On a cool Saturday morning in Richmond, Calif., a group of colleagues from construction management company Vanir traded hard hats and project schedules for clipboards and smoke alarms. They were part of the American Red Cross Sound the Alarm campaign, installing free smoke alarms and sharing fire safety information in at-risk communities.
But for this team, the day was about more than just service. It was also about connection.
Read moreBy Dej Knuckey
On the first Earth Day in 1970, twenty million Americans gathered to protest pollution and industrial waste. No one was using the term “climate crisis” yet, but the biggest pollutants of all—greenhouse gases—were just beginning to take their toll.
Since then, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 325 to 430 parts per million, a powerful measure of how much the climate has changed in just over five decades.
Now we see the effects every day: The American Red Cross is responding to nearly twice as many large disasters as it did a decade ago.
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Emergencies don’t wait for the perfect moment.
They can happen without warning, in the middle of an ordinary day, at home, surrounded by family.
But what happens next often depends on one thing: whether someone nearby knows what to do.
For Edward Kuan, that moment came unexpectedly. At just 15 years old, his actions made the difference between life and death.
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Being called to assist those whose lives have been upended by a natural disaster is not only an opportunity to provide aid and service. A deployment is also a unique opportunity for cultural exchange, and Laura Hovden’s deployment to Alaska in the wake of Typhoon Halong in October 2025 was a testament to that.
Laura first got involved in local disaster management volunteer opportunities with the American Red Cross in 2014. Once her children left home for college, she left her own backyard to deploy to natural disasters across the country. She focused on organizing shelters during her initial deployments, but she soon secured more responsibilities as part of the Mass Care team that manages relief operations for larger natural disasters.
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By Veronica Oberholzer
I love the Christmas season and am always looking for new holiday activities. On Saturday, December 20, I took BART from my home in Oakland to the Yerba Buena Center for the Performing Arts in San Francisco to see a 2 p.m. Christmas Ballet.
The theater was a dark cocoon from the outside world during the beautiful performance. In a funny piece of foreshadowing, I thought that anything could be happening in the world outside, and we wouldn’t know about it until the show was over.
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Hans Cardenas is a man on a mission: he aims to make 100 homes safer by installing free smoke alarms with the American Red Cross Sound the Alarm program. And he is more than halfway there already!
Sound the Alarm is part of the national Red Cross Home Fire Campaign, which aims to reduce the number of deaths from home fires. This campaign has helped save 2,063 lives since its launch in October 2014. Here in the Northern California Coastal Region, volunteers and partners have installed more than 48,500 free smoke alarms and made more than 18,000 households safer since 2014.
“I’ve made 57 homes safer since I started on May 14, 2020. Working with different teams, we installed 171 alarms,” he detailed.
Hans’ journey with the Red Cross started in 2020 as a Senior Philanthropy Officer with the Regional Fund Development Team. He spent two years facilitating financial donations from individuals across the Northern California Coastal Region. Through his role, he forged connections with donors, aligning their priorities with the Red Cross mission, which includes disaster relief, blood donation and community support. As of December 2023, he transitioned to a similar position with the San Francisco Opera. Despite his busy schedule, he still finds time to install free smoke alarms with his fellow Red Crossers, visiting communities at risk for home fires across the region. “We, the fundraisers, are very goal oriented. I was just being audacious by choosing such (a) number, but also trying to stay engaged with something I really enjoy doing,” he explained.
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Your Red Cross Update 