The American Red Cross can provide two types of assistance after a disaster – hard and soft.  

Hard assistance provides material items and may include feeding, shelter, clean-up kits, comfort kits and financial assistance.  

Soft assistance minimizes immediate disaster-caused suffering through listening, guidance, advocacy, and counseling. 

Contacting Family Members

List yourself as Safe and Well

If you have been affected by a disaster, this website provides a way for you to register yourself as "safe and well." From a list of standard messages, you can select those that you want to communicate to your family members, letting them know of your well-being.
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Find Shelter and Supplies

If you are in need of a shelter during a disaster, please contact your local Red Cross chapter.

The most visible and well-known of Red Cross disaster relief activities are sheltering and feeding. The Red Cross opens shelters for those displaced by a disaster and provides meals and snacks to families and to emergency workers in affected areas.

After a disaster trained Red Cross interviewers meet one on one with families to determine their needs. The assistance may include providing the means for them to pay for groceries, new clothes, rent, emergency home repairs, transportation, medicines, and tools. The Red Cross also lets people know about other community or government resources available to them and helps those needing long-term recovery assistance when other resources are inadequate.

Red Cross nurses deliver first aid and attend to other health-related matters. The Red Cross may help pay for certain medical needs, including prescription medicines, medical supplies, and emergency medical treatment. The Red Cross also provides blood and blood products.

Disaster Mental Health Services workers are licensed mental health practitioners trained to recognize the emotional impact of a disaster on those affected by the disaster as well as disaster workers. They offer information and help educate people on the emotional impacts of disasters and how to cope with them.

If a loved one is in the affected area, family members from outside the area can call their local chapter and request assistance in determining the well-being of their family member.

The American Red Cross has gathered this information to encourage you take precautions to help keep you safe and speed your recovery after a disaster. You will also find ideas on what you can do to help make yourself and your home safer from future disasters.

The American Red Cross links members of the U.S. Armed Forces with their families during a crisis.  Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, the Red Cross quickly sends emergency communications to deployed service members on behalf of their family.  Military members can have peace of mind knowing that when they are on a mission, in training or stationed far from home-and leaving cell phones and emails behind-they are still connected to home.

While providing service to 1.4 million active duty military personnel and their families, the Red Cross also reaches out to more than 1.2 million members of the National Guard and Reserves and their families living in nearly every community in America.

Red Cross workers in hundreds of chapters and on military installations briefed 974,573  departing service members and their families regarding available support services, and explained how the Red Cross may assist them during the deployment.

Both active duty and community-based military can count on the Red Cross to provide emergency communications that link them with their families back home, access to financial assistance in partnership with the military aid societies, information and referral and assistance to veterans.  Red Cross personnel form a global network in 700 U.S. chapters, military installations worldwide and in forward deployed locations in Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.

I Am Alive
The family messages transmitted by the Red Cross can be very brief, but the three short words "I am alive" may be all that is needed to ease the minds of distraught loved ones half a world away.

Armed conflict and natural disaster leave millions of people around the globe in urgent need of humanitarian assistance every year. Adding to the physical losses, the confusion and chaos surrounding war and natural disasters often separates families when they need each other most. Tragically, when families and loved ones are separated by war or disaster, their suffering is greater. But, through the strength of the global Red Cross and Red Crescent network and the assistance of local tracing volunteers around the world, the American Red Cross helps families reconnect. American Red Cross International Family Tracing Services accepts tracing cases and traces sought persons when:

• Families have been separated as a result of either armed conflict or disaster.
• Families have already tried normal channels of communication, to the extent possible.
• The family member making the inquiry provides sufficient essential information on the sought person.
• The family member making the inquiry is a close family relative, who has been in direct contact with the sought person before the conflict or disaster occurred.

Learn more about:

• Restoring Family Links
• Holocaust Tracing

To begin a search, call your local American Red Cross chapter, the critical link in your community to the global Red Cross and Red Crescent network.

The American Red Cross cannot accept requests when there is insufficient information to conduct a search; or when it is for genealogical research; or tracing regarding legal matters such as wills, child custody etc.; or the tracing of birth parents or third party requests.