Navy Community, Navy Spouse and Family Resources - Navy Times

Charities help families deal with stress

The grassroots charity Operation Homefront is seeing signs that financial stress is increasing in military families, with their caseload for emergency assistance doubling in all its locations over the last few months.

“Financial and psychological stress that has accumulated over multiple deployments is finally reaching a crisis in many military families,” said Amy Palmer, executive vice president of operations, who oversees charitable activities.

The cases they are seeing are not the usual requests for car repair or extra groceries at the end of the month, she said. “These are big dollar emergencies that threaten military families and wounded warriors with homelessness and the loss of everything they own.”

Operation Homefront founder and chairman emeritus Meredith Leyva said a number of these cases are related to wounded warriors. The families’ expenses go up, related to hospital visits and other issues, and the spouse may need to quit his or her job. “Then everything they own is at stake,” she said.

Some are also facing large expenses related to remodeling their homes to make them handicapped accessible, she said.

Another problem is that the service member’s pay is drastically reduced during the period of temporary disability pay while service officials wait to see if the member’s health improves.

Leyva said Operation Homefront assisted 1,700 wounded warriors nationwide in 2006, mostly at Madigan Army Medical Center at Fort Lewis, Wash., and Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, but also at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Md., and medical hold units around the country.

The charity launched a Wounded Warrior Wives Project earlier this year as a support network for the spouses of those who are injured or wounded.

“This combines the emergency assistance of Operation Homefront with the network of CincHouse.com,” an online community for military women and wives of service members, Leyva said. “We know this support network is needed because of the stressful time so many of our wives have been through.”

Among the partnerships they’ve formed is an arrangement with the company Maid Brigade, which can provide free weekly household cleaning for some of these military families in need.

Operation Homefront also works with other charities helping the families of wounded warriors, such as the Fisher House Foundation, Leyva said.

The Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes announced this week that they have helped 4,000 severely wounded veterans and their families in three years, provided critical, immediate and long-term, assistance and support to over half of the estimated 8,000 wounded troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

They’ve found that 42 percent of husbands and wives have to give up their jobs to care for the wounded spouse. That, on top of their other medical bills, makes it nearly impossible to manage, officials said.