For more than six decades, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Red Cross So­ci­ety (TTRCS) has stood as a sym­bol of hu­man­i­tar­i­an strength, de­liv­er­ing vi­tal sup­port through its dis­as­ter re­sponse, mi­gra­tion as­sis­tance, and First Aid pro­grammes.

How­ev­er, a mis­sion re­port by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the In­ter­na­tion­al Fed­er­a­tion of Red Cross (IFRC), con­duct­ed in De­cem­ber 2024, high­light­ed is­sues with­in the TTRCS, in­clud­ing mis­man­age­ment, poor fi­nan­cial over­sight, and break­downs in com­mu­ni­ca­tion and gov­er­nance.

The fall­out be­gan pub­licly in Oc­to­ber, when anony­mous fly­ers plas­tered across the Port-of-Spain com­pound called for its pres­i­dent Jill De Bourg’s re­moval. The fly­ers read: “We had giv­en you a chance to be our TTRCS pres­i­dent to bring bet­ter­ment to the so­ci­ety, not to bring it apart.”