VALOR Clinic Foundation’s Role in the Service to Civilian Transition

by: Mark Baylis
2024-09-30
Source: valorclinic.org
09/30/2024

If you would have told me I would be running a Veterans charity when I left the service I would have laughed at you in 2006. 2007 had a surprise for me I never saw coming. I was living in a camper hoping I could afford the fuel to pick up my kid for the weekend and still have enough left to buy some peanut butter to feed him for two days. You may wonder how that happens to a retired Special Forces soldier who began service as a young Ranger private, I retired in pay grade E9 with over 26 years of service. It happened because the green machine lost my retirement paperwork. It wasn’t very problematic until my savings were gone.

State says I don’t qualify for unemployment because I have a pension. My have a pension verses supposed to have a pension arguments fall on deaf ears. So no help came from unemployment.

If things weren’t complicated enough, I was medically retired for injuries received in combat as determined by my medical evaluation board. This is important because I was dealing with many medical issues at a VA hospital an hour from my camper, the VA is billing me for health care, my claim took 3 plus years to wrap up so for a long time I am not even being reimbursed for mileage nor receiving a VA disability check.

The many months long process to correct it although painful, was educational. School of hard knocks is a powerful educator. I learned firsthand how the injured young troops land in civilian life. I promise you it is not an enjoyable experience.   Maybe I should have reached out to food pantry or something. But this would all be straightened out any day I always thought, so I never did. Now I am in great shape, 100% VA with SMC, full pension with CRSC and the back pays were life changing when they arrived. With all this said, let me shift gears from the life experience that landed me here to why and how I got here.

My medical situation left me with a busy appointment schedule. Custody lawyer was draining my savings faster than an 18B drains a beer glass and I needed something to do with my down time. I started volunteering at a local church food pantry. This shift is important because now I am also learning from other people’s hard knocks. But I want to know what I am doing so I start reading studies on food insecurity as being hungry is called. But the world seems to focus on food insecurity like that is the problem. Poor target folder preparation with that description. The glaring fact is it is a malnutrition issue not a calories issue. We have tons of malnourished obese people in this country. Obesity is a calories issues and there a very few obese people in the homeless camps I visit regularly. First health symptoms to arise from malnutrition are cognitive function issues like concentration problems and difficulty processing thoughts, that also contribute to emotional outbursts that often manifest as anger or tears. Next up is the immune systems abilities wane.

Seemed to me that, a disproportionate ratio of the people in the food pantry line were Veterans or Veterans spouses. Veterans make up 7.1% of population according to last statistic I remember reading. So why are a 1/3 of my clients Veterans? In fact it seems every male over the age of 30 is a Veteran. I didn’t make a spreadsheet to confirm this or a fancy pie chart or bar graph, I just started taking the Veterans off to the side and talking with them. I learned quickly everyone I spoke to was in that line because a service related injury or illness was causing work disruptions. I started using the lessons I learned figuring out the service connection process for myself to help the food pantry line Veterans with claims submission informally. It was a frequent enough problem I became accredited as a claims agent. I am now claims agent #44976 with the VA if you ever need help with a claim reach out. Apparently my interest in helping the veterans caught people’s attention down at the food pantry.

Knock, knock, knock I hear at my door, in the dark about 9pm. I am out of the camper by now and live half a mile down a dirt road in middle of the woods. I am not born and raised here, I know almost nobody—who the heck is at my door—at night? Turns out it is a volunteer from the food pantry, she has a homeless Veteran with her and is making both a passionate and emotional plea for me to help him. The humorous part is she doesn’t tell me he is homeless or what she wants me to do for him for at least 5 or 10 minutes into the emotional plea. So I am standing there confused about what she is there for and wondering how in the hell she found my house in the first place. When she finally tells me she wants me to help this homeless Veteran, I am taken aback. I had never helped a homeless person with anything more than a sandwich or a couple bucks when I saw one on a corner begging. I had no idea how to help this homeless veteran.   I told her meet me at the food pantry the next day and we’d try to figure something out.

