FRT-JM — A Community Team That Shows Up First
In Jabal Mohsen, emergency response is not only about arriving after a crisis; it is about being trusted before the crisis happens. The First Responder Team – Jabal Mohsen (FRT-JM), affiliated with AICA, has grown from a local community initiative into a visible emergency-response arm rooted in the neighborhood it serves. The Emergency Response Sector was established in 2016, with FRT working in partnership with the Lebanese Red Cross – Disaster Risk Reduction Unit, one of the few such initiatives that remains operational.
FRT-JM’s success is its ability to connect emergency response with AICA’s broader ecosystem: Alzahraa Medical Center, community outreach, protection referrals, displacement support, and accountability to affected people. AICA’s emergency procedures apply across FRT and emergency response sites, ensuring that rapid action remains controlled, documented, safeguarding-sensitive, and accountable.
The team’s record shows a pattern of practical community service: supporting vaccination activities with the Lebanese Red Cross and UNICEF, conducting a campaigns at Alzahraa Medical Center to register forcibly displaced Syrians, transferring medical cases from shelters, and intervening immediately after the collapse of a residential building in Al-Muhajreen, Jabal Mohsen. These are not isolated activities; together they show a local team able to move between health, shelter, emergency referral, and community mobilization.
What makes FRT-JM a success story is not only the uniform or the response vehicle; it is the trust built through repeated presence. In moments of uncertainty, families in Jabal Mohsen know that a trained local team can help organize, guide, refer, and respond. The uploaded team photo reflects this strength: a disciplined group standing together, visibly rooted in the community and ready to serve.
FRT-JM also reflects AICA’s wider protection approach, as AICA’s Protection département requires services to follow do-no-harm, safety, confidentiality, informed consent, non-discrimination, referral, and minimum necessary documentation principles. This gives FRT-JM an important added value: the team is not only responding quickly, but is expected to respond safely, ethically, and in coordination with AICA’s protection and health pathways.