 One organization I would like to highlight today has taken up the fight against the suicide epidemic afflicting our veteran community, and they're seeing encouraging results. These statistics we hear about service member and veteran suicides are heartbreaking, with 17 a day choosing to end their life. This affects everyone in our community, whether it's someone we know, something we face ourselves, struggles with mental health, are pervasive, and we must respond with urgent force to eliminate suicide in our ranks. Save a Warrior is a leader in this fight and a partner you'll hear about more in the years to come. To date, more than 2,000 men and women have gone through their program, which begins with an intensive 72 hours of cohort-based healing. Facilitators go beyond a veteran's experiences during service to explore the root of what, in some cases, is a lifetime of pain. They have saved and transformed lives. People who have felt they were at their end have come through this program finding purpose and healing. We want to see this continue so the trust granted Save a Warrior $1 million to build its national center of excellence for complex post-traumatic stress. The building's dedication was this past June. We've also awarded another $200,000 for its programming. Here's a look at our support of Save a Warrior and how the organization is helping to change the lives of veterans who are experiencing mental health issues. Save a Warrior was founded on the possibility that they could step into a space to end the veteran's suicide epidemic. Since that time, our organization has also stepped up to encompass and serve first responders, many of which served our country in a military capacity in the past. And our mission is to take an individual that is struggling, that has tried a lot of different other modalities. Maybe they've tried traditional therapy, you know, they've been impatient, they've been out there searching for some way to get help. Where DAV provides the perfect partnership and stewardship for Save a Warrior is the credibility of partnering with an organization that has a century of reputation for seeing that returning veterans make it all the way home. They have a recipe that is proven to work. So that's why we are here and supporting Save a Warrior in this very significant endeavor. Often in-service trauma as well as pre-service experiences combine to make a situation that is extremely disabling for some of our nation's heroes. And we want to be part of a process along with Save a Warrior that helps them look back on their military service not only with pride but to use it to equip themselves for life after service. We provide this incredible transformative experience for them to take a different path in life unlike anything else out there where they can come have a conversation with a peer-to-peer model with warriors who have sat in the seat just like them and have them basically have that experience that ends up taking them out of the darkness and into the light. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Jake Clark, president and founder of Save a Warrior. Good morning everyone. My name is Adam Carr and I'm a lifetime member of DAV. It's an honor to be down here. I represent an organization called Save a Warrior. Over a decade ago I was on the phone with my team trying to call a former teammate and I'll tell you what that silence on the other end of the line was louder than any combat zone I've ever served in. That teammate's name was Tim Mahalik and little did we know that Tim would take his life that day. We've lost about three veterans around this country since we had breakfast and coffee this morning and we have it that that's unacceptable. Now you heard the secretary come up here and he talked about nearly 6,000 people in 2019 around this country and the veteran community that had taken their lives. That's nearly the same amount of people that died in combat for this country over a 20-year period in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's also unacceptable. Now I spent my career in the United States Army as a green beret operating on the front lines and combat zones all over this country right at the tip of the spear because I believe in this country. I believe in what it stands for and when I transitioned out I was looking for an organization to work with to dive my life's work into to be a part of that was doing something at the tip of the spear. Save a Warrior is that organization looking in disciplines from neurobiology, psychology, psychiatry, mythology, anthropology, mindfulness, and meditation and to date we've served over 2,000 people with a 99.9 percent success rate when they've come to us like this. We're so grateful to DAV's executive leadership team, to the charitable service trust for building this partnership and looking into the future because we're an organization of innovation. We never stop. We never turn this off. How could we with those numbers? How could we? Barry Jezanowski said to us when we created this partnership as long as you guys are doing this work, DAV will be there with you to have your back and we're honored. We're grateful for that because we're just getting started and it's my honor this morning to introduce to you the founder, a friend of mine, a mentor of mine, of Save a Warrior, Jake Clark spent his entire career serving both on the federal side as an FBI agent, as an LAPD police officer, serving in the Army as an enlisted soldier in Panama in the 80s, and as an officer serving overseas in the Balkans during that conflict. He started this organization with a declaration out of the trunk of his car and now we stand here before you, two months removed from the ribbon-cutting of the first and only National Center of Excellence for complex post-traumatic stress. So without further ado, let me introduce to you Jake Clark. