He Couldn’t Save His Brother on 9/11. He Spent the Next 25 Years Saving Others.

Frank Siller’s youngest brother, Stephen, was orphaned at 10, grew up to become a New York City firefighter, and was driving home from a night shift on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he heard the World Trade Center had been hit. He turned his truck around, grabbed his gear, and ran through the closed Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and up the stairs of the South Tower. He never came out.

Two weeks later, Siller and his siblings started a charity in Stephen’s name. Twenty-five years on, that foundation, Tunnel to Towers, has paid off mortgages for fallen first responders and Gold Star families, built mortgage-free smart homes for catastrophically wounded veterans and first responders, and worked to end veteran homelessness across the country. Siller writes about Stephen—on that morning and the 25 years since—in his new memoir, Let Us Do Good. He joins Coleman Hughes to talk about what it actually took to build one of the largest charities of its kind in America out of a single family’s grief.

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