06/20/2025
We’re proud to have Brandi here at the Mental Health Hub, turning her passion into reality. She’s here to support first responders and their families — with understanding, without judgment.
Help us spread the word: Support is available from someone who truly gets it.
Welcome to SHIFT
My husband and I have both worn the badge. We met as cops. We built a life around the job. And we’ve carried what comes with it—courtrooms, scenes, trauma, chaos, and the kind of numbness that creeps in over time without asking permission that greatly impacts a family.
What we didn’t see coming was what the job would slowly take from us.
The friendships.
The missed family events.
The normal sleep schedule.
The ability to feel grief and loss without compartmentalization.
It was grief after grief. Loss after loss.
We still chose to do the job.
While quietly falling apart at home.
When we finally reached for help, we found it in individual therapy—and in Jesus. But we also realized something painful: not every first responder has access to real, relevant, affordable mental health support. And not every therapist understands this world from the inside out.
So we built Shift.
Shift is a nonprofit offering group therapy and support services for first responders, their spouses, and couples—created by a first responder family, for first responder families.
Because we need more than awareness.
We need actual support.
We need spaces where we don’t have to explain the job before we can talk about what it’s doing to us.
• First responders are twice as likely to experience PTSD and depression than the general population.
• 1 in 3 has thought about su***de.
• Marriages in these professions end more in divorce than any other profession.
But healing is possible.
Not in silence. Not in shame.
In connection. In community.
That’s what Shift is.
Thanks to local donors, these groups are offered at no cost—because healing shouldn’t be a luxury. And because the people running toward everyone else’s crisis deserve somewhere to land with their own.
If you’re a responder, a spouse, or a couple hanging on—please hear me:
You are not too far gone.
You are not weak asking for help.
You are human. And you are not alone.
This is why Shift exists.
Because we’ve lived it.
And because we believe there’s more for you—more peace, more clarity, more life than the job ever told you was possible.
