Frontline Builders

Frontline Builders Mobilizing donations for the frontline workers keeping our world running. Follow for stories from the frontlines & how to help. 🌍✊
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Thank you, and farewell. đź’™In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic, we made a simple commitment: to show up for the ...
06/05/2026

Thank you, and farewell. đź’™

In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic, we made a simple commitment: to show up for the people showing up for us.

We called them frontline workers—first responders, nurses, teachers, firefighters, poll workers, and the countless others whose labor held our communities together when the world stopped. Frontline Builders existed to get essential resources into their hands, and to say what too often goes unsaid: we see you, we appreciate you, we've got your back.

What started as a pandemic response grew into something we never imagined.
🌎 When war broke out in Ukraine, we launched our first initiative abroad—delivering over 750,000 products to people facing humanitarian crisis at the borders and within the country.

🔥 When wildfires tore through California and floods devastated Texas, we mobilized donors to get relief to families and frontline workers on the ground with over 650,000 units donated.

🍎 When teachers were buying classroom supplies out of their own pockets, we showed up for them too—partnering with Lysol to deliver 14 million wipes to public schools, and stocking Teacher Resource Centers with the essentials that keep classrooms running.

🗳️ When democracy needed defending, we fed and supported the poll workers and ballot counters standing watch over our elections.

🏙️ And in 2025, we launched the first-ever Frontline Worker Appreciation Month—with 300+ cities issuing proclamations and organizing donation events.
In all, together we delivered over 28 million products to frontline workers across the U.S. and around the world.

Today, we share the news that Frontline Builders has closed its doors. June 5, 2026 was our final day of operations. It is not an easy goodbye—but it is a proud one.

To every donor, partner, volunteer, and frontline worker who built this with us: thank you. Every product delivered happened because you showed up. The work of supporting these communities continues, and we'll be sharing the trusted partners carrying this mission forward.

With deep gratitude, The Frontline Builders Team đź’™

On March 12, 2014, a 25-year-old paramedic in Spokane died by su***de. Ann Marie Farina didn't know him well. She rememb...
05/22/2026

On March 12, 2014, a 25-year-old paramedic in Spokane died by su***de. Ann Marie Farina didn't know him well. She remembers him as outgoing. She remembers the shock. And she remembers what came up in the conversations afterward — every EMS friend at every other agency had lost someone the same way. The silence around it was nearly total. The grief was everywhere.
Two weeks later, she founded The Code Green Campaign.

Farina had spent thirteen years as a paramedic across Alaska and Washington — wildland fires, advanced life support, the 911 calls that don't leave the body when the shift ends. She knew the field's instinct toward silence from the inside. She also knew the field's relationship to language — that a code called on a patient marshals everyone in the room toward saving a life. So she called one. Code Green. On the mental health of the people running the codes.

What started as an anonymous storytelling project on Facebook existed for forty-eight hours before it had to become something bigger. It's now collected over 700 stories. Built the first database of first-responder-friendly mental health resources. Helped track and confirm first-responder su***des.

Trained tens of thousands of providers in peer support and resilience. Won the 2016 Nicholas Rosecrans Award.

EMS Week closes today. Posts this week named what the work costs — to the body, to the nervous system, to the household. This is the post that names what one paramedic did with the loss. The answer didn't arrive from above. It came from the medic standing next to the medic, calling the code on the silence.

To every EMT, paramedic, dispatcher, and partner riding the second seat — and to the workers who built the support infrastructure the system still won't fully fund — thank you doesn't reach. We'll keep saying it anyway. We'll keep pointing toward the people doing the work.

Code Green Campaign · Reviving Responders · IAFF Center of Excellence · 988 (call or text).

Ann Marie Farina | Paramedic, founder of The Code Green Campaign

Ashley Diaz remembers three things from September 15, 2022: being on the ground, her mother screaming, and telling the f...
05/18/2026

Ashley Diaz remembers three things from September 15, 2022: being on the ground, her mother screaming, and telling the first responder how to apply the tourniquet to her own leg.

She'd been an FDNY EMT since 2017 — Coney Island, Station 43, the calls she said she absolutely loved. Overdoses. Shootings. The work where the difference between living and not is the speed of your hands. She was loading her car outside her mother's house on Staten Island when a driver impaired by fentanyl hit her. The EMT became the patient. She did the work anyway.

Thirteen surgeries later, her right leg gone, she's back at FDNY EMS — not in the rig, but in the agency. She raised over $150,000 on GoFundMe for the prosthetic, child care for her son, retrofitting her home. The wage doesn't cover what the job costs.
National EMS Week runs May 17–23. Median EMT pay in 2024 was $41,340. Entry-level starts at $14 an hour in many states. 73% of EMS providers report burnout or compassion fatigue. More than a third say they're leaving within five years.
Ashley came back. She names what keeps her: her son, the people she worked beside, life itself.

Ashley Diaz | FDNY EMT, Station 43, Coney Island


By the time the panic attacks started, Officer Nelson Osores had already lost two marriages to a silence the job demande...
05/14/2026

By the time the panic attacks started, Officer Nelson Osores had already lost two marriages to a silence the job demanded of him.

Seventeen years on the Miami-Dade force, and the instruction had never changed: suck it up. Don't talk about the calls you can't unsee. The job already asked for everything — and the culture asked for one more thing on top.

When he finally sought help, he didn't stop at his own recovery. He went back to school, earned a Master's in Social Work from FIU, and joined Miami-Dade County's Multi-Agency Peer Support Team. Now he sits with officers carrying what he used to carry, with families navigating the aftermath of involuntary mental-health detentions, and with survivors of officer su***de — a group he started meeting in person, because losing a colleague to that silence is its own kind of frontline call.

