Texas Alliance of Boys & Girls Clubs Support Letter for H.O.N.O.R.

Mentoring

Campaign Initiatives

Calvin Spann, Tuskegee Airman Love Your Veterans Spokesperson

In 1944, upon receiving his wings at Tuskegee, graduating in Class 44 G, Calvin Spann was sent to Walterboro, SC for overseas training in the P-47 Thunderbolt. His orders designated him a replacement pilot at the Ramitelli, Italy Air Base, and a training manual to fly the P-51 Mustang. Lt. Spann flew 26 combat missions including the longest and most historical mission of WWII, from Ramitelli, Italy to Berlin, Germany. Spann is among the elite group of pilots and living legends, of the 332nd Fighter Group and the 100th Fighter Squadron who served under Col. Benjamin O. Davis, upholding the impeccable record of never losing a bomber to enemy air attacks. Today Dr. Spann speaks to groups, inspiring the Can-Do attitude of achieving excellence. His formula for success has not changed in over 60 years. Melanie Davis, Founder and CEO Love Your Veterans is a campaign to raise awareness of the value of our protectors, their needs and what can be done to help them. It is a universal, all-encompassing banner under which every non-profit striving to make a difference can rally and through which the hearts and minds of citizens of The United States of America can be softened and turned to our heroes.

Copyright 2011 by LOVE YOUR VETERANS and NightTHRiVE Media and Marketing Group LLC All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from LOVE YOUR VETERANS and NightTHRiVE Media and Marketing Group LLC. www.LOVEYOURVETERANS.org www.NightTHRiVE.us Email: Info@LOVEYOURVETERANS.org Printed in U.S.A

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Love Your Veterans is a national campaign designed to enact a much needed cultural change in the appreciation of our veterans, to provide opportunities for the citizens of the United States of America to make a difference and meet the most critical needs of our veterans through the activities and programs overseen by Love Your Veterans including the following:

Campaign Marketing Strategy such as billboards, advertisements, public service announcements, The Triumph Book: HEROES and other vehicles for carrying the simple message: LOVE YOUR VETERANS! The Triumph Program: Overcoming PTSD expansion of use. This is a program which is designed to both assist veterans through PTSD while preserving important stories for the legacy of our nation. H.O.N.O.R. Mentoring (Helping Our Neighbors Overcome and Rebuild) is meaningful and gainful employment for veterans to mentor at-risk youth, gang members, and their families. Reintegration-after-Deployment Facility construction and management overseen in cities across the nation through the co-operation and service of the surrounding communities, allowing the citizens to network with and serve their veterans by providing them space and time to decompress after the high alert of war in order to move successfully into civilian life.
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Reintegration-after-Deployment Facilities provide vital space and time for families to reunite and soldiers to decompress before moving back into civilian life. The facilities will include game rooms, pools, basketball and tennis courts, commissaries and amenities which assist in creating the feeling of safety, comfort and recreation, counteracting the continual detrimental state of alert our warriors have been in during deployment. The facility will utilize proven effective methods for healing PTSD including RESET, one of the most successful programs in the nation, designed and implemented by Dr. Wesch, and The Triumph Program: Overcoming PTSD. The benefits of such facilities across the country can be one of the greatest movements towards solving veteran distress while allowing communities to come together and love their veterans! This campaign will develop the first facility in Dallas, TX, creating a blue-print and providing guidance for other communities to easily reproduce. The benefits of such facilities and the activities that can occur there will be profound.

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Campaign Marketing Strategies:

Through billboards, advertising, public service announcements, tshirts, car decals, special events and other vehicles for promoting viral messages, the idea of loving and serving our veterans will be deliberately propagated. The Triumph Book: HEROES will also serve as a powerful tool for defining the movement and motivating people to support the campaign. The Triumph Book: Heroes is a collection of stories capturing the first-person accounts of veterans spanning the last 70 years, from World War II up until our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. HEROES raises awareness of the challenges and needs of veterans as well as featuring many organizations which support them in a variety of ways. To truly understand or appreciate a difficult human condition, such as our veterans face, it requires much more than numbers and statistics to awaken the kind of compassion, sympathy and even passion that it takes to make a difference. It takes stories: putting a face, a name, and a life to the challenge or tragedy. It is by storytelling that we truly relate to each other. As you read HEROES you will fall in love with each of these veterans. You cant help it, after all they have literally been willing to give their lives for all of us and many still suffer for it today. The conclusion of The Triumph Book: HEROES is a call-to -action and full explanation of the Love Your Veterans TM campaign. HEROES will also be a funding source for the initiatives of the Love Your Veterans TM campaign.

