FORBES | We have watched the tragedy in Ukraine unfold with a continual stream of shocking live video footage. Many of us seeing the struggle on our screens have been left wondering how something like this could possibly happen during this day and age. It seems so foreign, so distant, yet—at the same time—so close. Our natural impulse is to ask, how can I help? Is there something that I, as an individual or a family or a business, can do to lend a helping hand?

We each answer this question in our own way. But what I share today is the story of how a small group of concerned Tennesseans responded to this question, rallying their connections among friends, businesses, nonprofits, government, and public entities. All these groups and people came together to act quickly, creatively piecing the puzzle of logistics together, to generously provide critical, life-saving medical equipment and supplies directly to the Ukrainian people suffering from daily atrocities.

The first call for help came at midnight on March 2: a message from my friend, Kenney Isaacs, with whom I have traveled extensively over the past twenty-five years doing urgent international relief in response to natural and man-made disasters. Together, we traveled to sites within days of onset of multiple catastrophic events around the world, he with logistics and me, as a physician, with medical and surgical teams. We were in Sri Lanka immediately after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, in New Orleans forty-eight hours after Katrina in 2005, in Haiti within thirty-six hours after the 2010 earthquake, and in Sudan on multiple occasions during the ongoing civil war in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Read the full article here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrist/2022/04/26/tennesseans-answer-the-call-volunteer-state-leads-rapid-response-efforts-for-ukrainian-requested-medical-supplies/?sh=4b10efb01238