Point Reyes National Seashore, in partnership with the veteran-based organization Team Rubicon, is hosting firefighter training for 75-80 veterans this coming weekend. Successful completion of the training will enable veterans to be deployed around the country to bolster capacity to fight wildland fire.

Point Reyes joins four other locations around the country and is the only unit of the National Park System working with Team Rubicon volunteers to employ veterans in this critical wildfire season.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell recently announced a partnership with the Bureau of Land Management and the veteran-based organization Team Rubicon to provide training to assist in wildland firefighting efforts.

Team Rubicon was founded in January 2010 after two Marines, Jake Wood and William McNulty, gathered a team of other military veterans and civilian first responders and traveled to Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the Port-au-Prince earthquake. They realized many of the skills they learned in the military (teamwork, decisive leadership, risk mitigation and management, logistics, emergency medicine) translated perfectly to disaster relief, thus uniquely positioning military veterans as ideal disaster relief volunteers.

Concurrently, there are over 2.2 million veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom find the transition from military to civilian life challenging. Team Rubicon seeks to help this transition by providing veterans with three things many lose after taking off the uniform: purpose, gained through disaster relief; community, built by serving with others; and self-worth, from recognizing the impact one individual can make.

Since 2010, nearly 28,000 members have joined Team Rubicon, the vast majority of them veterans. They have deployed nearly 100 times across the country and across the world: the 2011 tornado in Joplin, MO; Hurricane Sandy in NY and NJ; the 2013 tornado in Moore, OK; Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines; the 2013 floods in Colorado, and the recent earthquake in Nepal.