HEARTBEAT SERVING WOUNDED WARRIORS
This organization has already been registered
Someone in your organization has already registered and setup an account. would you like to join their team?Profile owner : j***t@h******************s.o*g
Mission Statement
Our mission is to provide emergency assistance, morale building, and innovative therapeutic services for wounded warriors and their families.
About This Cause
The road to recovery is a long and difficult one for wounded warriors. The financial strain on the whole family is huge. Heartbeat Serving Wounded Warriors offers the following assistance to families: food gift cards, utility payments, and rent assistance. Heartbeat also offers morale building programs such as Christmas Wish where community families adopt wounded warrior families and provide gifts, dinners,and friendship. This is one of our most popular programs. Heartbeat also introduced Christmas Gift A Card this year. Families are given a beautifully sewn gift card holder that holds a $100 gift card. The most successful programs for Heartbeat have been our therapies: Scuba Warriors, Back in the Saddle Warriors and our newest K9 Healing Warriors. Our scuba therapy not only teaches warriors how to dive but the diving and class itself helps improve cardiovascular strength, emotional well being, mobility, muscle strength and blood flow. Since the warriors work as a team while diving, the camaraderie mimics the teams they had during the war. Friendships begin and some continue after the classes end. The rehabilitative activity has produced positive results. The warriors experience reduced pain and a liberation not found on land. Heartbeat's Back in the Saddle Warriors is a hippotherapy program. Horses and humans have a pelvis that moves in the same three dimensional way. When a warrior sits on a moving horse, muscle groups for normal human movements are strengthened. This evidence based therapy improves muscle strength, emotional well being, motor development and balance. Working with the horse also provides an emotional calming for the warrior. In the last year, Heartbeat collected evaluations pre and post therapy sessions. Several aspects were evaluated: pain, anxiety, flexibility, mood and the ability to focus. When a statistical program was applied there was a highly significant difference between the pre and post evaluations. Therefore, the warriors showed significant improvement in terms of pain level, anxiety, flexibility, physical tension, mood and ability to focus after their therapy sessions. Recently, with the help of two large grants, Heartbeat has been able to add spouses and family members with both therapy programs, thus strengthening family bonds. Both therapies utilize only certified instructors. Our K9 Healing Warriors is a service dog program. This therapy is long term and requires the warrior and canine to commit to 9 months or even a year of training. The training is specific to each warrior. These dogs can be trained to help with balance, wake the warrior up from nightmares, help relieve anxiety, enable the warrior to exit from stressful situations out in public. In short, they become a team and the entire family benefits from this. Some of these warriors experience their first good night sleep with their canine on the alert for them. This is extremely healing. We firmly believe that we owe it to our heroes and their families to help them heal. After all, they put their lives on the line for complete strangers.