A Central Oregon ranch provides peer support and community for veterans

Military veteran Lauren Grigsby describes the Central Oregon Veterans Ranch in Bend as a place of sanctuary. For nearly a decade, the 19-acre working ranch has opened its gates to veterans searching to talk with someone who understands the feelings of anxiety, isolation and other symptoms of PTSD they carry from tours of duty or other military service. In addition to peer support counseling, the ranch also offers mentorship and vocational training programs in ranching, beekeeping and farming, including a greenhouse where lettuce, basil and other produce and plants are grown. In May, the ranch began participating in Together with Veterans, a nationwide suicide prevention program focusing on veterans living in rural communities. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among veterans under the age of 45, according to the Department of Veteran Affairs, which also found a higher rate of suicide among veterans in Oregon in 2020 than the national veteran suicide rate. Joining us to talk about Central Oregon Veterans Ranch and the impact it’s having are co-executive directors and U.S. Marine Corps veterans Lauren Grigsby and Adrian De La Rosa, who is also a certified peer support specialist.

If you or someone you know is struggling, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Help is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with the Central Oregon Veterans Ranch in Bend. For nearly a decade, the nineteen acre working ranch has opened its gates to veterans who are dealing with anxiety or isolation or other symptoms of PTSD. In addition to peer support counseling, the ranch also offers mentorship and vocational training programs in ranching, farming, and beekeeping. Lauren Grigsby and Adrian De La Rosa are Marine Corps veterans who now serve as the co-executive directors of the ranch, and they join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.

Adrian De La Rosa: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Lauren Grigsby: It’s great to be here.

Miller: Lauren first, can you describe an average day at the ranch?

Grigsby: You know, I always say every day looks different. Some of that is dependent on programming. Thursdays are a day that we have veterans of all different eras, backgrounds that will come out to the ranch just to have a community day. They’ll do ranch projects with us, hydroponics projects with us, beekeeping, we’ll have a lunch. There’s just a lot of laughter and people gathering and telling each other how their week went.

We’ll have other days that the ranch is a very quiet place, and people will walk down our driveway in crisis, and we have staff there to work with them. Our staff is majority veteran themselves, so we have those shared lived experiences of military service, and there’s an immediate connection that we can make with those individuals.

And just being in nature is an amazing thing. So there’s days like that where we’re just walking the fields with someone or just sitting in a quiet space with someone.

Miller: Adrian, Lauren said that there are days when someone will just walk down your driveway in crisis. Can you give us a sense for the kinds of things that might lead someone to do that? Obviously you don’t need to give us names or particulars, but I’m just curious about somebody cold calling you in that way, walking down your driveway.

De La Rosa: Yeah, absolutely. Quite often actually, individuals will be isolated in a moment in their life where they know they need to take action, and they need to do something about where they are in their chapter of their life. So they’ll make a decision to come up to the ranch. And like Lauren mentioned, the diversity of the staff that we have and the ability to be able to manage the crisis that individual is having is definitely one of the more positive things that we’re able to do.

Oftentimes a lot of it is just isolation. That feeling where the individual just has nowhere to go, no one to talk to. And in that moment, oftentimes that’s the individuals that we get.

Miller: Lauren, there is a VA clinic in Bend and there are some other veterans services in the area. I’m curious what needs weren’t being met before the Central Oregon Veterans Ranch opened? I mean, what’s the hole that you’re filling?

Grigsby: We are in a non-clinical space. Peer support is an area of mental health where you’re trying to capture the person often that has not yet acknowledged that they need clinical mental health support. And we actually work in partnership with the VA and with the vet center. Some of the individuals that come out to the ranch will come in group settings on a contract with the VA where those actual counselors are out at the ranch with them and doing PTS support groups, post traumatic stress.

When Adrian talks about isolation, we see people that are isolated in a crowded room as well. A man came out that was in the middle of a divorce, and had been so busy working his blue collar job that he had not had time to even process what was going on with his divorce paperwork, and that how that affected custody for his children. And he came to us late on a Thursday afternoon and just said “someone told me that you could help me.” And I don’t know if it was the county [Veterans Support Officer] or if it was just someone in his community, but he came out. And we will redirect people to resources. In fact it wasn’t his county VSO because that’s what we said, “the VSO at the county will have people that can help you with legal things like this.” Depending on what the person needs, we’re gonna try to direct them to that resource in the community. We’re not gonna try to reinvent any wheels where we’re at.

Miller: But it seems like on some level, if what you’re saying is that it might be easier for people to just drop in to see you even if they have been resistant for whatever reason to go to a clinic or seek help at the county level, for whatever reason, they could walk down your driveway or drive there, and the barrier seems lower.

Grigsby: Yes. I would say we’re one of the lowest barrier to entry programs in the United States right now. Definitely in Oregon. And there is something to that. There’s a lot of resilience in the mindset of a veteran. There’s a lot of armor that we’ve put on to not show that we have trauma or not show that we are struggling with anything. We have people show up that they’re almost still in denial that they need help. We’ve had people show up that said “I had a suicide attempt a month ago, but I’m here to support the ranch because the ranch supports preventing suicide. Not because I need help, but because I want to be part of the solution to change this problem.”

Miller: If someone says that, how do you flip their script a little bit to actually gently get them to realize that they need help as well?

Grigsby: This is the beauty of peer support. You have to be strong enough as a peer in this space to show your cards first, and to be vulnerable first. It’s huge.

