The call came in during the third week of January: a Kurdish family in the region had been using a single electric space heater to heat their entire apartment, and it had stopped working. Temperatures outside were below freezing. They had three children under ten.

This kind of situation is not rare, and it is not always visible. Families dealing with heating emergencies often do not call official social services, partly because of language barriers and partly because of distrust of government agencies. They call community members. KASA’s emergency response capacity exists precisely to fill this gap — to be the organization that a Kurdish family calls when they have a problem that does not fit neatly into any official program.

Within twenty-four hours of that January call, KASA volunteers had sourced a replacement heater and delivered it to the family. This is not a story about a large institutional response — it is a story about a small, mobile organization that can act quickly because it is close to the community it serves. That closeness is our most important resource.