The ensuing days found me in homeless camps for the first time in my life.   Once I saw the camps I couldn’t turn my back on the veterans in the Camps. That first Camp visit was probably in early 2008 or 2009. Since that time the problem out grew my ability to help alone, I reached out to a friend from C/1/1 SFG tony Cross doing counseling for Veterans and first responders in 2011 and said hey how about we see if we can’t help with this larger Veterans integrating civilian life problem together and start a 501 C 3? We are going to talk about what we learned about the challenges they face in a minute. Equally we need to talk about something it is not right up front.

First time in history average Veteran is better educated then their civilian counterpart. The volunteer military and the associated enlistment requirements have raised our average education level. How many NCOs do you know with college degrees up to an including graduate degrees? Yes we still have some draftees out there, but they are not the majority, even many draftees went on to college or trade school after the military. So the number, of uneducated draftees who need financial literacy classes to survive as civilians, still alive are a huge minority that does not represent the average in my experience. Teaching troops separating from service how to balance their check book and why they should have a retirement account definitely won’t prevent homelessness and probably won’t keep them out of life crisis. If your goal is to help the ones that will be successful anyway be more successful, I am clapping for you, good job. If you want to keep your 18B out of my homeless shelter or from hurting themselves with that type approach, not going to help BIG swing and a miss.

I tell you this story because several of our brethren want to help struggling Veterans also and have reached out for advice.   Life is too short to learn everything the hard way. Maybe some of my lessons as an individual and our lessons as an organization will save you a headache. Or better yet maybe they will motivate you into action to find even better ways to help.

Things started to happen I didn’t plan for. Word of mouth about the way I handled claims resulted in an initially slow but steady stream of veterans coming to me for help with disability claims. Combined with my unwillingness to look away from the homeless Veterans has grown the efforts over the years from an individual Good Samaritan action into a 501 C 3 with four core programs. We helped less than 100 Veterans in 2012 the year we received our 501 C 3 status from the IRS. Eleven years later in 2023 those four programs combined to help 3,443 Veterans in six states. The growth has been staggering at times to sustain, especially through the COVID years.

Through, by and with the locals is the Special Forces way to accomplish our mission to Free the Oppressed using FID and UW. I was fortunate to witness its resulting outcome during the response to 9/11 in Afghanistan. Wish I could tell you Tony and I made a business plan to run the organization on a through, by and with model, but we didn’t. We had a plan formatted straight out of ST 101-5 and the Student handout from SWC for mission planning. That plan didn’t mention a UW operations model converted to charity efforts anyplace. Guess what happened? The community rallied to the cause, they became our funders, our referral sources and our work force. Auxiliary, underground and gorillas sound similar as comparisons?? It just unfolded that way, maybe by chance or maybe professional habits, but probably by path of least resistance.

We as a community are much better educated, much more resourceful and much more determined than our conventional counterparts. Common sense would suggest we would have avoided some of the struggles Veterans face as civilians.   My experience is that we don’t. Two Special Forces soldiers have lived in the Major Paul Syverson Veterans Sanctuary. One was a SSG 18E the other an 18Z. I know of three other formerly or current homeless SF veterans that I couldn’t bring in. I know one other, a Major no less that benefitted from our homeless Veterans resources in another way. I also had a CPT helicopter pilot and a LTC infantry officer live at the facility. This is not a problem that is only facing privates. We are not immune to the homeless Veteran problem by Branch, nor by rank. If our best and brightest service members are having trouble, no wonder our lower enlisted are struggling in the transition.

The list in my head of our brothers who have hurt themselves is much longer than the homeless list. We are not immune to the Veteran suicide problem. We are not immune to the addiction problem. We are not immune to constant conflict at home problem. We are not immune from the getting fired at work unemployment problem.

