How It Started

Providing an online delivery of recovery support services, The Woman’s Heart has been operating since 2002, attracting hundreds of women in search of crisis support services. A significant data point was the frequency of women veterans disclosing their chronic use of alcohol and drugs as a means of coping or self-medicating their symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury and military sexual assault. The online crisis ratio trends show 8 out of 10 women veterans are in crisis at the time of contact.

This brought about our greatest initiative, Grace After Fire (“Grace”). Grace is designed to serve women veterans from all eras and branches of service (currently 1.8M), and is preparing to meet the high numbers of women (approximately 14 percent of the armed services) currently serving. Although women veterans represent less than 6 percent of veterans accessing VA healthcare, 71 percent of the women who do use the VA System have a mental health concern. Unfortunately, a challenge that can occur in offering VA services to women is providing accessible gender-responsive and trauma-informed care at all locations.