MONTROSE — The mission to make Montrose the most welcoming community in the country for veterans never ends for Melanie Kline.
Last week, the founder of Welcome Home Montrose was filling out a form in a doctor’s office when she was struck by the fact that, amid pages of questions about family status and medical issues, there was nothing about military service.
“Doctors need to know if patients are veterans. That’s really important,” Kline said as she directed staffers to write letters to each medical office in Montrose recommending that military status be included on intake forms.
It is just one more tweak in Kline’s 2½-year-old ambitious effort to reshape the Western Slope community of Montrose into a unique place where those who have served their country can feel appreciated and supported in all facets of life.
Her effort has won over skeptics, drawn national attention and taught Kline some hard lessons about how a vision needs to be tempered with practicality.
“We were naive when we started,” Kline admits. “We are not so naive anymore. We are seeing what kinds of things can work better.”
The things that didn’t go as well as hoped include a lack of enough formal structure for veterans who come to Montrose to take mentored jobs, and an overloaded schedule for veterans who came to participate in an inaugural summer activity camp.
The list of what has worked well is much longer.
With no government funding and a whole lot of community involvement, Welcome Home Montrose now has 560 veterans registered for a variety of services at its Warrior Resource Center. The center is the only one of its kind in the country. It serves veterans in many capacities with no government funding, making it a safe place for veterans to seek services that range from help filling out benefit forms to suicide intervention.
“This place is a lifesaver. It’s just a safe place to go. I drop in pretty often,” said Army National Guard Spec. Tim Kenney, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and volunteers to help others as well as partake of services.
Veterans in the various Welcome Home Montrose programs span from World War II to the conflict in Afghanistan. They include 20-year-olds to 90-somethings and at least 45 female veterans. The largest percentage are Vietnam veterans.
The older veterans come to the center mainly for camaraderie. The Vietnam veterans and those from more recent wars need more help with problems associated with PTSD, finding jobs and homelessness.
Veterans from all wars come together weekly at the center for a coffee gathering that is closed to everyone else — what they talk about is their business. Afterward, a small group of PTSD sufferers meets privately to give one another support in dealing with the problems they face daily.
Volunteers are always on hand at the center and at outside events sponsored by Welcome Home Montrose. They have logged more than 14,000 hours. Thirty-three businesses in this town of about 19,000 have joined in a program that offers discounts to veterans. More than 225 individuals have donated about $100,000 to the various programs.
Last year, Montrose was awarded an All-America City designation based in large part on the Welcome Home Montrose effort. Next month, it is going to receive an employer-service-organization award from the Department of Defense. Welcome Home Montrose will be featured at a Colorado Municipal League annual meeting this summer.
And, in the sincerest form of flattery, the program is being copied. About 60 other towns around the country have sought information about the program. Welcome Home Montrose has compiled a four-phase how-to for towns serious about moving forward.
“We are trying to follow the book they wrote. They have done just a super job,” said Ron Tyner, who is starting a similar program in Durango called Salute to Veterans.
Patriotic wind chimes
But the real sign of success can be seen on a recent typical morning at the Warrior Resource Center. The phone is ringing steadily. Ringing is also coming from a room where a small band of veterans is making patriotic wind chimes. Veterans drop in to share news, pick up forms and look for help with housing, groceries or jobs.
One veteran needs immediate help with an emotional crisis. Executive director Emily Smith doesn’t hesitate. She goes into a private room with him for an impromptu counseling session.
“This is a therapeutic place,” said Helena Hoover, who served two years in the Navy during the Vietnam War and spends three days a week at the center helping to make the wind chimes, which are hung from trees around Montrose on Memorial Day to honor soldiers.
All this was sparked by Kline watching television on a Sunday morning in fall 2011. A news segment about wounded veterans on a river trip gave Kline a vision. She pictured Montrose, with all of its outdoor opportunities, as a perfect place to do something special for veterans and to help her community in the process.
She began Welcome Home Montrose with a series of focus groups to gauge reaction to her idea that community-based services for veterans could be a kind of moral and economic stimulus: Veterans would move to Montrose because it would be so welcoming. It would be good for the veterans and good for the town.
Bringing new veterans to town temporarily has taken a back seat to offering services to those already in the community.
Jared Bolhuis, the young Marine veteran who was a key figure in the television report Kline saw, met with her early on in her quest to create Welcome Home Montrose and moved from the East Coast to Montrose to help with, and be helped by, the program. He now works as an apprentice jeweler in Montrose and has been instrumental in drawing funding to the town for a whitewater river park that will include components for the disabled.
Bolhuis also drew three other veterans he had served with to take part in a six-month pilot program that placed those veterans in mentored “dream jobs” in Montrose. One of the other veterans is still working in Montrose at a plant nursery. One left the area to attend college. Another left to get married.
Kline said the dream-job component of Welcome Home Montrose needs improvement. She has put that program on hold until more structure is in place. Kline said she plans to have formal contracts with job-seekers and mentors in the future and to add mandated counseling during the course of the internships.
More time to relax
Kline said the other area that needs improvement is Mission No Barriers. That program brought 20 veterans to Montrose last summer for a week of recreational activities and the opportunity for Welcome Home Montrose to find out what barriers wounded veterans still find in Montrose.
“We kept them too busy,” Kline said of the inaugural Mission No Barriers program. She said that this summer they will invite a smaller group of a dozen veterans and involve them in fewer activities. The veterans will have more time to relax and to enjoy community potlucks — the part of the program that many of the vets, in a surprise to Kline, rated as their favorite activity.
That community involvement and acceptance have turned out to be key to the program’s success.
From the military widow who brings home-baked goods for the veterans each week to the anonymous donor who is paying $50,000 for a salary and benefits for Smith, there are many indications Montrose has become the welcoming place Kline envisioned.
Two weeks ago, a bronze memorial for Vietnam veterans was carried down Main Street to the center in a mini-parade featuring a riderless horse to signify soldiers who didn’t make it back.
Montrose residents, now much more aware of the thousands of veterans in their midst than they were before Welcome Home Montrose began, stopped in their tracks and saluted or held hands over their hearts.
“They have the appreciation and the heart for what these veterans have done,” Smith said. “They just didn’t know before what to do for them.”
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957, nlofholm@denverpost.com or twitter.com/nlofholm
