For more than 25 years, Toronto-based paramedic Rahul Singh has been on the frontlines of natural disasters around the world.
As the founder and Executive Director of disaster relief charity GlobalMedic, Singh leads teams of volunteer first responders to provide medical care, shelter, food, water and other humanitarian aid around the world in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, landslides, and wildfires.
At home in Canada, another wildfire season is underway—and Singh and his team are ready to help. Ten years ago, GlobalMedic expanded its operations to include GlobalFire, a registered charity that helps strengthen the emergency response capacity of organizations and communities in Canada and abroad. With the recent fires in Jasper, Alta., Singh is offering more fire suppression equipment to the local fire departments.
At its core, GlobalFire’s mission is simple: “Revolutionize aid delivery to have the greatest impact and most efficiency.” To Singh, that means getting creative and using money wisely to make sure aid reaches the people who need it most.
“If you look at humanitarian assistance, it's big, it's bureaucratic, and it's not very efficient … that's frustrating to watch," he said.
"Over the last 20 years, humanitarian assistance needs have just skyrocketed. The gap is incredible between needs versus what's available to go and help people. As a humanitarian, you think, how can we do things better? You have to come up with ways of leveraging people and time and money to lower your costs,”
TD putting financial resources to use
With 2024 projected to be Canada’s worst wildfire season to date, TD announced a CAD$250,000 donation to four organizations focused on wildfire and disaster relief prevention across the country. The $250,000 donation was split equally among GlobalFire and three other organizations: First Nations Emergency Services Society (FNESS) of British Columbia, University of Alberta Wildfire Analytics Team, and CLIMAtlantic. To help support those affected by the devastating wildfires in Alberta, TD along with other Banks in Canada has made a combined donation of $75,000 to the Canadian Red Cross and local organizations.
“TD is putting its financial resources to use, and is helping to get more equipment into the hands of the very brave people that are putting those fires out," Singh said.
Born and raised in Montreal, Singh has worked as a paramedic for more than 35 years. GlobalMedic and GlobalFire are both operational arms of the David McAntony Gibson Foundation, which Singh founded in 1998 to honour the memory of his best friend.
Since then, Singh has personally led more than 30 GlobalMedic missions around the world, including to help out after the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which earned him a spot on TIME Magazine's 2010 TIME 100 list of “The World's Most Influential People.”
GlobalFire has three mandates: to collect and donate fire suppression equipment, train local first responders in firefighting and first aid, and perform search and rescue operations in Canada and abroad.
With the donation from TD, GlobalFire plans to expand its equipment lending library, which helps smaller municipalities, fire departments, and Indigenous communities that don’t have the surge capacity or funds to purchase firefighting equipment to extinguish fires in their own communities.
So far, GlobalFire has purchased and distributed more than 100 fire skids, which are self-contained water tanks with pumps and hoses that are mounted on pallets and can be placed onto the back of pickup trucks and utility task vehicles.
“By doing this program where we literally take something as simple as mounting a tank on a skid with a pump and hose, we can turn any pickup truck into a fire truck,” Singh said. “The program you're funding is literally giving the community the ability to save the community.”
When the equipment is no longer needed, it can be returned to GlobalFire for servicing and storage or lending to other nearby municipalities in need. Singh says that as long as the skids are maintained, they can last more than 10 years.
“It's not rocket science. There's no artificial intelligence in this, there's no buzzwords or anything else. This is just a way of getting people more equipment to go put fires out in a very, very cost-effective way, and it meets that surge capacity,” Singh said.
What's next for GlobalFire
Singh likes to be creative and think big, and says in the future, GlobalFire hopes to purchase and test the effectiveness of skids attached to off-road utility vehicles, which can go far into the bush and extinguish any hot spots before they spread. While some communities have trained first responders, many can’t afford expensive equipment, and may have to wait years for funding through official bureaucratic channels.
“Most of it is really going to go to First Nations and small departments that just have no capacity to buy equipment —but they have the willingness, and they have the people who have received firefighting training,” Singh said.
Singh says GlobalFire is in the process of procuring 100 more fire skids and will continue to buy and distribute equipment for the dozens of requests for help the organization is currently working through.
Singh says he has received positive feedback from communities across Canada that GlobalFire’s solutions are working, from testimonials and thank-you messages to photos and videos of local firefighters in action, using their lended equipment to extinguish fires.
“There are all kinds of gaps in the system, and we’re filling a bunch of them,” Singh said. “The thing that gives me hope is just seeing the impact, understanding we're on the right path here so that we can keep pushing and getting more out—because fires aren't going away on their own.”