Miller: What do you mean by that?

Grigsby: Tell a story about yourself. Help them understand that you see them. There’s an unconditional support, a levelheadedness that you have to have. And I think that shared experience too, that you get it. You’ve been in Iraq, you’ve been in Afghanistan, you understand some of the things that they are bringing home,

Miller: Adrian, why was it important to you to become a peer support specialist after your service in the marines?

De La Rosa: A lot of people ask me that. My immediate answer is, since I got out in 2017, I’ve lost six members either on my fire team or my unit to suicide. Since then, really it’s just been kind of like a situation where I get reignited. It’s a whole new feel to the thing, to be able to move forward and push into the subject to prevent as many more veterans as possible from putting themselves in a situation where they’re in that crisis situation.

Miller: Lauren, what about you? What drove you personally to do this particular work?

Grigsby: I had started doing some veteran advocacy work last year on the PACT Act that was directly related to me losing a friend to environmental exposures. She passed away of breast cancer last March. And she had actually been in this space, she had a doctorate degree in public health after she got out of the Marine Corps and was tackling this issue. So for me, I had stepped away from the veterans space for a while. I was a mom, I was a business owner, and I was doing my own thing and not even really even seeing myself as a veteran, but more as just a regular community member.

And with her loss, there was definitely a desire to pick up that torch. Doctor Kate Hendricks Thomas, she was a light in this space that was providing a lot of research and good.

Miller: Adrian, we’ve talked mainly so far about peer counseling and support groups. But that’s not the only thing that happens at the Central Oregon Veterans Ranch. As I noted in the beginning, you’re also a working ranch where people can come and do things physically outside with their hands and their minds, and learn skills as well. What do you see as the benefits of the physical aspects of the ranch?

De La Rosa: Yeah you’re correct, we definitely have a variety of agrotherapy programs that we established. We coined the term “vessel” as the programs that we have established. When the veterans engage in any of those other programs, agrotherapy or regenerative agriculture applications that we’re practicing out there, what I see is the veterans get a win under their belt. When they’re in that moment of isolation, they don’t really have the energy to do anything. They don’t wanna reach out to individuals, they isolate, they disperse themselves from pretty much everyone around their life. And when they get the courage, that one opportunity to come out to the ranch, even just feeding some of the animals, that snowballs into creating that victory for them. And they can come back maybe next week, maybe feed the animals again, and then maybe help with the basil harvest or our hydroponics program and so on and so on. A lot of that confidence comes back. That veteran then can be in a position to say “alright, this is where I am. I now have that confidence. I wanna try and maybe go into a support group once a week.” And slowly we start to see these veterans lose a piece here and there of their armor, to be able to really start that transition back into society.

Miller: Lauren, you recently launched a peer support group that is specifically for veterans who are women. What’s the idea behind it?

Grigsby: Women veterans are a very underserved population. And honestly, it’s our own fault. When we talk about that armor, we come from a space where if we were vulnerable in service, then there is a tie of that vulnerability to failure. And so we don’t let even other women see that we fail. So it’s actually extremely difficult to get a bunch of veteran women to join a peer support group together. It’s funny, when I think back to some of our first meetings, and you go around the room, and they’re all looking at you like “What’s the point of this? Why did you bring us here? What’s the real reason? I’m doing great.” Now, it’s only just been a few months, but again, it’s showing the cards first and being vulnerable first, and then they realized that they needed that community all along. It’s a really special group of women and it just keeps growing.

Miller: Adrian, there’s another partnership that you’re working on now through Together With Veterans, which is focused on preventing suicide among rural veterans. What’s that gonna look like at the Central Oregon Veterans Ranch?

De La Rosa: The partnership itself, the part that I’m most excited about is the community aspect of it. Really, the program is kind of designed for us to be able to go out into the community here in Central Oregon, and wider areas if possible, to create a team of individuals in the community, whether it be doctors, teachers, firefighters, whatever it be, trying to diversify that community as much as possible, and then coming together to really get a base of where we are as a community in knowledge in military life, suicide prevention, post traumatic stress, all those subjects. Once we have that baseline, then as an organization, the Center Oregon Veterans Ranch, working with Together With Veterans, will come up with solutions with the community efforts and that team to be able to combat suicide.

Miller: I should say that if you or someone is struggling, you can call or text 988 to reach a suicide and crisis lifeline. It’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Lauren Grigsby, I’m just curious to the flip side of peer support. What do you think that non veterans can do in Central Oregon or anywhere to better support veterans?

Grigsby: One thing we talk about all the time at the ranch is creating a bridge. Understanding has to happen on both sides. Veterans have to be willing to open up and tell their stories and talk about their service to civilians, and civilians have to put in the effort on their side to understand what veterans service looks like. And it’s more than just a “thank you for your service,” because a lot of the individuals coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are coming back with a lot of different emotions that aren’t necessarily positive from their service. And not to say that we shouldn’t thank our veterans, because we should. But maybe opening up a conversation that has more depth to your question or to your comment towards that veteran. “What branch did you serve in? What was your experience?” Open it up to discussion.

And then just be ready to listen. Even within the veteran community and peer to peer, that’s what we do a lot, is we listen.

Miller: Lauren Grigsby and Adrian De La Rosa are co-executive directors of the Central Oregon Veterans Ranch. Thanks very much.

De La Rosa / Grigsby: Thanks for having us.

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