I believe circumstances upon discharge are oppressive in many ways for our Veterans. So oppressive our representation in the homeless community; and suicide statistics are grossly out of proportion to our representation in the population as a whole. I call the struggles created by this perceived oppression as the war at home. Where is our De Oppresso Liber representation in fighting the war at home?

What we are is the informal leaders who create military change. The conventional forces use our tactics, our equipment and uniform modifications very soon after they witness our use of same. Why; because they look up to us and trust our insights. I do not believe the way the nation handles Veterans crisis will improve until WE as the SF community set an example worth following for the rest of the Veteran community. I say that because the Veterans will need to fix these problems. There is a horrible void of people who wore camouflage in laboratories and people wearing lab coats in foxholes. Again I encourage our people as individuals and our chapters and maybe even national to consider if we think it appropriate to be more involved in fighting the war at home.

At VALOR we fight the war at home with four programs. They are Resilient Warrior, Hope for the Homeless, Holiday Meals and Veterans Unstoppable. We staff the efforts primarily with volunteers. We fund the efforts primarily with individual donors, along with grassroots efforts like motorcycle rides, spaghetti dinners, raffles, a golf tournament and our annual Patriots Ball.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
VALOR Clinic Foundation (VALOR) is an innovative 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in 2012 to provide relief, resources, long-term solutions, and housing to Veterans. We are applying for General Operating support to fund The War to Peace Transition Center, our site/facility in Lake Harmony, PA to provide us with a long-term base and headquarters for our key program, Veterans Unstoppable.

The mission of VALOR is to provide Veterans with assistance accessing benefits, securing shelter, and providing long-lasting Post Traumatic Stress resources and relief through our Veterans Unstoppable Program.

Our purpose is to help Veterans and their families deal with life challenges by meeting them where they are and being flexible and adaptive in our response to their unique needs. We provide a hand up on the home front, and seek innovative, responsive, creative and immediate ways to improve the lives of our nation’s Veterans. Eventually we want to provide nationwide integrated medical care to all Veterans who need it.

We began this work in 2012, helping about 50 Veterans who were homeless and living on the streets. Over the past eight years we have had a steep growth curve and have served close to 9,000 homeless or at risk of homelessness Veterans. We also work with homeless and at risk civilians and have provided assistance to over 62,000 since 2012.   Each year we work with over 800 volunteers to provide support to homeless Veterans and civilians and distribute over 200,000 items. Our outreach continues to grow each year, and we are committed to create and sustain a Veteran community where every Veteran knows there is someone out there who cares about their challenges and will respond effectively with their situation in mind.

Our current main effort is Veteran Suicide prevention at our War to Peace Transition Center, where we will continue our ground-breaking work with our keystone program, Veterans Unstoppable. Operations are ongoing but classes are smaller than we would like. We need to improve our facilities to support expansion. This will allow us to move from our current mobile approach to a permanent base. Our highly effective, five-step program helps Veterans build productive lives with positive outcomes as civilians. The funding will go towards the design and construction of six new buildings, repairs to two existing buildings, and continued support for our retreat sessions including costs associated with materials such as books, meals, utilities, equipment and maintenance at our 192-acre site in Lake Harmony, PA.

ORGANIZATION HISTORY
VALOR was founded in 2012 as a 501(c)3 by Mark Baylis in response to the chronic lack of resources and support available to Veterans returning from war, specifically with PTSD trauma. As a Veteran himself, he works tirelessly as a champion for other Veterans, seeing them as family members who deserve to be treated with the same dignity and respect in civilian life they received as soldiers. He understands how Veterans think and what resources they need to heal and regain a solid foundation, and because of that VALOR has become an incredibly successful model for other organizations to follow.