More police officers die by su***de than in the line of duty.

National Police Week honors the ones lost on the job. The work Nelson does honors them, too — by making sure the next officer doesn't carry it alone.

"The difference is that I am a midwife."But Dr. Alexis Dunn Amore will tell you that wasn't the real difference.When she...
05/11/2026

"The difference is that I am a midwife."
But Dr. Alexis Dunn Amore will tell you that wasn't the real difference.
When she faced severe preeclampsia in her first pregnancy, what stood between her and the fate too many Black mothers meet wasn't her credentials. It was a room of doctors and midwives who knew her by name. Who read the signs before the signs became a crisis. The protective factor was relationship — being known, being seen, being held in a circle of care.

She lived. Then she built.

The app Dr. Dunn Amore developed extends that protective circle to those who've never had access to one — helping birthing individuals recognize the dangerous symptoms that nearly took her. Symptoms that too often go unnamed for Black mothers navigating a system that doesn't know them by name.

Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women. More than 80% of those deaths are preventable.
Preventable. That word should haunt us. It should also move us toward what Dr. Dunn Amore is building — survival translated into infrastructure for everyone who comes after.

This Frontline Worker Appreciation Month, we honor the builders. The ones who survived something and refused to keep the lesson to themselves.

đź”— Resources in the next slide.

There is a particular kind of silence inside a firehouse.Not the silence between calls. The silence after them.The silen...
05/08/2026

There is a particular kind of silence inside a firehouse.Not the silence between calls. The silence after them.The silence of a culture that taught its bravest to swallow what they saw.

The silence that fills the gap where a brother used to be. The silence that the fire service has been losing people to for years — quietly, one at a time.Cory is a firefighter and EMT in Greece, NY.

After a deadly Halloween crash in 2017 changed his life, he stopped staying quiet. He found his way to a motorcycle club of first responders who decided the silence had cost them enough — and turned the club into a nonprofit built around mental health advocacy in the fire service."The fire service loses more people to su***de than to Line of Duty Deaths."

Read that again.

That's the sentence Cory and his brothers are organizing against. Rides, fundraisers, peer support, the kind of conversations that don't happen in the bay but happen on a bike. They are doing what the institution hasn't: building the room where a firefighter can say I'm not okay and still be one of the guys.International Firefighters' Day lands inside Mental Health

Awareness Month for a reason. The bravery it takes to run into a burning building is the same bravery it takes to say it at the kitchen table. Both deserve honor. Both keep people alive.Follow @[nonprofit handle] to support the work. Tag a firefighter who's been carrying it. đźš’.

There is a particular kind of math nurses are forced to do.Eleven patients. One nurse. One body. One twelve-hour shift.T...
05/06/2026

There is a particular kind of math nurses are forced to do.

Eleven patients. One nurse. One body. One twelve-hour shift.

The math doesn't work. Everyone in the building knows the math doesn't work. And still, the math is what gets handed to her at the start of every shift.

Kelly Rivera-Craine has been a nurse for 23 years. At Henry Ford Genesys, she and her colleagues filed grievance after grievance over unsafe ratios — and watched the paperwork disappear into a drawer.
So they walked outside. Picket signs. Cameras. Each other.

"They weren't doing anything to address it."
National Nurses Day lands inside Mental Health Awareness Month for a reason. You cannot ask someone to hold eleven lives at once and then act surprised when something in them breaks. Safe staffing isn't a perk. It's the floor.

Tag a nurse who's been doing the math. đź©ş

There is a particular kind of tired that teachers carry home.Not the tired of a long day.The tired of holding thirty kid...
05/04/2026

There is a particular kind of tired that teachers carry home.
Not the tired of a long day.

The tired of holding thirty kids' weather while the roof leaks and the supply closet runs thin. The tired of being called a hero in May and a problem in September. The tired of loving the work and watching the work get harder to love.

Elsa Batista teaches world languages in Newington, CT. She stood up at a press conference and said the part most teachers swallow:
this is mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausting — and we cannot afford to lose more of us.
That's not a complaint. That's a diagnosis.

Teacher Appreciation Week lands inside Mental Health Awareness Month for a reason. Appreciation is the floor. Support is the building.

Tag a teacher who deserves more than a thank-you card this week. 🍎

May holds two truths at once.Frontline Worker Appreciation Month. Mental Health Awareness Month. Same thirty-one days. T...
05/01/2026

May holds two truths at once.
Frontline Worker Appreciation Month. Mental Health Awareness Month. Same thirty-one days. The calendar didn't stutter — it told the truth.

The people who run toward what the rest of us run from carry weight that doesn't clock out. Nurses. Teachers. Firefighters. Officers. EMTs. Midwives. Volunteers. Folks who answer the call, then go home to be human about it.

Appreciation without honesty is a thank-you card with nothing inside.
So this month, we're doing both. Celebrating the showing up. Telling the truth about what it costs.
All May, we're sharing the people behind the work. Stay close.

He was 18 years old when volunteer firefighters rushed into his home to save his father from a heart attack. They couldn...
04/26/2026

He was 18 years old when volunteer firefighters rushed into his home to save his father from a heart attack. They couldn't do it. But what he saw that night — ordinary people dropping everything for a neighbor in crisis — changed who he was forever.

The next year, Tom Franks joined the department. That was 45 years ago.

He's never left. No pension. No paid leave. No guarantee the department survives the year. Just a fire chief in Fayette, Ohio who knows exactly what it means when someone doesn't show up — and has spent his entire life making sure that never happens on his watch.

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