Pro Football Hall of Fame — A Letter from the Director

The Warrior Healing Center is celebrating remarkable news: our founder, Tim Kirk, has been selected by the Pro Football Hall of Fame to receive its Award of Character — and he is the first veteran ever to be recognized with this honor.

Photo credit: Jeff Davenport

Tim Kirk stunned by the presentation of the Pro NFL Hall of Fame Award of Character presented by Hall of Famer, Roger Wehrli and Brittney Payton. 

Tim is a local veteran who has turned his pain into purpose in ways that ripple through this community every single day. After 25 years of service in the Air Force, he retired carrying the weight that so many of our warriors carry home: betrayal, survivor's guilt, hypervigilance, insomnia, chronic physical pain, and more. But Tim has always understood his calling. He is a deep thinker who knows that the game asks us to do what's right, not what's easy. He sees the targets that are hidden to others, and he brings the experience he gained leading thousands of troops to bear on the challenges in front of him today.

One of the hardest-won lessons Tim learned is also one of the simplest: injured veterans often find healing by helping others. When pain becomes purpose, it becomes bearable. Tim built the Warrior Healing Center (WHC) in Sierra Vista, Arizona, on that foundation. We are rural. We sit roughly an hour from any specialized resources. And yet our region ranks third in the nation for veterans per capita.

People walk into the Warrior Healing Center every week with a list of "you shoulds." What makes WHC different is that we don't do the "shoulds." We don't do the "everyone does." We don't do the "you have tos." We learned early on that conventional wisdom is not the answer. If it were, the VA and the many veteran service organizations across the country would have solved veteran suicide decades ago. They haven't. Despite the billions spent annually on mental health and suicide prevention, the problem continues to grow.

When we were first getting started, we had to decline the support of a local leader who told us plainly that she would help us only if we promised never to talk about veteran suicide. We took the time to understand her reasoning, then thanked her and walked away. I share that not as criticism, but as context: you cannot solve what you refuse to understand, and you cannot understand what you refuse to discuss. Having the hard conversations has been part of WHC's work from day one.

WHC was never planned. It was a response to a need in this community. We actually began with the goal of creating an indoor dog training center for Soldier's Best Friend (SBF), an Arizona-based nonprofit. Tim had found help and healing alongside the stubbornest coonhound on the planet — Josie, who was introduced to him through SBF — and he saw firsthand how training a service dog could transform a veteran's life. Since 2016, we have watched that program change one life after another. But between veterans navigating PTSD, dogs rescued from shelters, and the realities of training in a public park, Tim graduated from the program convinced that an indoor facility was essential if more veterans were going to benefit from the steady, grounding companionship of a well-trained canine.

Fast forward to today, and WHC has been receiving and responding to 60 intakes per month for the past 16 months — nearly 3,000 veteran requests for assistance handled by a 100% volunteer staff. Our volunteer organizational chart now includes more than 90 distinct lines of effort, each one shaped by what veterans in our community actually need.

Most often, what they need comes down to one thing: community. It is what tends to be missing after a veteran leaves the service. They have "transitioned" out of the DoD and into civilian life, but that transition program offers very little guidance on how to rebuild a sense of identity, purpose, and relationships with people who have no frame of reference for military life. That is what WHC exists to do — help veterans build lives worth living in a civilian world that can feel completely foreign to everything they embodied in uniform.

Tim, thank you for the vision you continue to cast as we build this wheel of care, spoke by spoke. Your insight, your effort, your dedication, and your character have made this real. The Pro Football Hall of Fame got it exactly right.

— Cathie