Mark Baylis served 26 years in active duty in the US Army, and is personally aware of the difficult road that Veterans face once they return home from duty. Mark worked as a formally trained performance counselor in the US Army with very strong positive outcomes for all the units he was responsible for, and received more than forty military awards and decorations during this time. After retiring from Active Duty, he trained with Dr. Sylvia LaFair, a psychologist who was using effective methods for overcoming social conflict between employees in corporate America. After two years of this training, he gathered a core group of Veterans and they developed Veterans Unstoppable – a five-phase program designed to reset the unconscious behavior, or the psychological id, of the soldier coming back from war to re-enter civilian life in a safe, productive, and meaningful way. VALOR has implemented four core programs since 2012 and we are extremely proud and encouraged by the great gains we have made during this time.   These are offered at no-cost to all qualifying Veterans. Each year we work with over 850 volunteers to provide support almost 2,000 Veterans and distribute over 200,000 items.

1. Hope for the Homeless: A program to provide immediate relief and support as food, shelter, and counseling services. In 2022 we:

Provided 1,112 homeless Veterans with 28,390 meals
Provided 4,380 nights of shelter
Furnished 68 apartments for homeless Veterans and their families and donated items such as couches, beds, desks, utensils, lights

2. Veterans Unstoppable: A five-phase program designed to reset the psychology of a traumatized soldier returning to civilian society to keep them off the streets, in secure family units, and employed through an intensive 3-month retreat (4-day session once a month for three months with homework and exercises planned during the weeks we are apart). In 2022 we:

Provided help to 75 Veterans
Provided 5,250 hours of retreat counseling & education
Provided 832.5 hours of Veteran community peer group support to 333 Veterans
Launched our couples program to support Veterans and their partners
Hosted 111 Veterans for recreational therapy events
Zero participant alumni suicides since program inception in 2012
41 Companion and Service Dog placements since 2012

3. Holiday Meals: Provides all three holiday meals to formerly homeless and financially struggling Veterans during the holidays.
In 2022 we:

Provided 1,269 Veteran families with 38,070 meals

4. Resilient Warrior: Assists Veterans who need to file for access to care and benefits through the Department of Veteran Affairs, Social Security Administration, their state and other resources through non-government organizations or individuals. The intent is to assist Veterans in maintaining a normal lifestyle in the face of adverse life conditions and occasionally assist with more than paperwork. In 2022 we:

Provided help to 48 Veterans
Provided a combined $1 million dollars back to our Veterans by getting them back into society receiving their social security and VA benefits
VALOR relies on its volunteer base to make these programs effective and possible. We have a core team in place for the four programs, and more than 850 volunteers who get involved throughout the year. They directly contribute their time and talent through local recruitment with their churches, scout troops, legion posts and civic groups to donate and food and clothing drives for us.

5. PROBLEM STATEMENT: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is one of the most likely outcomes of serving in active duty, and one of the least understood to treat. More than one in five Veterans return home with some form of PTSD, and yet the ability to effectively manage and remedy this devastating injury is chronically lacking[1]. Although the Veterans Administration (VA) has improved their reaction and treatment protocol for Veterans suffering from PTSD, there is still a shocking lack of real work being done to help them return home safely and maintain their employment, housing, and relationships. The VA system presents more options than it did twenty years ago, but the dramatic absence of holistic, long-term, long-lasting treatment programs results in a widespread breakdown for the Veteran and their families. The emotional wounds of PTSD can severely interfere with a Veteran’s ability to lead a normal healthy life, especially in relationships and consistent employment.

6. Since September 11, 2001, more active duty service members have been lost to suicide than to combat in the United States. An important study published in the Annals of Epidemiology confirms that on average 22 Veterans commit suicide everyday in this country.[2] Because of increased body armor and protection, more soldiers from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are able to return home and not die in battle – a very dramatic change from the Vietnam War, our last real ongoing battlefield fight. But a sad outcome of these survivors is that they are saddled with the painful and heavy weight of PTSD and other disorders that our system is unbelievably unprepared to handle.[3]

