After college, aspiring writer Jason Friesen put his English degree to use in the same way as many of his peers: teaching English abroad. He found himself in Costa Rica, where he picked up Spanish and landed a job at Habitat for Humanity’s corporate office copyediting and translating. But he longed to get his hands dirty.
“I was so intrigued by all of the stories you were hearing from these people whose lives they were touching,” says Friesen. “And I was like, ‘I want to be on the ground.’”
It was at this moment that Friesen entered into emergency medical services—a move that’s a lot more rooted in literature than most people would imagine.
“Ernest Hemingway got his start on an ambulance,” he says. “Walt Whitman was a stretcher-bearer. I started in EMS in about 2005 and I’ve gotten thousands of stories out of it, but most of the writing I’m doing these days is grant writing. It’s creative, but it’s not fiction.”
As founder of the nonprofit Trek Medics International, he helps ensure that communities all over the world have access to emergency medical care. In other words, the Trek Medics team helps provide “911 where there is none.” Below, the New York-based WeWork Soho West member talks about his journey through the nonprofit world, the technology his organization uses, and what he’s most proud of so far.
When did the idea for Trek Medics come about?
In EMS, they have different ranks or levels. And I started like everybody at the bottom. As soon as I got my textbook, I was like, “I want to get the whole textbook in Spanish” because I just knew right away there would be an opportunity for this in Latin America. When I finished my EMT-Basic course, I went out to San Diego for that very reason: so I could be next to Mexico. And when I got involved in Mexico, I started riding along with the Red Cross in Tijuana as a volunteer paramedic down there. I was like, “Wow, this isn’t a job. They need help. They don’t have money to pay me. They need money to find for themselves.”
I started getting involved. I got some donations from my employer in the United States—a bunch of cardiac monitors. And when my employer started donating equipment, they were like, “We’re happy to donate it to you, but we want tax exemption.” They want a write-off for it because it was very expensive equipment. Through a family friend, I found someone who helped me secure LLC, and register as a nonprofit, and get our tax-exempt status. So I was like, “Hey, I’ve got a nonprofit organization now.”
Through another job as a flight medic, just as a side job to make cash, I had been flying for these remote Mexican villages picking up Americans and Canadians to bring them back to the U.S. And I was meeting all these rural EMS agencies in Mexico, and I was like, “Wow, I thought Tijuana had it bad. These guys got nothing.”
Then the Haiti earthquake happened, and I was deployed to Haiti. It kind of confirmed my suspicions. So after Haiti, it was like, “Okay, one, I see that there’s a significant need for EMS systems development. Two, no one’s really doing anything about this specifically. And three, it’s clear that if I want to actually work as a paramedic in these countries, you’re basically gonna have to build the system first.” That’s how after Haiti, it all kind of came together.
What year was this?
That was January 2010. A few months after that, I moved back to New York. Got into Columbia’s Master of Public Health program, but I was in the executive program, which meant you had classes Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday once a month. And the rest of the time you were working. I knew what I wanted to do with Trek Medics—I just didn’t have any money for it. I had no experience doing it, in terms of building and running an organization on my own.
I ended up getting a job for a very large, international, non-governmental organization called Project HOPE, and I moved back to Haiti and was their country director for the next year and a half or so. The Columbia program was kind of an incubator for Trek Medics, and working for Project HOPE turned out to be the lab, so to speak, where we were actually implementing programs, many of which had to do with stuff I wanted to do with Trek Medics. Between those two things, I got the experience and got the plans together so that in 2013, after I went out on my own, it was like, “Alright, now or never. Let’s do Trek Medics.”
Anything you want to add about the Beacon technology?
What we found is that if you want to do 911 the way we do it in the United States, you’re gonna need, at a minimum, two things: lots of money and really good roads everywhere. This is actually where it all falls apart because these low and middle-income countries don’t have these 911 systems like we do, and the reason why is because our technologies were developed for our infrastructure. You think about—you watched maybe the Olympics this summer or if you’ve ever been to Brazil, in Rio, they have these hillside shantytowns. These mountainsides where you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people and not a single one of them has a road. How do you dispatch an ambulance to a place like that? You can’t. So we had to say, “Let’s just forget ambulances. Let’s just say that ambulances are not the centerpiece of an EMS system. They are one tool in a toolbox.”
These countries have very fragmented systems. Some places have some little thing—maybe a couple ambulances—or maybe they’ve got nothing. We needed a software solution for communication that was going to be able to be the standalone dispatch system if there was nothing, but would also plug into or augment existing dispatch systems where they were. We’re not trying to go toe-to-toe with the Red Cross. In Mexico, the Red Cross is phenomenal and they do great stuff. In other countries, they don’t have that capacity, and they do, let’s just say, spotty services. We don’t want these countries to outsource their EMS to us, so we developed a tool that would enable them to do it themselves whether or not they had existing capabilities.
Your organization has grown so much in the last few years, and there’s a lot you have achieved. What are you most proud of so far?
The thing I am undoubtedly most proud of is the fact that these programs are being run by local communities. That it’s not us. They are doing it themselves. Our approach is to say, “Look, just because there’s no formal 911 system doesn’t mean there isn’t something being done.” And our goal is not to replace that, but to finally coordinate it and to teach people to do it well.