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you so much. Thank you to everyone at DAV Charitable Service Trust. That's a good-looking young man, huh? Wow. That's hard to follow. Thank you, Dick. Thank you to the secretary. Yeah, challenge accepted. Veteran-centered, Save a Warrior all day long. Improve outcomes all day long. Fight like hell all day long. I'm not going to embarrass anybody other than myself here today, but I want you to know that there's a veteran in this space today. It happens everywhere we go, and I had the opportunity to meet this person. This person's going to be coming to Warrior Village in the coming months, and that experience will be transformative and perhaps life-saving. You know, when you have an idea like Save a Warrior, you start by yourself, and it was scary, you know, giving up a paycheck for about four years. There were times when we didn't know how we were going to pay for the next cohort, the direction that we were headed, but it doesn't look anything like that today. You know, your name's on that building. If you're part of DAV, every time we walk out to that new center on a facility that was donated by a very gracious man in central Ohio, the facilities in southern Ohio, it's 350 beautiful acres that this retired businessman spent millions of dollars to buy it out of his own trust to give it away because he was so moved by the mission. You know, I'm going to tell you something. Barry said it in his statement about pre-service experiences. We specialize in that. After talking to more than 2,000 returning veterans over the last decade after spending 25 years in recovery myself, because not only am I the hair club president, I'm also a client. You know, I grew up, I grew up as a little kid and I don't recommend this, starting at six years old visiting my mother in mental institutions, and I knew two things. Number one, my mother was not going to get better and come home, and number two, unfortunately, the people to whose care she was entrusted were not that interested in seeing her get well. When you come to our facility, I'm very interested. I'm very interested that you get well because my heroes, my entire life, my father is a, my late father is a prior service marine of the Vietnam era. Dad, is that you? He said he would haunt me. Dad, hold my water. You know, when this idea struck me because I was very bothered, like a lot of you are, by these suicides, all of which are preventable, you know, he voiced his objections about why I shouldn't do it. You know, I'd come home from deployments, it was my second time in the military, and he said, you know, you're in your mid 40s, now you're getting your life back together. And I said, dad, listen, I got a number of love for you, but I'm going to do this. I love you, dad, I'm not asking your permission. And he said, you know, if you just save one, it'll all be worth it. And I said, do you mean that? He said, yeah, I mean that. I said, okay, that's a done deal then. And I love your motto of keeping our promise to America's veterans. I give you my word that inside of your promise, we're keeping our promise because if you know someone, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And you know, I had a chance to speak with someone today, as I said, who's going to spend time with us. And it's just, it's just, I was so moved, you know, I got to see all the folks from DAV got to shake hands with the secretary. I invited him to warrior village. You want to do me a favor? Get that secretary to warrior village, because we'll show you what the solution looks like for a particular subgroup in the veteran population. When he talks about fight like hell and Barry Jezanowski talks about pre-service experiences, that's all we deal with all day long. And those secrets come to save a warrior to be exposed, processed, mourned, grieved, and put to death. There is a part of us that needs to die. And it's the story that goes with why we want to kill ourselves. Because people just want to be acknowledged for what happened. They want to have their dignity preserved. And they want to heal and they want to get on with their life and they want to pay this thing forward. And that's who we are as a community of warriors. We're really, really, really good at coming back for each other. And we stake our lives on that. You don't know what Adam Carr looked like six years ago when I met him. He was on the internet with a bottle of booze, a bag of pills, and a gun. And his wife looking at him in terror as he went live and that went viral. And that's how I met Adam Carr. You wouldn't know that when he comes up here today looking cleaner than the board of health. I can go all day. I can go all day. We have almost 2,000 stories like that 10 years later with three suicides and your help makes all the difference in the world. Please, I beg of you, please help us be in a position where when somebody comes and asks us for our support that that support is going to be there because there's, again, there's a slice in that broad ecosystem of solving this problem. We will absolutely do our part. Please, we're so grateful for everything you've done for us. Bringing that building up out of the mud is a miracle. That started, that started with nothing. And now it's on this beautiful facility that your name is on. You have an open invitation. Just let us know that you're coming. We would love to show you what you made possible. God bless you. Thank you for everything you pay for it. And God bless America. Thank you, DAV. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jake. We are proud to stand alongside your organization and support the work you do for the veterans on their healing journey.