The Veterans Who Crossed Into Haiti: Team Rubicon and the Operational VSO

On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, leveling much of Port-au-Prince and killing more than two hundred thousand people. The international response was massive in commitment and slow on the ground. Roads were impassable, the port was damaged, the airport was overwhelmed, and the first days of the response were defined by a gap between what was needed and what had arrived.

Within days of the quake, two former U.S. Marines — Jake Wood and William McNulty — pulled together a small initial team of veterans and medical professionals, raised emergency funds through social media, flew into the Dominican Republic, and drove a rented vehicle across the border into Haiti with medical supplies. They went where the larger relief apparatus had not yet been able to deploy. They treated patients. They moved supplies. They came home and decided the model was worth keeping. They named it Team Rubicon, after the river Caesar crossed when he committed to an irreversible decision.

What grew from that first crossing is now one of the largest U.S. veteran-led nonprofits by operational tempo: a disaster-response NGO that deploys military veterans — called "Greyshirts" after the gray T-shirts they wear in the field — for domestic and international response. By the early 2020s, Team Rubicon reported a deployable membership in the tens of thousands and annual revenues in the tens of millions of dollars. The interesting fact about it is not the size. It is the shape.

Most American veterans' organizations are built around three things: benefits advocacy, fraternal community, or both. Team Rubicon is built around a third thing — operations — and its case is that operating is itself the benefit.

The founding

Team Rubicon was incorporated in 2010 in Los Angeles. The founders were Jake Wood, a former U.S. Marine Corps Corporal who had served as a scout sniper in Iraq and Afghanistan, and William McNulty, a former Marine and intelligence community alumnus. Wood and McNulty had no nonprofit-management background. They had military training, a network of veterans, and an immediate humanitarian crisis that the institutional response had not yet reached.

The conditions in early 2010 made the founding possible in a way it had not been a decade earlier. The post-9/11 veteran cohort — by then nearly nine years into Iraq and Afghanistan operations — had absorbed years of austere-environment work: convoy operations, medical care under fire, rapid logistics across broken infrastructure, leading small teams in chaotic conditions. Those are the same skills a disaster zone demands. Wood and McNulty's argument was straightforward: the U.S. had spent more than a decade training a generation of veterans in exactly the capabilities a humanitarian response needs, and almost none of that capability was being put to use after discharge.

The founding cohort was small. The initial Haiti deployment was a team of eight, including veterans and a Jesuit priest and physician, Father Eddie Griffin, who Wood has credited in his own published account as an essential medical lead on the early ground operations. The team operated out of churches and improvised clinics, treated trauma cases, and coordinated with the limited NGO and church infrastructure that was already in country. They came back and started building an organization.

Two structural choices in the founding period mattered. First, Team Rubicon did not require prior military service for medical and skilled-trade volunteers, but it built the culture and the operational doctrine around the veteran identity. The implicit promise was that a veteran joining Team Rubicon would find something that looked and felt like a small-unit deployment, with a clear mission, a defined operational window, and a team. Second, it built explicitly toward a partnership posture with FEMA and state emergency management agencies rather than positioning itself as a substitute for them.

Peak influence and current scale

Team Rubicon's growth curve is the genuinely unusual part of its record. From the eight-person Haiti team in 2010, the organization scaled to roughly 25,000 registered Greyshirts by the mid-2010s and to a reported deployable membership in the vicinity of 150,000 by the early 2020s, according to its annual reports and IRS Form 990 filings. Annual revenue grew from negligible in 2010 to more than $40 million in some years of the early 2020s, with a meaningful spike during the COVID-19 period when general-public donations and federal contracting both expanded.

Three operations are worth naming as the proof of model.

Hurricane Harvey, 2017. When Harvey stalled over Houston in late August 2017, Team Rubicon ran what was, by its own subsequent reporting, the largest deployment in its history to that date — a multi-month operation focused on muck-and-gut work (the hands-on debris removal and gutting of flooded homes that allows reconstruction to begin), damage assessment, and coordination with the City of Houston, Harris County, and FEMA. The Harvey response is the deployment that moved Team Rubicon from "interesting veteran-led nonprofit" to "named partner in the federal-state disaster response stack."

COVID-19 response, 2020–2022. The pandemic was Team Rubicon's most operationally expansive period. The organization stood up food-distribution operations, supported testing and vaccination sites in multiple states under contracts and partnerships with state health departments, and adapted its deployment model from physical disaster response to a longer-form public health support posture. The COVID period also drove Team Rubicon's revenue to its current order of magnitude and shifted parts of its workforce from purely volunteer to a mix of paid and volunteer roles.

Hurricane Ian and recurring tornado responses, 2022 onward. Hurricane Ian's strike on southwest Florida in September 2022 produced another large-scale Greyshirt deployment focused on damage assessment, debris removal, and the same partnership posture Team Rubicon had built with FEMA and state emergency management. The recurring tornado responses across the Midwest and South — including the December 2021 Kentucky tornado outbreak — established Team Rubicon as a routine, named participant in U.S. disaster response rather than an episodic actor.

What Team Rubicon did well

Three concrete accomplishments are worth naming as facts, not tributes.

It proved the operational VSO model. Before Team Rubicon, the dominant shapes of American veterans' organizations were the benefits-and-lobbying model (American Legion, VFW, DAV, IAVA), the fraternal-and-mutual-aid model (the Legion and VFW posts in their local-community function), and the therapeutic-program model (Wounded Warrior Project, Travis Manion, others). Team Rubicon is the clearest American instance of a fourth model — an operational VSO whose primary product is service delivery into a non-veteran context, with the veteran benefit (purpose, identity, peer community) produced as a byproduct of the operation. Whether the model scales further is an open question. Whether it works at the scale Team Rubicon has reached is no longer in serious dispute.

