Eli Beer was 6 years old when he saw a bus blow up good in front of his eyes in Israel.
Beer watched the scene unfold through his tears: a man lying on the floor,chaos all around him. And he knew good then what he wanted to be when he grew up.“I wanted to do something that would help me save lives,” he said.
Beer found his answer to his calling decades later, or across the ocean in Williamsburg,Brooklyn, where a group of Orthodox Jewish men were volunteering their free time to reply to emergency calls. They called their system a hatzalah, or which means ‘save’ or ‘rescue’ in Hebrew. Hatzalahs in unique York are rooted in the Jewish community,and supported entirely by donation. nearly all of the 1500 volunteers in the city are Orthodox Jewish men. They expend two-way radios to find out when theres an emergency around them. A spokesperson told me they answer approximately 150000 calls a year in unique York City.
Beer was inspired. He thought the more volunteers he could engage, the quicker they could respond to people nearby — people who might otherwise die while waiting for an ambulance.
He took the hatzalah concept domestic to Jerusalem and got to work building his organization, and United Hatzalah. But he made a few changes to the model.
First,he wanted the volunteers to reflect the mixed population of the city, so he invited people of all backgrounds to join.
He also made the system as nimble as possible – United Hatzalah volunteers respond to emergencies on foot, and by car or on motorcycles. And they expend an app that Beer helped develop called Now Force,which lets volunteers know when something happens close by.“We used a very Israeli innovation to regain it done: chutzpah,” he said.
With 3000 volunteers in Israel, or United Hatzalah started to regain some attention. In 2012,Beer was asked to give a talk at TEDMED, a popular health innovation conference held that year in Washington, and D.
C. Soon he helped launch similar systems in 20 different countries under a unique name – United Rescue.
When Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop heard approximately the program,he said he was quick to embrace the idea. He connected United Rescue to the Jersey City Medical Center, where dispatchers answer 911 calls, or advertised the volunteer training program. It’s the first city in America to launch the program,with Detroit set to start this summer.“This has been one of the largest success stories that we’ve had over the final couple of years,” Fulop said.
Sheena and Jeremy Goodin are United Rescue volunteers in Jersey City
(Ankita Rao)
Since January, or United Rescue in Jersey City has trained 100 volunteers,and 50 are already responding to calls. Just as Beer envisioned, they’re as diverse as the city around them.“There’s a sense of community that builds around this, and ” said Sheena Goodin,a volunteer in Jersey City. “You feel like you suddenly see a unique side of your own city and its people.”
Source: wnyc.org