas Tig, President and CEO of Direct Relief, which you can learn more about and support at direct relief dot org. I want to get to two other aspects of your work, maternal health and your response to outbreaks. Can you dive into that for us?
I think maternal health is just one of those organizing principles that maybe doesn't get the attention that an earthquake would, but it's you know, the fact is that most of the deaths that occurred during childbirth, for example, are preventable. I think all the research has shown that the most important intervention is just making sure that women who are pregnant and delivering have someone who's trained companying them when
they're giving birth. So that's why Directorli worked for a few years with the International Confederation of Midwives to develop a standard kit that trained midwives would need to perform, you know, their skills that they're trained to perform.
A lot of the work goes into training a midwife.
It's a four year program, and so we recognize that, well, that's great that you know how to fish, but you need to f wishing poll to catch one, right, I mean sort of in the same analogy. And so we worked with them to develop a standard that we can provide to midwives who are trained around the world so that they're equipped to perform the jobs they're trained to do.
And that is something we look at. In emergencies in particularly, the midwives have been terrifically motivated, including last summer and Maui when.
They're the horrible fire hit Lahaina.
I think some of the first responders were the Midwifery Association that called Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies in Hawaii that we've worked with previously, But they're so focused on taking care of the women who are pregnant and who is more vulnerable in one of these emergencies than a pregnant
woman or a little baby. So I think that's their orientation and we have seen repeatedly in crisis after crisis some of the most effective responders are midwives because they're so focused on caring for people who are inherently vulnerable because because of their status. So that's something that we do on an emergency basis, on an ongoing basis, and really have been deeply inspired by just the commitment of the midwives, people who focus on care for pregnant women
and little kids and children. It's not the type of issue that often you get the statistics and they're horrible and you sort of check out. But I think to see the number of people and these these groups that organize and are deeply committed to making sure women can you know, be healthy, be safe and have children safely. It's something that we love to do and it's deeply
rewarding to be part of that. The outbreak question, I think, you know, we're seeing that right now a little bit in the news with MPOs.
But I think basically.
Emergencies tend to cause a spike in need and it doesn't really work well with supply chains, and it's just in time thinking.
You know, that.
Exists in commerce, so we typically like to stockpile knowing that something's going to happen and the need will be somewhere based on history, whereas businesses don't want to carry inventory that may or may not be used right. So I think that's the difference between directly physic philanthropic organization and just a business that it doesn't it really doesn't make sense to buy inventory and hold it so because someone might want it at some future date.
So I think for outbreaks, we do have a stockpile, a private stockpile for the essentials. It came to COVID, no one had the vaccine.
But we were a channel for making it available, like from the US to Mexico that was having shortages, So our distribution capability.
Comes in very handy.
Where we had some calls, just initial calls with regard to the MPs formerly known as monkey pocks that's been declared an emergency this week by the World Health Organization. Of them are backbone basically for any private assistance that you can be helpful to get these vaccines where they are, from where they are to where they need to be, and we typically receive them via donation, but will also help any government or other enterprise that's doing public service or humanitarian work.
Will make available any capacity we have to help the people, and that's what we can do, but we've seen them increasingly and it's like an emergency of a different type of declared emergency.
There's a surge and demand for something with limited supply, and often the supply chain itself is either broken or inadequate, so you need to bolster kind of.
The distribution mechanism.
You need to identify the supply, and then you need to make sure there's integrity, particularly when you're handling a scarce thing like a vaccine that requires cold storage and special were handing throughout. There's a high degree of difficulty involved, but it's one that I guessed, like anything, you get better at, more familiar with what's involved the more you do it, which we have done a lot in the past decade with vaccines and particularly cold storage medications and including insulin.
Thomas Tig, President and CEO of Direct Relief Again. You can learn more about this organization and support their work at direct relief dot org. Thomas, A real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on the show and for all the great work your organization is doing well.
Thank you, Ryan, I really appreciate what you do too, and to all your listeners. Uch appreciate it, all.
Right, And that's going to do it for this edition of iHeartRadio Communities. As we wrap things up, one offer big thanks to our guests and of course to all of you for listening. If you want to hear previous episodes of the show, run your iHeartRadio app. Just search for iHeartRadio Communities. I'm your host, Ryan Gorman. We'll talk to you again real soon.