herme testimonial letter

Today’s Law Enforcement members face untold challenges in fulfilling their commitment to service in our communities. Yet, when trouble invades our personal space and a call goes out to those First Responders, they arrive to intervene and service the crisis and chaos of others. They land on scene with little regard for their own inner turmoil; the collision of the cumulative impact of countless calls for service and their contention with their own relationships, finances, health and the effects it all has on their mental, emotional and physical state. More now than ever before, we need to offer assurance that we see our Officers’/Deputies’ need for total wellness and demonstrate an understanding that they are themselves open to the invasion of painful hurts, hang-ups and habits that readily erodes their stability and quality of life. It is time to retool policy and practice in a way that offers non-judgmental provisions to shore up and sustain their sense of total well-being and worth. They must have the affirmation that our desire is that they be fully equipped physically and mentally to continue their professional calling to our community. This is extraordinarily true given that each call for service demands that our Law Enforcement members jump into the deeply mired circumstances of the public they serve to protect. Our Officers/Deputies are called in at the worst of moments when the situation is peeked…monumentally off the chart, to offer Crisis Intervention and resources to help the public cope with the stress of the moment and the feeder conditions that plague their sense of order and control. Our heroes wade in to those calls knowing they will themselves be drenched in the visible trauma, dysfunction, and blatant disregard of the common consideration for decency, let alone the need for order and basic consideration of kindness toward others. The responding Officer and Deputy shows up to every call and is confronted consciously, nicked spiritually, struck in the brain by the compounding distress of the ordeal. This relentless cycle carriers the strong plausibility that over time our Officer/Deputy may be dragged into an all-out fight to survive the added psychological weight of the unattended baggage of a profession that saturates them in trauma and crisis and the matters of their own life journey’s challenges. The statistics and evidence of this is already clear. If we fail to promote and pronounce intervention for him or her and affirm our commitment to their total wellness another Law Enforcement member will fall victim to the cycle of mental distress. In those far too frequent instances our agencies lose a member that made the cut and was an effective peacekeeper in their community, a First Responder’s family will suffer the irreconcilable loss of an irreplaceable person they loved and cared for deeply; someone they were proud of for choosing to be a Law Enforcement member. Every day our Officers and Deputies don the uniform to address seeing what can’t be unseen, hear what can’t be unheard, touch and feel what can’t be washed from their memory while they were standing in harms way to protect the one that was violently beaten and abused. Our Officers and Deputies can’t possibly function continuously in their role expecting that it won’t scar the fabric of their own soul and require some meaningful help. Finding real, relevant and personally tailored life support for our Law Enforcement members and the families of those heroes is what the Four Generations Foundation, Inc., has as its core mission. Our family can personally attest to the generous and strident support of Four Generations Foundation. We are a Law Enforcement family who in July of 2021 suffered the grief and loss of a son to the onslaught of despair. His twelve (12) plus years of Law Enforcement service and 38 years of life succumbed to a formidable moment of real pain that took our boy from our day-to-day manner of life and from the life events of his own son. When that all-encompassing tragedy hit our home Four Generations Foundation found us. They offered substantive support as few others are able to do. 

Four Generations Foundation brought their mission to us and applied the science of caring for other First Responder families to our home and family. Four Generations Foundation, Inc., continues to track the needs of other Law Enforcement families with needs similar to those we had and they are filling a gap of support that in those deep moments of grief could not be otherwise filled. Additionally, this Foundation is a huge advocate for the advancement of mental wellness and awareness toward the professional cadre of First Responders. They press to decrease the stigma that once was the cultural environment of denial.  Four Generations Foundation is leading out to find openness toward new ways of thinking and new provisions for equipping our Law Enforcement professionals with practiced care that focuses on the persons who are the heroes wearing the badge and fulfilling their sworn oath to protect the communities we want to see thrive.   

The hope of our family is that no one would ever require the genuine care that we personally received from Four Generations Foundation. However, it is our experience that in one of the deepest moments of grief that our family has ever known, Four Generations Foundation, Inc., was there at our side to offer a provision of care and hope that we so desperately needed. This Foundation and its mission is one that we can confidently offer as worthy of notice and support for its continued ability to fill the gap of advocacy and aide that is unlike any other.