Building Homes for Heroes

Home award program - Building Homes for Heroes constructs, gifts, modifies and beautifies Homes for our injured veterans and their families, including our gold star families and more recently our first responders, while providing an ever-growing number of support services to enable them to build better and brighter lives and reach new heights. These mortgage-free Homes not only help to remove the family's financial burden, but they also help to restore the individual's freedom, and enable the veteran to lead a more independent and productive civilian life. All Homes we gift are constructed, customized and beautified to meet the needs of physically or psychologically disabled veterans and their families, to help improve their day-to-day quality of life and to lead a hopeful and promising future ahead. On average, the organization reached more than one home every 11 days for an eleventh consecutive year in 2023, and hopes to reach 40 Homes once again in 2024, including our milestone 400th home. We've found that the gift of a mortgage-free home provides permanent stability and a life-changing foundation for the veteran to pursue their dreams, professionally, academically and recreationally, that they might never have imagined following their injuries, and sets them on a path towards improving their physical health and mental wellness on a long road to recovery. It's also a gift that allows the children of the families to create stability in their life and one day inherit the home. Often a gift that will be generational. It's truly an honor to serve the amazing men and women who have courageously served and sacrificed so much for all of us and for our country.

Emergency funding - with economic challenges causing significant hardship all-across the country, more families are struggling than ever before and we are receiving an extraordinary number of financial concerns, day-to-day concerns and bankruptcy concerns. Our emergency funding program allows us to help veterans and first responders during these hard financial times, as well as sudden life-altering moments in their lives. These moments can include, but are not limited to, the loss of job, an illness, or a major repair needed as a result of disastrous weather events such as hurricanes, flooding or tornadoes. As well, it can save a family from foreclosure on their home and heartbreaking homelessness. The organization also provides immediate assistance to veterans who are experiencing homelessness or are on the brink of homelessness. Another major aspect of helping veterans improve their financial well-being is by providing guidance to maintain home expenses and maintain their Homes and to plan a successful future ahead. To achieve that end, we offer partnerships with certified financial professionals to assist them through their finances and help veterans and their families focus on living a promising and productive life, while also learning about investing and saving for the future. A major focus of the financial support program is to highlight the importance of minimizing or eliminating debt entirely, and the freedom it provides to live an ever more hopeful future ahead. Building Homes for Heroes is also supporting our veterans accomplish their dreams in academics following their service. Many of our veterans go on to continue their education with our organization's support. All of these programs are a large part of our mission to help our veterans build better and brighter lives above and beyond the gifting of a home.

Physical, mental and financial wellness - Building Homes for Heroes goes well above and beyond to support our veterans and our first responders by providing a fundamental basis for family connectivity, hope and healing, camaraderie, communication and promise towards their physical health and mental well-being. One major aspect of this is in 2023 was our growing programs to help with physical health and mental wellness. To accomplish this, we sponsored hundreds of workshops and retreats across the country that trained veterans and first responders with essential skills that aim to improve their every-day well-being, their mental health and performance, their physical fitness, and their quality of life. Ranging from traditional to innovative support, we were able to support more than 1,600 Heroes in 2023 alone, and hope to support more than 2,500 Heroes in 2024. We have supported veterans climb the world's tallest mountains, and winning medals in the warrior games, invictus games and international competitions. We also host an annual team Building family retreat, bringing together more than 200 of our veteran home recipients and their family members for three days of family fun, friendly competition, connectivity, new friendships and spirited camaraderie. This program has been extraordinarily helpful towards helping veterans regain their military camaraderie with their fellow servicemen and women, and also helps them understand that they are not defined by their injures, but how they can overcome them. With more support, we hope to further grow this program on a national scale. With reports of as many as 23 veteran suicides a day, we're finding these programs to be among our most important as we envision the future ahead.