It built a working federal partnership. Team Rubicon is a named participant in the National Response Framework's voluntary-organization layer and works under mission assignments and contracts with FEMA and state emergency management agencies. That is a technical accomplishment that gets less attention than the disaster footage but matters more for sustainability: an organization that can be tasked through formal emergency-management channels has a path to operating that is not entirely dependent on donor news cycles.

It articulated the "bridge from military to civilian" framing in a way the broader VSO sector has since absorbed. Wood's public writing and speaking, and the organization's communications, made the case that the post-9/11 veteran needed not a transition program but a continued mission — and that the absence of that mission was itself a public-health problem connected to the suicide rates the cohort was facing. That framing is now common across veteran nonprofits. Team Rubicon did not invent it, but it operationalized it earlier and louder than most.

What it failed at, or what it became

Operating at this scale produces three honest problems, and Team Rubicon's record contains all of them.

The first is the deployment-quality versus deployment-quantity tension. A reportable operations count is a useful proxy for activity, but it is a poor proxy for impact. Damage assessment by volunteer teams varies in quality. Muck-and-gut work, done well, accelerates a homeowner's path to recovery; done poorly, it complicates insurance claims and creates new problems. Team Rubicon's internal training and standardization improved meaningfully across the 2010s — the Greyshirt training curriculum, the incident-command structure, the safety protocols are not what they were in 2011 — but the underlying tension between scaling membership and maintaining deployment quality is structural to the model and does not go away.

The second is mission-scope drift. The COVID-19 period in particular pushed Team Rubicon into a wider set of activities — food distribution, testing sites, vaccination support, longer-duration deployments without a clearly defined austere-environment dimension — that look less like the original Haiti model. Some of that expansion is straightforward "the country needed help and we had a deployable workforce." Some of it raises a legitimate question about what Team Rubicon is for. The organization has continued to define itself primarily as a disaster-response NGO, but the share of activity that is not classic disaster response has grown, and the donor-facing narrative has occasionally lagged the operational reality.

The third is leadership and growth transitions. Jake Wood stepped back from the CEO role in 2020 and the organization moved through a leadership transition during the same period it was scaling fastest and managing the COVID surge. Subsequent leadership turnover and the ordinary tensions of a founder-built organization moving into a professionalized management phase have produced some friction. None of that is unusual for a fast-growing nonprofit; all of it is worth naming honestly because the GAR's experience and the more recent Wounded Warrior Project experience both demonstrate that the institutional management phase of a veterans' organization is where the failure modes concentrate.

One thing Team Rubicon has not had is a marquee financial scandal. The organization's IRS Form 990 filings show program-spend ratios in the range that institutional donors expect, and there has not been a Wounded-Warrior-Project-style public reckoning over executive compensation or fundraising practices. That fact is worth stating plainly because the absence of that kind of failure is not automatic at this scale.

What it teaches a present-day veteran

The clearest lesson of Team Rubicon's first fifteen years is structural. A veterans' organization does not have to be built around benefits, fraternal life, or lobbying. It can be built around operations — around delivering a service to a non-veteran beneficiary — and the veteran benefit (purpose, peer community, the continuation of identity into post-service life) can be produced as a byproduct of doing the work. That is a different organizational shape from the GAR or the American Legion, and it is worth naming explicitly in any taxonomy of veteran organizations.

The second lesson is narrower and harder. The operational model only works if the operation is real. A veteran who joins Team Rubicon on the promise of a mission and gets a poorly run deployment, a damage assessment that does not get used, or a muck-and-gut team without proper safety equipment is worse off than a veteran who joined a Legion post for the fraternal community and got exactly that. The operational VSO's product is the operation. Quality control on the operation is therefore the central management problem, and any new entrant into this space — and there will be new entrants — has to face that problem on day one rather than scaling first and addressing quality second.

The third lesson is for the broader veteran nonprofit sector. Team Rubicon's federal-partnership posture, its training infrastructure, and its incident-command discipline are the parts of the organization that are worth studying regardless of whether anyone wants to replicate the disaster-response mission specifically. The same architecture — trained veteran teams, deployable through a formal partnership channel, with a clear operational doctrine — could plausibly be applied to wildfire response, refugee resettlement support, rural-clinic surge staffing, or election-infrastructure security work. The Team Rubicon contribution to American civic life may eventually be less about disaster response than about proving the operational-VSO architecture and leaving the architecture available for the next organization to use.

Sources

• Team Rubicon, Inc., IRS Form 990 filings, 2012–2023, available through ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer and Team Rubicon's published financials (accessed 2026-05-10).
• Team Rubicon, Annual Report series, 2015–2023, teamrubiconusa.org (accessed 2026-05-10).
• Jake Wood, Take Command: Lessons in Leadership: How to Be a First Responder in Business (Crown Business, 2014). Wood's first-person account of the Haiti founding and early Team Rubicon operations.
• Jake Wood, Once a Warrior: How One Veteran Found a New Mission Closer to Home (Sentinel, 2020). Founder's account of the organization's growth and the post-service mission framing.
• U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Response Framework documentation and Voluntary Agency Liaison program materials, fema.gov (accessed 2026-05-10).
• Contemporaneous reporting on the 2010 Haiti earthquake response, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Associated Press coverage of NGO operations in January–March 2010.
• Contemporaneous reporting on Hurricane Harvey (2017), the COVID-19 nonprofit response (2020–2022), and Hurricane Ian (2022) covering Team Rubicon's named participation, including The Houston Chronicle, The Tampa Bay Times, and NPR reporting.
• Charity Navigator and GuideStar / Candid organizational profiles for Team Rubicon, Inc. (accessed 2026-05-10).