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Hero’s Bridge Filling Older Veterans Needs
Hero’s Bridge Filling Older Veterans Needs
By Emerson Leger
Hero’s Bridge in Warrenton started in 2016 after Molly Brooks, its founder and CEO, saw how veterans 65 and older she was working with as a registered nurse were struggling with issues related to their health, their housing and their finances.
“I thought as a county, (Fauquier) could do better in taking care of our older veterans,” Molly recalled. “So I filed the paperwork to start Hero’s Bridge as an actual 501(c) 3 non-profit.”
After the legal documents were filed, Brooks created four different programs— Battle Buddy, Honor Guard, Paw Patrol, and Homefront—each designed to fill every veteran’s specific needs. Volunteers, ranging from teenagers to other veterans of all ages, assist in all these programs and the organization looks out for over 300 older veterans.
The Honor Guard program helps veterans recover or replace their lost medals and records, with a number of younger volunteers leading the research effort. It also helps the veterans find lost comrades, record life stories, offer portrait sessions and host veteran socials.
The Battle Buddy program has developed into nationwide outreach that began in June, 2023. It pairs elderly veterans with a dedicated younger veteran trained to provide direct in-home services. It includes a Battle Buddy Call Center where volunteers answer telephone calls from veterans seeking help for whatever problems they’re having.
“We really wanted any veteran in America to be able to have a Battle Buddy,” Molly explained.
The Paw Patrol team arranges home and nursing facility pet visits. They also help the veteran care for aging pets and help find them loving new homes if necessary.
Carolyn Olech, a Paw Patrol volunteer, uses two of her own dogs trained to conduct pet therapy visits at nursing homes during her visits to veterans.
“We have little American flag bandanas we put on the dogs the days of our visits, and they get so excited, the just love it,” Olech remarked.
Olech and the volunteer dogs are assigned to the Culpeper Health and Rehabilitation Center, where they visit the first and third Monday of each month.
“Each veteran prefers a different dog,” Carolyn said, “but the dogs for the most part do they intuitively own thing, and they know what works.”
The Homefront Program makes sure veterans are living in clean and safe housing. Volunteers conduct home repair tasks, from putting safety handrails in bathrooms to finding a new housing arrangement for veterans whose homes are not safe to live in, to handling lawn and yard maintenance.
“One of the things I do is design and build handicapped-accessible ramps,” said volunteer Ed Benson, a veteran himself. “That’s so a veteran in a wheelchair, for example, can get in and out of his house.”
The Homefront Program also has led to the development of The Village Project in Warrenton.
“It’s 44 cottages, and we are right now in the middle of the rezoning process, hopefully to be completed in June, which would allow us to break ground in the fall,” Molly said, adding those new homes will help relieve a local veteran housing crisis significantly.