7. For soldiers coming home with PTSD, their chance of falling into debt, homelessness, divorce, and general crisis are higher than those Veterans returning without PTSD. Research that has examined the effect of PTSD on intimate relationships reveals severe and pervasive negative effects on marital adjustment, general family functioning, and the mental health of partners. These negative effects result in such problems as compromised parenting, family violence, divorce, sexual problems, aggression, and caregiver burden.[4] In an important study done by RAND, the results were unequivocal. The leader of the study was quoted: "If PTSD and depression go untreated or are under-treated, there is a cascading set of consequences. Drug use, suicide, marital problems and unemployment are some of the consequences. There will be a bigger societal impact if these service members go untreated. The consequences are not good for the individuals or society in general."[5]

8. One of the major underlying issues that prevents solid and strong solutions to this crisis is unfortunately found within the very system that is supposed to heal the Veterans: the mainstream medical establishment. Regardless of the good intention of our healthcare providers to treat PTSD, none of them are thinking in the Veteran mindset. Simply put, they are trying to solve something they themselves have never experienced nor understand clearly. The VA does a woeful job at bringing Veterans to the table to help solve these issues by actually asking Veterans what could help. That is a shameful disgrace. The doctors treating our PTSD Veterans are using the same methods they use for civilians and there is a great difference between a one-time tragic event that causes PTSD in a civilian and a constant, yearlong daily bombardment in an active fire battlefield. While this type of trauma is radically different from the civilian type, both are treated as the same injury and treatment for both includes the same tactics.

Our core program, Veterans Unstoppable, seeks to address this chronic lack of understanding from doctors and clinicians by putting Veterans in charge of finding solutions and holistic healing responses. This has a powerful and immediate effect. At the time of this writing VALOR is proud to report that we have never lost a single Veterans Unstoppable program participant or graduate in the war at home and there has only been one divorce out of the 400 Veterans who went through the program since 2014. The Veterans have had to find the answers ourselves to navigate the War to Peace transition. We have to do it ourselves, and at Valor we are. We at Valor are setting the standard for Veteran designed and managed transition programs for others to follow.

Our primary Goal for Veterans Unstoppable
Continue to offer our Veterans Unstoppable Program at no-cost to qualifying Veterans at our War to Peace Transition Center

Three-session retreat that lasts one long weekend (Friday – Monday) each month for 3 months with four graduating “classes” each year.
5-step program, outlined below in the Methodology section.
Healthy life style adjustment activities happen minimum five times per year including turkey, deer hunting and trout fishing.
Over the next two years increase class size and double frequency.
Over the next year double the peer groups with successful prior students who become instructors and lead the groups themselves.
We recently began conducting a week long version of Veterans Unstoppable in GA. Two more week long classes will be run in GA in 2021 and a First will be run in TN.
We anticipate a 10 day version to be conducted at our facility once constructed and operational.

METHODOLOGY
VALOR will work towards completing the objectives set forth under the guidance and direction of the President and Board Members. The timeline to accomplish the completion of The War to Peace Transition Center is 24 months. The programming for the four classes per year will continue on leased properties until the facility is complete, although we can begin using it in stages as buildings are constructed and completed. We are working with Hanover Engineering and The Hill Architecture firm.

Veterans Unstoppable is our groundbreaking core program developed and designed by Mark Baylis with feedback from more than 25 Veterans and the assistance of Glen Lippincott.

From 2012 – 2014 Mark studied under Dr. Sylvia LeFaire, a leading psychologist and conflict negotiator whose transformative work in corporate America helped employers retrain their employees causing chronic issues in the workplace. After shadowing her for two years, Mark ventured out on his own to develop Veterans Unstoppable in consultation and collaboration with other Veterans to create a custom-fit holistic healing program for Veterans experiencing PTSD. We have been practicing this method since 2014 and have graduated over 700 Veterans 27 graduating classes in PA and four in Georgia and one in TN.

