Serve OnFive members of Wiltshire based charity Serve On have left the UK for Nepal to deliver lifesaving search and rescue training. 

Four members of the same team provided critical search and rescue in Kathmandu last year after the devastating earthquake and were the first British team with boots on the ground. This time Serve On have been invited back to share their skills, experience and deliver a training programme in technical search and building search.

Pete Old, Director of Serve On, says, “Our charity has a history extending nearly two decades of responding to disasters and returning at a later stage to train local responders. We do this because we know more lives can be saved in the first 24 hours of a disaster by local people than by International search and rescue teams arriving in the following days, this way we can transform a relief-stage solution into a sustainable and permanent one.”

During their visit to Nepal Serve On will be discussing partnership working with the Ghurkha Welfare Trust, building on their unique Community Resilience model already in place in Salisbury and Portsmouth to build a team of highly trained volunteers who can respond in a disaster.

Whilst in Nepal Serve On have been asked by another UK charity, Team Rubicon, to support it’s completion of a project that HRH Prince Harry worked on. Dan Cooke, Director of Operations said, “We are really proud to have been asked by Team Rubicon to help them – in March they did a fantastic job in helping a group of determined villagers to rebuild a school that was destroyed by the earthquake.”

The team will deliver the training over 10 days, returning to the UK on 25th May. Since deploying a team to Nepal last year Serve On has also supported UK communities during the floods that battered the North of Britain in Cumbria and Tadcaster and continues to stand prepared to respond when communities need support.