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Team Rubicon: The Veterans Who Deploy to Disasters and Find Purpose There
How a crew of eight who drove into post-earthquake Haiti grew into a 180,000-strong disaster force built from military veterans.
By The Pennygood team · Jul 2026 · 3 min read
Three days after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake flattened Port-au-Prince in January 2010, a group of eight Americans, many of them military veterans and medics, flew into the Dominican Republic, rented a truck, and drove west into Haiti to reach camps that larger aid groups had judged too dangerous to enter. They treated thousands of survivors. That improvised mission became Team Rubicon.
Why they call it Rubicon
The name comes from the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" — a point of no return, after the river Julius Caesar's army crossed to march on Rome. For the founders, Marine Corps veteran Jake Wood and William McNulty, wading across Haiti's Artibonite River to reach the wounded was exactly that kind of line, once crossed, you don't turn back.
What they noticed in the rubble shaped everything after: the skills that make a good soldier, staying calm in chaos, moving supplies, making decisions with bad information, treating the injured, are the same skills a disaster zone demands. Veterans weren't just willing to help. They were unusually well equipped to.
What a Greyshirt actually does
Team Rubicon's volunteers are known as Greyshirts, for the plain grey tees they wear on operations. When a storm, flood, or wildfire hits, they get on the ground quickly to do the heavy, unglamorous work of recovery: mucking mud and ruined drywall out of flooded homes, clearing fallen trees and debris from roads, tarping and repairing damaged roofs, and rebuilding. Internationally, teams provide medical care and clean-water and sanitation services. They work in all 50 states, showing up for small, low-attention disasters as readily as for the ones that make national news.
A second mission: the volunteers themselves
For many veterans and first responders, leaving service means losing two things at once, a tight-knit team and a clear sense of purpose. Team Rubicon's founders came to see that giving people a way to serve again could help heal that loss as much as it helped the communities being served. Disaster response became a way to put both to work.
That focus deepened after the death of Clay Hunt, an early member and Marine veteran who struggled after coming home. His story pushed the organization further into veteran mental-health support, it launched the Clay Hunt Fellowship in 2013, and his name was later carried by the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention Act, signed into law in 2015.
From eight people to a standing force
Fifteen years on, Team Rubicon counts roughly 180,000 volunteers across North America and has deployed on more than 500 operations, from Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Maria, and the Moore tornado at home to earthquakes and crises abroad in places like Nepal, Pakistan, and Turkey. Headquartered in Los Angeles, it is led today by CEO Art delaCruz, with co-founder Jake Wood serving as executive chairman.
How to support their work
Team Rubicon takes both volunteers and donations directly through its own channels. You don't need a military background to become a Greyshirt, sign-ups and training information are at teamrubiconusa.org, and one-time or monthly gifts go through support.teamrubiconusa.org.
An organization like this runs on people who choose to show up, again and again, often without recognition. Pennygood is a platform built for exactly those people: it lets a community send a good-doer a little steady support each month, a few dollars at a time. Team Rubicon isn't on Pennygood, but if reading this brings to mind someone near you who quietly keeps showing up, they can start a page at pennygood.me.