A Retreat With Major Advances in Trauma Treatment

A Retreat With Major Advances in Trauma Treatment

By Leonard Shapiro

Julia and Ken Falke, Boulder Crest Retreat Founders.

Photo by Doug Gehlsen/Middleburg Photo

It began when Navy veteran and businessman Ken Falke and his wife, Julia, began inviting wounded warriors being treated for their injuries in Washington to spend a day or two at their home in Bluemont, the better to breathe some clean air and enjoy the countryside.

One day, the Falkes, now married for 35 years, happened to be hiking on a hilly ridge overlooking their property when their thoughts coalesced into a creative new idea to help America’s heroic veterans.

“We looked down and we thought we have this land and we could put some cabins down there and maybe bring their families out with them,” Julia Falke recalled. “It all went from there.”

It went from a few cabins into The Boulder Crest Retreat, a magnificent facility nestled near Mt. Weather that opened in 2013 and has grown exponentially ever since. And in 2017, after another round of fundraising and major giving by a number of donors, they opened another facility 45 minutes south of Tucson, Arizona to serve veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars living west of the Mississippi River.

In the beginning, the Bluemont facility was dealing with soldiers trying to recover from their physical injuries. A triple amputee and Houston native named Tim Brown played a critical role in helping consult in the designing of cabins that would be easy to negotiate no matter the injury.

These days, there is also an emphasis on dealing with mental health, as more is known about the effects of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on combat veterans. Both Virginia and Arizona locations offer free, short duration, high impact programs based on the science of post-traumatic growth.

“It’s all so much bigger and better than our original plan,” Julia Falke said. “We have such a great team and there are so many wonderful things happening.”

And so many wonderful people contributing.

Ken Faulke is a 21-year combat veteran of the U.S. Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) community and retired Master Chief Petty Officer. He’s also a widely respected innovative and forward thinking leader on the subjects of wounded warrior care, military and veteran transition, counterterrorism, military training, and innovative technology development.

Ken Falke’s passion involves taking care of his fellow combat veterans and their family members, and all services provided at Boulder Crest are free of charge to the 750 people a year who come out to Bluemont. He’s chairman of Boulder Crest, which remains focused on the teachings of post-traumatic growth. He’s also the co-author with Boulder Crest executive director Josh Goldberg of a book called “Struggle Well: Thriving in the Aftermath of Trauma.”

A serial entrepreneur. Ken Falke was founder and CEO of A-T Solutions, a recognized international expert and in combating the war on terrorism. At the forefront of providing training and consulting services in the Anti- and Counter-Terrorism industry, A-T Solutions was named four consecutive years to the annual Inc. 500 fastest growing privately held companies in the U.S.

He also founded Shoulder 2 Shoulder, Inc. a multimedia technology company and, before selling his share of the firm, he served as its CEO for six years.

These days, he’s also a serial fundraiser. The facilities in Bluemont and Arizona each cost between $8 and $9 million to start, with a total budget of $7 million a year to run both.

One of Boulder Crest’s main donors has been the James and Alice B. Clarke Foundation, an offshoot of the Clarke Construction company based in the Washington area.

“They asked us what we’d have to do to grow Boulder Crest,” Ken Falke said. “We said we’d love to go out west and have a facility out there. They have been very generous.”

Just like Ken and Julia Falke.

Struggle Well: Dealing With PTSD

WBy Ken Falke hen we opened Boulder Crest Retreat Virginia, we recognized that the families we were serving needed something beyond a comfortable place to stay.

There were plenty of nonprofit organizations out there with programs helping veterans so we started inviting the organizations to use our retreat center for free, hoping they would be able to offer needed help to the families we were hosting.

The programs were a mixed bag. Some were good, but some were terrible. Most were somewhere in the middle of the road. For the most part, none of what they were doing was documented in a curriculum that could scale and solve the problem.

They had some evidence to prove why it worked and how it worked, but I didn’t see a clear path on how it could solve the mental health crisis in our combat veterans. That bothered me.

I had spent two of my Navy tours as an instructor and curriculums developer. My company had trained 50,000 soldiers a year to do one of the most sophisticated tasks on the battlefield —finding and disarming improvised explosive devices (IEDs)—so I had some experience in taking a program to scale.

I knew we needed to create a standardized curriculum for PTSD. It can’t be all about one person who thinks he can magically cure another in the process of searching for a program that would work.

I met (co-author) Josh Goldberg when he showed up at one of our retreats in December, 2013. We had our first extended discussion on the topic of PTSD and struggle.

We were not interested in helping one veteran, or 30, or even 300. We were willing to dedicate the remainder of our lives and every ounce of effort and energy we had if, and only if, we could work toward fundamentally solving the problems of anxiety, depression, PTSD, and suicide. To accomplish that we had to create a transformational and scalable solution.

Excerpted from “Struggle Well: Thriving in the Aftermath of Trauma” by Ken Falke and Josh Goldberg.