We offer a three-session retreat that lasts one long weekend a month (Friday – Monday) for three months. Each session begins with dinner on Friday evening, followed by an introduction to the program and the session schedule. Saturday and Sunday are full days of classes and events, and Monday ends with a morning fly-fishing class. All activities are done in group sessions with group rules that establish behavior expectations of mutual respect. We use a military technique for protecting each other called Battle Buddies, each Veteran gets paired up with a new buddie at the start of each session and are required to have two phones between sessions to check in with each other.

Our program is broken into five steps:

Step 1: Managing exposures and their effects -

We offer exposure classes and their impact on Veterans health including mental health, and provide mitigation techniques to off-set the effects of toxic exposures.
Our topics include saunas, chelation therapy, massage and juice-fasting as aides to detoxification as the body’s primary methods to remove toxins.
Required reading to guide this step: Toxic Relief by Dr. Don Colbert and a cookbook to take home, Eating Your Way to Good Health by Doug Kauffman.

Step 2: Reducing Social Conflict -

Classes use a combined approach of self-awareness and awareness of others to avoid social conflict as much as possible.
Classes focus on relationships - what they are and discussions about the elements of relationships including respect, responsibilities, and attitude.
Required reading to guide this step: Four Agreements and Don’t Bring it To Work by Dr. LaFair. This enables the Gregoric style delineator to raise awareness about people, the way they think and how people of different personality types interact. It greatly improves awareness of social conflict points and prepares them to avoid conflict points. They adopt a behavior code as part of this process. We call it the Unstoppable Code.

Step 3: Finding Closure to reduce stress and anxiety -

Group Sessions are transformative and emotionally intense about our experience in life and service, including the high number of military who suffered abuse as children. Focused on family trauma and emotional trauma and ways to address it together and then adopt new behaviors to introduce.
Making a “Family Tree” as a way to map the history of trauma within the family.
Making a “Military Timeline” as a way to map the history of trauma within the military.
Fire Ritual is the culminating event to let go of the most unrelenting memories or events through a ritualized bon fire burning and collective gathering and healing.
Required reading to guide this step: Don't Bring it to Work by Dr. LeFair.

Step 4: Finding Purpose and direction in life by making a plan -

Working in buddy teams to make charts and score parts of their lives to identify the positive and negative. These get broken down into tasks and goals to accomplish.
Future plans to help change behavior and give purpose and direction.
Required reading to guide this step: Your Best Year Ever by Michael Hyatt.

Phase 5: Initiating healthy lifestyle changes. (Initially through Fly Fishing)

Breaking the cycle of dysfunction (addiction, denial, avoidance, abuse) to create new healthy lifestyle changes (fly-fishing, white-water rafting, mountain biking, archery)
Class outlines 20 different healthy choices including how to fly-fish and hunt deer with archery on the property.
These continue throughout the year as ongoing events that encourage Veterans to get comfortable at our retreats and have a positive day with their families to do fly-fishing, turkey hunting, deer hunting with archery.

EVALUATION

Our Veterans Unstoppable program will have a positive effect on our target population of Veterans suffering from PTSD without hope, many of whom are homeless and in crisis situations, by providing them with a support system unlike any other available in the entire country. We provide our trauma-aware services at no-cost to the Veteran, because they are meant for the under-served population who struggle with the return to normal life after a tour of duty. We call this the War to Peace Readjustment Process. The social conflict aspects of the war to peace readjustment are the most important issue for Veterans to learn to manage.

We are able to evaluate our success based on the success of the Veterans themselves. Their success points towards how well this program works. Over 400 Veterans and a limited number of their spouses have attended the program at various levels of life crisis. Among the homeless Veteran participants our recidivism rate fluctuates but stays at about 7% cumulative since 2014 in a demographic with 70-80% normal rates one year later. Control group 98% resident Veterans at our facility Paul’s House in Jonas, PA. Our suicide rate among all participants is zero. We have only had one divorce in eight years against a standard that is double civilian divorce rates.

