Diveheart

My father was an Army veteran with disabilities. I grew up dodging wheelchairs at Hines Veterans Hospital in Maywood Illinois at a very young age.

Hence, I was comfortable being around people with disabilities early on. I believe that is one of the reasons it was so natural for me to guide and teach blind skiers for decades as I raised a blind daughter; and then transitioned and applied those same skill sets after I left the media business to begin Diveheart in 2001 and use scuba diving as a therapy.

But it wasn’t until I began working with Gold Star Families that I realized who they were and what the Gold Star meant. If the term is new to you, know that a Gold Star Family is a family who has lost an immediate family member while that family member was serving in the military. I learned about their “new normal” while working with another nonprofit in Naperville. It occurred to me that Diveheart was working with veterans with disabilities who also had experienced trauma and also had a new normal. An idea then came to me.

What if we take these two groups of people who have different types of new normals and put them together in a scuba class to learn, grow and depend on each other as buddies?
The concept was that while these two groups learned to work with each other, there may be an opportunity for them to heal in some way in body, mind and spirit. CNN liked the idea enough to join Diveheart on an adaptive scuba adventure trip to Key Largo, Florida, with the Gold Star Families and the veterans with disabilities in the hopes of sharing their stories with the world.

It worked and CNN/HLN aired the feature STORIES OF COURAGE. I’ve shared this feature with military groups around the country with amazing results. Unfortunately, the Naperville nonprofit that was collaborating with us on the project backed out at the last minute and Diveheart had to foot the twenty-thousand-dollar bill for the entire trip and training.

As luck would have it, that year Southwest Airlines was celebrating its 40th anniversary and chose 40 nonprofits from around the country to give 40-round trip tickets to.

Diveheart was blessed to be one of those nonprofits. It didn’t cover the entire cost of the trip, but it really helped.