Ten years of showing up. That's why this directory exists.
TrustLight is built with Cajun Navy Ground Force, a Louisiana disaster relief organization that has deployed into 21 disasters across nine states and Jamaica since 2020. This directory came directly out of what they kept seeing in the field.
Boyka Kriakova, Pine Island, after Hurricane Ian. A river of water ran through her home. Ground Force gutted the house and cleared the yard.
Disasters bring help. They also bring people who take advantage.
After every storm, the same thing happens. Trucks with out-of-state plates roll in. Someone knocks on the door of a family who just lost their roof and asks for cash up front. A homeowner with no power, no insurance adjuster yet, and a hole in their ceiling has to decide who to trust based on a business card and a handshake.
Cajun Navy Ground Force has watched it happen in Lake Charles, Houma, Mayfield, Fort Myers, Rolling Fork, Lahaina and Kerrville. Deposits taken and never returned. Work started and abandoned. Insurance rights signed away by people who didn't know what they were signing.
That's the whole partnership. CNGF does the verification work no homeowner in crisis can do for themselves — licensing board records, license verification with the state board, insurance confirmed directly with the carrier — and then puts that list in the hands of the people who need it, at the moment they need it.
This list goes out to an audience of millions.
Cajun Navy Ground Force is a media organization before it is a disaster organization. Live field coverage from inside disasters has built an audience that turns on the moment a storm hits — and verified contractors go out with it.
Fluid and fast is not a style. It's the intervention.
The first seventy-two hours after a disaster are chaos — no power, no cell service, no roads, no roster of who needs what. Large institutions are built to work on the far side of that. CNGF built itself to work inside it.
Volunteers deploy into impacted communities in two-week shifts to form a disaster safety net, and that net stays in place long after the news cycle moves on. In Lake Charles they stayed a year. In Houma, six months. In Mayfield, they stayed through Christmas Day, tarping roofs. The standing commitment is to elderly and vulnerable residents — the people who can't dig themselves out, and who are still there after everyone else has gone.
Being fast has a specific operational meaning: an advance team in Houma within twelve hours of Ida passing. Boots on the ground in Lahaina seventy-two hours after the fire. Arrival in Mayfield less than forty-eight hours after an EF4 crossed eleven counties.
S.A.F.E. Camp
Swift Action Force Emergency Camp. Operational within hours, turning a parking lot into a command center for a community that has lost power, water and fuel. Volunteer intake, drive-thru distribution, victim intake, and case management under one roof. Runs on solar and Starlink.
Community Caretaking
In-home care for people who can't come to the line — elderly, disabled, homebound, veterans. Wellness checks, chainsaw crews, muck-outs, tarping, medical and mental health care in the home, and help navigating FEMA paperwork.
Data-Driven Remote Team
Operations oversight without adding bodies to the disaster zone. Tracks volunteer movement, logs donations and hours for grant and FEMA reimbursement, coordinates corporate logistics and press, and pushes live aid maps when local communications fail.
Visual Storytelling
The engine behind everything else. Live field coverage keeps the story alive after the networks leave, and converts within hours into truckloads of donated product and volunteers who pay their own way to get there.
Swift Intervention Training
Year-round readiness. Certification that prepares volunteers to join the crisis team before the next disaster rather than during it. Runs out of Baton Rouge and Scott, Louisiana, and travels so local organizers keep the systems after the team goes home.
Contractor Verification
The newest piece, and the reason this site exists. Independent verification of home repair contractors — license confirmed with the state board, insurance confirmed with the carrier — so that families in recovery have a vetted list instead of a stack of business cards.
Lahaina, Maui, 2023. Cars served through the distribution line went from 300 to over 1,200 in a day, and 2,688 volunteer hours were logged at no cost to the community.
Twenty-one disasters since 2020.
Every deployment is documented, with metrics drawn from primary sources — daily logs, volunteer-hour records, grant reporting and field documentation. Where a figure doesn't exist, the record says so rather than estimating.
Get on the list families are handed after the storm.
Verification is $497 a year right now — $500 off list for the first 50 businesses — and it is the only way onto the directory. Nine checks, run by our team, re-run every year. No paid placement, ever.
Cajun Navy Ground Force · EIN 81-3926021 · 102 Pecan Grove, Scott, Louisiana
Rob Gaudet, President & Founder