Stephanie Preciado, who served six years in the Texas Army National Guard, holds a special love for Help Heal Veterans — an organization that has maintained a decades-long belief that arts and crafts are a “time-tested healing tool” for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.
“It feels like a safe place,” Preciado told the Telegram. “I learned about this place from a veteran at the VA by word of mouth, and it is a kind of therapy that you really can’t get from doctors. It’s not just about doing the crafts but finding people to connect with that understand you.”
Each year, nearly 1 million kits are produced and shipped from Help Heal Veterans’ headquarters in Winchester, Calif., to community-based arts and craft centers nationwide.
“We need more people to know about it and that’s why I started volunteering,” said Preciado, who now works with Help Heal Veterans as a part-time staff member. “I get to do crafts, I get to learn, and I get to give back to the veterans that visit. But I stuck around because of that connection. We’re out here for a reason. The conversations every day are based around people in the community that get where you’ve been and where you’ve come from. You don’t always get that elsewhere.”
Although the Temple facility — which is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays at 819 S. Fifth St. — has nearly 200 different kits available, Preciado and other veterans opted for crafts that mostly required a sewing machine on Thursday.
Some relied on the help from Killeen resident Linda Temple, the wife of a local veteran.
“I took sewing when I was in junior high in the seventh grade but my mother taught me how to sew on a treadle sewing machine … so I’ve been sewing a while,” she said. “Today, we’ve been making pillowcases, tote bags and a (lanyard holder) that hangs around your neck. You can keep your ID, keys, phone or money in it.”
Pat Carey, who served in the military as a medic, is another local veteran who spent her Thursday afternoon at Help Heal Veterans.
“I’ve been using Help Heal Veterans since they opened in 1971,” she said. “I enlisted in 1971 and the first time I walked into the hospital it was set up in the Red Cross room. They gave me cowhide in a pattern for moccasin boots.”
Like Preciado, Carey emphasized how the organization is about more than arts and crafts.
“It’s also a good place for lots of discussion,” she said. “We can talk to people who were there and just share our stories.”
“We are committed to placing our therapeutic craft kits in the hands of our veteran community,” Trish Alger, a craft case specialist at Help Heal Veterans in Temple, previously told the Telegram.
For information on how to participate in future Help Heal Veterans efforts, veterans may contact the Temple facility at 254-773-8900 or go online at healvets.org.
