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The History of BOLV

The History of BOLV

Yolonda Holmes-Echols and Tameka Pierre-Louis

Yolonda Holmes-Echols and Tameka Pierre-Louis
The Beacon of Light Institute for Veterans is a nonprofit organization forged by two sisters, Dr. Yolonda Holmes-Echols and Dr. Tameka Pierre-Louis, as a labor of love with the sole purpose of rendering mental health services to help veterans with or without physical disabilities, whose lives have been gravely affected by addiction, depression, suicide, and homelessness resulting in their battle with PTSD. Our passion emerged from witnessing our father enduring life-long challenges of PTSD due to his service in Vietnam. Our goal is to treat veterans and their families through trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy to help them slowly heal from the invisible wounds of war. Our mission is compounded with a secondary focus geared towards facilitating the treatment of PTSD also in children, at-risk teens both in and outside of the juvenile correctional system, and first responders who also endure similar challenges due to past catastrophic events in their lives, using horticultural therapy for vocational rehabilitation.

Our organization was created with the sole purpose of rendering mental health services to help veterans with or without physical disabilities, whose lives have been gravely affected by their battle with PTSD. The objective is to treat veterans as well as first responders through a network of clinicians specializing in Prolonged Exposure (PE) Therapy and Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), compounded with the use of horticulture therapy for vocational rehabilitation to generate goods and services geared to stimulate local communities resilience in supporting the initiatives.