from Dallas to Chicago, Detroit and other major cities with gang problems across the nation. H.O.N.O.R. Mentoring has also partnered with The Texas Alliance of Boys and Girls Clubs and can present a letter of support indicating plans to utilize and roll-out the program through all 400 Boys and Girls Club locations in Texas. Laura ReaganPorras is the CEO of a Boys and Girls Club in McAllen, TX where she serves 14,000 youth. She is also a recognized expert in mentoring with a Masters degree in sociology and years of successfully building curriculum, serving youth and their families in a variety of ways. Laura has co-created the curriculum and mentor training for H.O.N.O.R. Mentoring. H.O.N.O.R. Mentoring does more than provide meaningful employment for veterans; the outcome of the work done by our heroes can represent a huge savings to our country while giving our youth the chance to truly succeed which is currently missing in their lives. The value is priceless!

www.HONORMentoring.org
Joshua George, Founding Mentor
I fought just down the hill from Restrepo, Afghanistan, the infamous outpost of a documentary film. It was a hot-spot with three to five firefights a day. Flying into the valley, I truly thought it would be the last thing I ever saw. Those of us who returned from the war were shocked that we had survived, and didnt know what to do after we were discharged what does highly trained infantry do in the civilian world? Serving my country by mentoring her troubled youth is my ideal job I could do it until I die. It is a position I feel confident and capable of fulfilling. I know I can make a big difference in the lives of these kids! I can be tough, educate them about the value of our country and their lives. I truly care!

H.O.N.O.R. Mentoring is a program which works closely with youth support non-profits across our country to employ literal armies of veterans who can give at-risk kids real heroes, the love and attention they lack and the information they need to lead successful and fulfilling lives. Most veterans, especially those familiar with combat, have experienced exactly what these youth have: witnessing or even causing death and destruction. No other mentor can gain the trust of these children so easily, while at the same time becoming a highly effective role model, as our war heroes! H.O.N.O.R. Mentoring gives veterans the opportunity to continue serving our country which provides them with the sense of purpose and usefulness that is often lacking as they return home from war. In this way, the veterans themselves receive valuable service in return from those they mentor and a strong bond of love and appreciation can form between them, further increasing the effectiveness of the program. H.O.N.O.R. MENTORING has partnered with G.I. C.O.P. (Gang Intervention Community Outreach Program) a non-profit developed for gang reduction and prevention (www.GICOP.org). Specific curriculum for gang prevention to be used by the veteran mentors serving in the G.I. C.O.P. organization is being developed with the assistance of the G.I. C.O.P. founder, Sergeant Leroy Quigg, a veteran of Desert Storm. G.I. C.O.P. is a program which has plans to expand
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view their experiences from a new angle, with the perspective of a researcher which allows them the space to explore the depth of their war experience and its potential for bringing good into the world. The veterans will work on one section per week and then participate in a group meeting once a week. The group discussion and exercises at the end of each section allow for greater insight, sharing and epiphanies while giving each veteran a true understanding that they are not alone in their suffering, or in their growth. Processing ideas with the input of others can often enlarge the amount of wisdom gained, and creates special bonds of friendship from having experienced the program together. At the end of the process, if they so choose, the veterans will have the opportunity to share their valuable stories in the Military Section of the ShareYourTriumph.com website where their experiences and the resulting wisdom may serve to uplift other veterans and their families still in the throes of PTSD and provide an important legacy for the benefit of our nation. The Triumph Program: Overcoming PTSD was written with the assistance, contribution and first-hand knowledge of Matthew Brown, a machine gunner with 1st battalion 8th Marines who fought in Operation Phantom Fury, the invasion of Fallujah. On November 11th, 2004, Veterans Day, he was shot by a sniper. That event changed his life. Due to the constant fight with PTSD and permanent physical limitations, after almost dying on the battlefield, Matthew endured onslaughts of the worst PTSD symptoms and then gradually developed the strength to overcome the challenges. Matthew says, Through my pain and suffering I hope to help other veterans. I now treat my injuries as a blessing instead of a curse. For More Information Go To:

The Triumph Program: Overcoming PTSD

The Triumph Program: Overcoming PTSD is a carefully designed process through which veterans advance out of the darkness of PTSD and depression into the light of hope and purpose as they work through the tragedies and losses they have suffered and gradually look forward, finding meaning in life, setting goals, and exploring whom they can serve with abilities they have gained as a result of their life-experiences. The program helps veterans put their past horrors on paper, work through the anger, survivors guilt and fear that PTSD brings and find purpose and meaning in the experience of war as they write their extremely important stories for the benefit of our nation as well as their brothers and sisters in arms. The Triumph Program: Overcoming PTSD is also designed to help the veterans recognize their heroism and the continued value of their military service. It contains seven sections made up of writing, reading, creative expression and other activities which help them
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www.PTSDTriumphProgram.com
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