Boulder Crest Foundation reflects on 10th Anniversary

By Robert Talbot

This September, marked the tenth anniversary of the Boulder Crest Foundation, a center dedicated to helping military service members, veterans, and first responders suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. Its facility in Bluemont offers programs to help them connect with their families and get back on their feet.

The foundation aims to combat a PTSD epidemic among veterans and first responders, a condition that brings increased risk of suicide. On average, 22 veterans die by suicide in the United States each day.  

Boulder Crest CEO Josh Goldberg explains, “For most people, if you get a PTSD diagnosis, it feels like it’s final … it’s going to doom your life and it’s never going to go away. When we started to look to run programs, we really wanted to find a philosophy that helped people go through difficulty and struggle and come out better for it.”

Ken Faulke, the founder of Boulder Crest, discovered the idea of posttraumatic growth conceived by Dr. Rich Tedeschi, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “Posttraumatic growth describes the ways in which the struggles and the trauma and the hardship we experience can often serve as a catalyst for growth and transformation … for change in our lives,” Goldberg continues. “And so that’s the basis for everything we do — it provides people with hope, agency, direction, and possibility.”

Boulder Crest’s principal programs, Warrior PATHH (Progressive and Alternative Training for Helping Heroes) and Struggle Well, are centered around posttraumatic growth. These programs have been instituted at the foundation’s facilities in Bluemont and Sonoita, Arizona, and in collaboration with other nonprofit organizations throughout the country. 

In just a decade, Boulder Crest has helped over 100,000 people with its programs. “I think what’s underneath that number is incredible stories of transformation of individuals’ lives, of relationships, of families, of communities that have been significantly positively impacted,” Goldberg said.

As a nonprofit organization, Boulder Crest couldn’t have made such an impact without community support. Fundraising, Goldberg says, “is always a challenge, but it’s a good kind of challenge — making sure people know what you do, that you do a good job, and they’re willing to invest their time and their treasure and their energy …”

The foundation is proud of how far support from the community has brought it in just a decade. However, Goldberg knows the fight to help our nation’s struggling heroes is far from over. “When you’re facing a suicide epidemic, time matters. Every day that goes by, you lose more people. We’re trying to change that trajectory because you can’t bring people back. That’s the urgency that’s at play.”