Retreat Center
A place for those dealing with brain injury to get away and be refreshed, renewed, and revived with comfort and peace.
About the Project
To design the perfect retreat center (for advancement) for survivors of severe trauma, we intend to work with about a dozen clinicians and Hesston College’s Nursing program to bring to bear everything we know about healing:
- Healing of the brain > Healing of the body
- Healing of the broken heart
- Healing of the broken spirit (which can morph into a devastating post traumatic stress)
Stays with us are by application only, and we will choose just 12 participants at first – 6 men, 6 woman – so we can work closely with them, monitoring their progress. We will offer three versions:
• 3 days highlighting the longer sessions (the IKEA furniture model, giving them tools and materials to take home and work on)
• 7 days
• 21 days
We will also have accommodations for stays as long as 3 months.
The longer participants stay, the more therapies and treatments they can try, all under medical supervision. As the attached Neuro Plastic Cities poster outlines, we begin with The Brain Injury Recovery Team Model: A Multi-disciplinary Approach to Neuro Trauma Rehabilitation from my 2012 book (“You Look Great!” — Strategies for Living Inside a Brain Injury).
For all the treatments and therapies, we are prepared to offer, and there are many, our organizing principle is the 88 keys of a piano.
Key Point:
As specific as our injuries are — as specific as our fingerprints — so should our course of recovery be! (We owe it to ourselves to try all 88 keys and write the song of our recovery!)
Key Point:
We will gather data on participants from beginning to end, tracking improvements in those four areas: brain, body, heart, spirit.
We have them rank the top 10 and the top 3, which gives unarguable data (with a large sample size of 500 or 1000) to present at 1) brain injury conferences worldwide, and 2) fundraisers for veterans (at first) to go through the whole treatment, with special emphasis placed on what DATA tells us are the three strongest strands of the rehab braid. (Mine are Faith, Music, Tender Loving Care!)
Our Testing Ground
Short of buying the property through fundraising, or aggressively seeking the charitable transfer from one 501c3 to another, we intend to partner with the 60-acre Crosswinds Camp and Conference Center in Hesston Kansas, a perfect facility for us that sits UNUSED for long stretches. This will be our “laboratory,” our testing ground.
The Center becomes our prototype, replicable anywhere in the country. We intend to have these healing centers in every state, and in other countries as opportunities open for us. I have already met with two administrators at the Dole VA Hospital in Wichita about The BISON Foundation and they are eager to learn more! They have a thick rolodex of very needy veterans, and the statistic of losing 22 veterans a day to suicide is a national crisis. The strictly pharmacological solution is no solution at all.
How can you help?
If you have a passion for helping those dealing with brain injuries, please reach out to us to see how you can help. We are always seeking to expand our network so as to help more people and develop our programs more.
Tap the button below to reach out today.
