SAFE SOLDIERS AND FAMILIES EMBRACED INC

Our goals are simple here at SAFE-\r\n\r\n- to continue to provide free, professional and totally confidential counseling and other wrap-around social services and support to the people in our community who have done so much and ask for so little in return.\r\n- to ease the readjustment and reintegration of military members returning from our current wars and their families, as well as veterans from previous eras.\r\n- to strive to help develop future mental healthcare professionals who work with our demographic by offering internships and other professional development opportunities. In this way we are able to directly address the constantly growing need for well-trained providers to our community.\r\n- to work towards peace and healing by providing the services required, advocating for clients, assisting the community at large in finding these services through other agencies, or facilitating the creation of programs by individual organizations.

The organization uses an eclectic mix of systems approaches and therapeutic modalities to conduct community outreach, advocacy and counseling services. Most of all, our guiding principal for us is listening. We do not seek to tell families or veterans what they need; rather, we listen. Within this culture, more often than not active duty, veterans and their families are TOLD what to do, when to do it, and what their "problems" are and how they can fix them. No one actually takes the time to actually ASK how they can help and LISTEN to them. We help churches, civic and community groups to listen because we believe those of us who are affected by trauma often know what we need to do to heal. We may not know that we know immediately; with help, however, we can find healing together.

Because most of us are either veterans ourselves or military family members, we know that welcoming service members home is not enough; the community must “walk them all the way home." We enlisted the community support to help us provide our counseling free of charge so there would be no reporting to the chain of command (unless protocol for risk of violence or suicide warranted.) We offered counselors training in deployment psychology because it was evident there weren't enough in the area who knew the issues and stressors faced by this population. We have worked to support this fragile and overwhelmed 1% of our population by offering deployment support groups, counseling and other wraparound services such as housing referrals, assistance with VA paperwork and financial counseling as they arose. We have managed this through private donations and grants as our community members are stakeholders in this important work. They recognize this fact, and have answered the call to make a difference. \r\n\r\nAlso, in an effort to not simply reinvent the wheel, we built collaborations with other local providers of services:\r\n• Centerstone -­‐ housing\r\n• Buffalo Valley-­‐ housing\r\n• Austin Peay State University\r\n• TBI Program of the Tennessee Rehabilitation Center\r\n• Montgomery County Jail/Courts\r\n• 101st Airborne Division Association\r\n• Local Churches and Faith groups\r\n• TN State Dept of Veteran Affairs Commissioner Many-­Bears Grinder\r\n• Montgomery County Veterans Treatment Courts\r\n• TN State National Guard – J­‐9 Programs: Col. Patty Jones\r\n• TN State Reps. Joe Pitts, Curtis Johnson & State Senator Mark Green

We continue to see signs that what we set out to do continues to grow and have a bigger and bigger impact on our demographic. We are contacted by other mental health and veterans service agencies in the Mid-Tennessee area on a consistent basis because of the positive impact we are having in our community. We are also starting to be seen as experts in our field on a national level as well- we have been contacted by civic organizations and communities from as far away as California, Montana, Texas and Washington, D.C. that have heard (again, by word of mouth) about our program and our approach asking how we are able to do what we do as well as seeking advice so that they may also start their own programs. In addition, recently a nationally-recognized foundation that works with wounded veterans expressed the difficulty with getting veterans to open up to them, leading them to ask us "How do you get them to TALK to you? What are you doing?"