Event draws reps from veteran nonprofits from across New Mexico
Veterans in Taos and surrounding communities came together on Saturday (March 11) for the first of a series of meetings hosted by Together With Veterans, a Taos-based nonprofit focused on reducing veteran suicides in the community.
The meeting brought locals together to discuss suicide among veterans in rural communities like Taos and, furthermore, ways to confront the issue. Introductions and brief presentations built up to the focal point of the event: breakout groups, where veterans and some civilians discussed plans of action for reducing suicide rates among veterans, which were then presented to the rest of the room.
The series of meetings will be sixfold, and each will address a different strategy for combating veteran suicides. The topic of Saturday’s meeting was connectivity. According to Jennifer Ammann, the director of operations at Veterans Off-Grid and facilitator for Together With Veterans, the importance of connecting veterans is to provide them with a network of individuals who might be having similar experiences.
“Everybody who I’ve heard from felt really positive about it,” Ammann said. “Looking at just the activity of having the breakout groups and people communicating was like, we were doing exactly the thing that we were trying to address. How do we connect? Well, we were all there, maybe 35 or 40 people, connecting in order to talk about the issue.”
With a conference room full of veterans and some civilian supporters, participants were able to connect with each other while simultaneously learning about the importance of building a network of support. Many participants were also representatives for veteran nonprofits across the state, some even coming in all the way from Albuquerque. Everyone arrived prepared to talk about the sensitive issue of veteran suicide rates.
“We tend to think we’re warriors,” Ryan Timmermans, the founder and executive director of Veterans Off-Grid, said at the meeting. “I think when I joined, ‘Army of One’ was the slogan. You can handle anything, but I think another [issue] is that you don’t want to burden anybody else with your problems, and you just suffer in silence.”
Timmermans went on to say that while many seek professional help, bureaucracy commonly gets in the way, and the experience is impersonal. Together With Veterans is focused on providing personal connections that help veterans in very different ways than they might experience in a professional setting, while yielding similar results.
Most of the meeting was based on information from a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis conducted during one of the first Together With Veterans meetings in October 2022. One of the weaknesses mentioned in the analysis was the fact that Taos is a rural community. According to Ammann, suicide rates among veterans are much higher in rural areas compared to cities for several reasons.
“One is isolation,” Ammann said. “If you’re living in a city, and you’re having suicidal ideation, there are constantly things that distract you from that thought process. There’s a natural connection to the world, even if you are really deep in your isolation, you’re still surrounded by others. That can be enough to distract a person from acting on the ideation.”
Rural communities have limited communication abilities compared to densely populated areas, increasing the likelihood of loneliness, which, according to Ammann, was a key characteristic reported among veterans experiencing suicidal ideation. Other barriers for rural communities include limited transportation, limited access to income and limited technology, all of which can take a toll on veterans.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between the years 2000 and 2020, suicides in rural communities increased by 46 percent, compared to 27 percent in urban areas over the same time period. Additionally, rural areas see the most suicides among Native Americans. According to the 2022 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report, veteran suicides have remained relatively constant between 2001 and 2022, never deviating from around 6,000 suicides per year.
Together With Veterans is a program with a peer-based model that began in 2022 and stemmed from Veterans Off-Grid in partnership with Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education and the Department of Veterans Affairs. By maintaining a membership primarily of veterans, it is built around the idea that veterans are more likely to recognize other veterans who might be facing difficulties.
While the meeting on Saturday was the first of six, the next meeting has not yet been scheduled. However, Veterans Off-Grid will be partnering with The Paseo Project in concordance with the New Mexico Arts Association to provide participants with four separate art workshops free of cost: blacksmithing on April 15, knitting on May 7, woodworking on May 27 and stone carving on June 11. According to Ammann, two of the artists are veterans.