Cuban immigrant salutes the wounded

2021 Women of Distinction – Nonprofit

Ana Yelen – Healing Warriors Program

Meeting the needs of America’s returning military personnel deserves not just an award but a salute as well. Ana Yelen’s work in that area has been exemplary.

“I am one of the founders of the Healing Warriors Program, a nonprofit serving our service members and their families,” she said. “The launching of this nonprofit came as a result of both my life story as a Cuban immigrant during the 1960s and my career in high tech, where I hired veterans for a variety of roles.

“As an immigrant leaving a country in midst of revolution, my parents continuously reminded me of the importance of gratitude toward our new nation and toward our service members who ensured our safe passage,” Yelen said. As a child living in New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood during the Vietnam War “and witnessing the loss of life and the injuries, both physical and mental, that our service members endured,” she added, “I felt powerless to help.

“Growing into adulthood, the undercurrent of the personal and moral question of what was mine to do on behalf of our service member, for whom I held tremendous gratitude, stayed with me,” she said. “Sending care packages, donating to various nonprofits, writing cards and letters and buying the occasional dinner for a soldier at the airport felt small in comparison to what my family and I had gained when fleeing to the United States.

“My opportunity to do more finally came when I worked in the high-tech industry” including at Sun Microsystems Inc. in Broomfield and Exabyte Corp. in Boulder, she said. “I hired a number of veterans, and given that I worked with a government team of veteran engineers, I became aware of the problems with pain management, narcotics and suicides. Being an advocate for integrative approaches to health care, I knew I could do more.”

In 2006, Yelen launched an annual event in which 14 integrative-care practitioners provided free care during a volunteer service day in donated space at the Wings Over the Rockies museum. She paid for advertising and supplies including treatment tables, linens, pillows and medical supplies out of her own funds.

The event grew into larger spaces, finally evolving from an annual event into an ongoing clinic. “Since we knew that there was demonstrable efficacy due to our data collection,” Yelen said, “our next step would be to secure a 501(c)(3) nonprofit designation, which we accomplished in the fall of 2012, and to create the clinic operational model, which we completed in June 2013. In July, 2013, after being offered free clinic space in Fort Collins for four months as a proof of concept, we launched the Healing Warriors program clinic.”

Healing Warriors outgrew the space within those four months, and now operates a five-room clinic with more than 2,500 clients in its database. It has delivered more than 2,400 clients in our database, and in 2018 was presented the Newman’s Own award at the Pentagon.

Yelen also co-founded Louisville-based Whisperingtree.net, an online resource for information and products supporting wellness.

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