Frank Siller was 8 years old when he received envelopes for his first communion. They contained $26—all in dollar bills—more money than he’d ever held in his life. His parents made him give half of it away to a family in need. He still remembers exactly how it felt to hand it over, and he has no memory of what he did with the rest. That’s the kind of family Siller grew up in. It’s also, more than anything else, the reason his youngest brother, Stephen, did what he did on September 11, 2001. Stephen was orphaned at 10 and raised the rest of the way by his six older siblings. He grew up to become a New York City firefighter, married the girl he’d walked to school with as a kid, and had five children of his own. On the morning of the attacks, he was driving home from a night shift when he heard on the radio that the World Trade Center had been attacked. He turned his truck around and found the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel shut down. He ran through it anyway—on foot, with 60 pounds of equipment on his back—and kept going into the South Tower. He never came out. Siller found out that afternoon from a neighbor, a firefighter who called to say nobody was coming back. Two weeks later he asked his brother’s widow if the family could start something in Stephen’s name. It began as a handful of scholarships and has since grown into the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, one of the largest charities of its kind in the country. It has paid off mortgages for the families of fallen first responders and service members, built homes for veterans who lost multiple limbs in combat and severely injured first responders, and taken on the fight to end veteran homelessness nationwide. Siller tells the whole story of Stephen’s life—that morning and everything that came after—in his new memoir, Let Us Do Good. I asked him what it’s actually taken to build something at that scale out of a single, devastating loss. His answer kept circling back to the same lesson his parents taught him with that $26: It’s never about how much you give, only that you notice someone who needs it. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. 0:00 Intro 1:21 Introducing Frank Siller and the Story of Stephen Siller 6:55 A Portrait of Staten Island in the 50s, 60s, and 70s 10:57 The Twenty Six Dollars 13:58 Growing Up Poor Without Knowing It 17:32 September 11th and the Founding of Tunnel to Towers 23:38 On Heroism and Being Tested 28:07 The Challenges of Running a National Nonprofit 33:28 Has America Grown More Divided Since 9/11?