He has served on the Board of Advisors of Friends of Firefighters, the nonprofit that provides free, independent, and confidential mental health counseling and wellness services to FDNY firefighters and their families. Friends of Firefighters has operated since 2001, out of a restored firehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Its services include individual counseling, peer support through the Aaron Clark Peer Support Team, and group wellness programs. The organization is explicitly independent of the FDNY bureaucracy — its services are confidential, which means a firefighter seeking help does not have to report that fact to supervisors or risk any career consequence. The independence is intentional: the culture of the fire service, like the culture of many emergency services, has historically discouraged the acknowledgment of psychological difficulty. People who face death regularly and who define themselves through physical courage do not find it easy to ask for help.
Buscemi has been explicit about this dynamic in interviews. “Firefighters are great at helping others,” he told CBS News. “They’re great at helping each other.” The unstated corollary, which he has articulated in various ways, is that the same quality that makes firefighters effective in their professional lives — the orientation toward action, the suppression of fear, the emphasis on handling the situation — makes it difficult for them to recognize and respond to their own need for support. The mental health consequences of what firefighters experienced at Ground Zero, and of what they continued to experience as colleagues died of 9/11-related illnesses in subsequent years, were real and documented. The organizations working to provide support for those consequences were doing necessary work. His involvement with Friends of Firefighters was not a celebrity endorsement; it was a sustained engagement with a community he had belonged to.