We evaluate our success through three specific areas of focus: Direct Actions, Awareness and Understanding. Our system of evaluation includes a holistic look at the family, because the family is ground zero in the war at home. We assist with helping couples (and single Veterans) to reduce the social conflict at home and look at the impact on the spouse and the children. Once we have our facility we will be better able to evaluate and address children by providing them with a specific environment for counseling, play, and assessment. VALOR is the only organization deliberately addressing the social conflict issues at the heart of the dysfunction that comes with PTSD in Veterans.

We are building and designing the template for this program and have implemented it in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio and Georgia. Our long-term goal is to get this program to spread across the country in every state. We want our Veterans to be as unstoppable at home as they were at war.

SUSTAINABILITY
The War to Peace Transition Center in Lake Harmony, PA will give us a permanent base and open up funding that would otherwise go to leasing facilities and meals for our Veterans Unstoppable Program. The cost of each participant to attend the retreat session now is between $2200 to $2500 per Veteran for books, fishing gear, leased space and catered meals. The overwhelming majority of the expense is lodging and meals. Once we own our facility the cost per Veteran will go down by close to 75% depending on class size, or approximately $600 per Veteran. The peer groups are the cornerstone to our sustainability of success for each Veteran who graduates from our program. This is built into the initial investment and becomes practically free to run once they graduate are trained to host their own.

We keep our costs as low as possible by functioning at a grassroots level to sustain our operations, and we rely on grant support for growth support. Grants allow us to buy and own every large cost item to relieve us of debt payments. Using sustainable energy to fuel the buildings are incorporated into the designs at the facility. Once this work is complete, we will begin the next phase of planning for bigger projects and facilities and programs. This is a five-year plan that will include a clinic for medical treatment to provide a national vision for Veteran healthcare. Our funding profile will shift when we can open the medical facility because at that point we will bill insurance as a funding stream and hire medically trained personnel.

The War to Peace Transition Center will provide us with an actual physical site to do all of our work. Instead of having to constantly rent and lease weekend retreat spaces, we will have the capacity to do all our work on-site. This will dramatically improve our fiscal health by allowing us to own instead of rent and opening up this funding for other more critical areas of support. We currently lease space to conduct our program. It costs four times what it would cost if we could build our own facility. We have a solid team who are willing to help us build The War to Peace Transition Center, with architects and engineers who have donated their talents.

VALOR is committed to maintaining its position as the leader and model in what Veteran care looks like. We have been working hard at this since 2012, and our success is dramatic and exciting. With each succeeding year we are able to help more Veterans and provide more support, resources, meals, housing and opportunities. And we have been doing all this work without a central location, on a small budget, and with the inconvenience and expense of leasing spaces instead of owning the facilities ourselves. Once the War to Peace Transition Center is built, we will have true security and a much stronger foundation. This will only aid us in our efforts to have ongoing growth, success, and outreach as an organization. We are focused on building a platform of support for our organization that includes a variety of funding options.

We will rely on a variety of funding strategies which include grant support, corporate sponsors, small business partnerships, and individual donations. Fundraising events will become a cornerstone of our annual funding streams.

We know that the work we do cannot be accomplished without the commitment and dedication of many volunteers who also give so much to our organization and are unpaid. While we work with nearly 800 each year, we also have a small core team that has accomplished so much for us and without them our organization would be so much less vital and vibrant. Our future financial picture looks at how we can pay our staff for their time, provide support for our Veterans, and continue to grow and deepen as an organization. We believe that this is fully possible and that with each succeeding year our organization will only grow stronger.

What we are asking the citizens and fellow Veterans to do?

Make our struggling Brothers and sisters aware there is a program where people get it. No security clearance risks. No 2A risks. Combat Veteran lead groups designed with Special Forces veterans providing input to program design. The program is free there is no reason not to give it a try.
Consider organizing in your area, post, church or civic group becoming a VU peer group or become a facilitator. Constant contact for struggling Veterans is important—even barrel chested freedom fighters.
Consider doing some grassroots legwork helping homeless Veterans.