Northeast Wilderness Search And Rescue

Our Mission

Northeast Wilderness Search & Rescue (NEWSAR), had its origins in "Childseekers, Inc.," a Vermont organization that specialized in finding missing children. NEWSAR was organized in 1999 and incorporated as a Massachusetts charitable corporation in the last quarter of the year 2000. NEWSAR was recognized as a Federal exempt non-profit organization in 2001 and received its 501[c][3] final determination letter from the IRS in in 2005. Expanding the mission of Childseekers, NEWSAR's mission statement included the commitment to address the high cost of training that faced SAR Volunteers. Over the last decade, the cost of training and certification escalated to the point that many SAR Volunteers were beginning to drop out of their local teams. Discouraged, they would ask why training fees were so expensive when they were providing their time and energy for free, in an effort to save lives. Guided by an executive board of experienced civilian and law enforcement SAR experts, NEWSAR in its first few years of existence, began to mitigate this problem in the Northeast. Working with law enforcement agencies, NEWSAR has been able to coordinate and provide a series of low cost and no-cost trainings since its inception, using law enforcement or public facilities and volunteer instructors to keep costs down. For example, the September 2010 Training Weekend (Friday-Sunday) at the VT Police Academy, included classroom instruction, workshops, field exercises and a mock search. The entire 3-day weekend, encompassing over 20 hours of multi-track training (K9, Ground Searching, SAR Planning), was provided at an average cost of only $160 per person, including 5 meals and 2 nights accommodations in the academy dormitory. This type of collaboration and shared training between Law Enforcement and Civilian personnel is a Win-Win formula: Civilians get access to high quality, low-cost training while the Law Enforcement community gets access to a cadre of highly motivated and well-trained Civilian SAR personnel who are ready to assist on any public emergency.

NEWSAR's fund-raising goal is to receive adequate donations to provide most or all of its SAR training at a subsidized discount or for free, with no required dues for Volunteers or their Teams. However, in the absence of adequate donations, NEWSAR tries to price dues and training events at or near the break even level to ensure high quality training at the lowest feasible cost.

A donation of $4000 would provide free training for 25 Volunteers over a full 3-day weekend. A donation of $1000 would cover most of the organization's annual fixed administrative costs related to maintaining a "virtual" organization with no bricks and mortar overhead. Besides being available for actual search emergencies, NEWSAR members routinely teach classes and manage mock search trainings on a volunteer basis. NEWSAR is committed to stretching any contributed dollar as far as it can go to fulfill its dual mission of providing low-cost/no-cost training and maintaining an online training registry operated by volunteer instructors.

NEWSAR also fills an important role as a credentialing agency that sets training standards which civilian SAR teams and law enforcement agencies use to ensure that their members are qualified to be deployed on lost person searches. NEWSAR maintains an online certification program that allows instructors to issue certificates of completion via email, further reducing administrative costs.