Project Aims to Serve Those Who Serve Their Country

Lorrie Knight-Major wasn’t sure where to turn after her 22-year-old son Ryan was critically injured in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006.

Ryan Major, who was being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, sustained severe injuries and lost both his legs. “We didn’t know whether he would live or die,” recalled Knight-Major, of Silver Spring.

She left her job to stay by her son’s bedside as he recovered. But when he was ready to come home, she faced a host of challenges. Without the income from her job and with another child to care for, she didn’t have the financial means to equip her home to be accessible for her son. She was given a ten-page list of phone numbers to call, but connecting with the right resources was difficult.

Finally, through word-of-mouth, she heard about the local nonprofit Rebuilding Together Montgomery County. The group installed an elevator in her home and remodeled her first-floor family room into an accessible bedroom and bathroom for her son. They even added a deck.

Without the group, her son wouldn’t have been able to return home, said Knight-Major, who is now a commissioner on the county’s Commission on Veterans Affairs and a director of Military and Veterans Initiatives for the Easter Seals of Greater Washington-Baltimore Region.

It was in part her experience with her son that led Knight-Major to conceptualize the Serving Together: Troops, Veterans and Family Care Project.

While serving last year on a committee tasked with outlining veterans priorities in preparation for the military's base realignment and closure process, Knight-Major suggested applying for a grant through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The Rockville-based Mental Health Association of Montgomery County announced Monday that it would use a $500,000 matching grant from the foundation, which backs efforts to improve health care, to launch the Serving Together project.

Serving Together aims to link community-based resources to improve access to health, mental health and other support services for troops, veterans, and families in Montgomery County.

“There exists an array of local, regional, and national services to offer our troops, veterans, and families and we can improve the way that these services are organized,” said Sharon Friedman, MHA Executive Director. “We can improve accessibility to those services and we should try to create new services where there are gaps.”

A 2008 study commissioned by The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region, with support from the county, showed that military families in the National Capital region were often unclear about what services were available and how to access them. It also showed that there was a growing need for services that would not be met by the current system. 

The study was in part prompted by the merger of Walter Reed Army Medical Center with Bethesda’s National Naval Medical Center, as part of the federally-mandated base realignment and closure process. The merger is set to be completed in September.

“The moving of Walter Reed to Bethesda has given us an opportunity to look at ways we can help military members and their families,” County Executive Isiah Legett (D), a Vietnam War veteran, said at the initiative’s launch on Monday.

Serving Together is designed to coordinate and provide information on existing services and to create new programs where needed.

The program seeks to answer questions like “Where do you go? How do you avoid the 1-800 number, to get a machine recording, when you might be going through the most awful time in your life?” said project director Jessica McNurlen, whose fiance is a Marine staff sergeant.

Funding for Serving Together comes from a number of public and private sources. To provide the actual services, MHA is partnering with Easter Seals Greater Washington-Baltimore Region and other organizations in the community.

“No one organization could attain this vision on its own and the Mental Health Association has always appreciated the tremendous value in innovating a project that is a community collaboration," Friedman said.