As temperatures dropped to record lows in Texas this winter, the Texas Disaster Recovery and Medical Response Team, led by Toby Hatton, Director of Clinical Operations Disaster Medical Response Unit, Disaster Recovery, Kimberly King and Olajumoke Basaru, Clinical Coordinators, handed out 800 winter care kits to unhoused people in the Austin community.
“We are always looking for an opportunity to mitigate suffering related to disasters or emergency events,” said Hatton.
While working with the unhoused population, doing community aid and resource events, the group recognized there was a need to assist during the cold weather.
“It is often overlooked until it is too late or too cold to do anything about it, so we started planning in the summer to make a kit for the winter,” he explained. The kit included a beanie, gloves, scarf, gaiter, hand-warmers, lotion, lip balm and some have additional items like hygiene kits, wound care kits, and thermal base layers.
“Through funding from the Ascension Texas Foundation, community partner donations, and service projects from the National HR, National Risk Management, and National Strategy teams, we were able to put together 1,100 winter weather care kits.”
Those kits were distributed to established community partners, local first responders, warming shelters and by hand on site where the unhoused are found. This was completed just in time for the historically coldest time of the year—the last two weeks of January and first two weeks of February.
In addition, the team shipped some heavier winter clothing kits to ministries up north, where cold weather is more pronounced and prolonged. Hatton explained, “The largest distribution occurred the week before Winter Storm Fern through our work with the community partners in the Austin Resiliency Network.”
Published: February 23, 2026
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