FORGING RECILIENCE

Forging Resilience is aimed to serve Purple Heart Recipients, Veterans, and Law Enforcement Officers who were involved in critical incidents or who have it their 10 year mark in Law Enforcement. Through traumatic events, our Veterans and First Responders (Warriors) risked their lives for strangers and each other. Often leading them to feel isolated from the lingering mental anguish after returning home or to work. Though they have returned from the event physically, many memories of what occurred still rage within them.

Using steel heated to over 2,000 degrees, the mission of this program is to be proactive in the mental healing of our warriors by blacksmith/forging their own knifes as a form of therapy.  The goal is to foster an environment in which our warriors can build camaraderie, through shared experience, with fellow warriors, while simultaneously forging a resilience to their trauma.

This program is typically a two-day course at a Forge in Kyle, Texas.  Our warriors will spend the first day in the Forge working out their design and learning the process of blacksmithing/forging.  At the conclusion of the first day our warriors will settle into a hotel for the night were there will be a mixer and time to share their experiences of how they have built a resilience to their trauma.  During this time our warriors will be able to engage with each-other and learn from shared experiences and how to get to living with a new normal.  Our warriors will then return to the forge for day two where they will put the finishing touches on their knives.  They will then leave back home with something they built along with long-lasting friendships with fellow warriors.