Ambitious nonprofit resolves to help more military veterans

Kendra Simpkins, who founded a nonprofit in 2018 that assists military veterans with their mental health, says knowing her why is easy — it’s hearing it out loud that can be hard. 

Consider a U.S. Army veteran who approached her recently after a group therapy session at the organization, Operation Warrior Resolution. The veteran leaned into Simpkins, herself a U.S. Army veteran, and half-whispered, “I wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for you,” adding he contemplated suicide before discovering Operation Warrior Resolution.

“That’s my why,” says Simpkins, recalling the exchange. “That’s why I get out of bed in the morning.” 

Simpkins seeks to help a lot more veterans in Lakewood Ranch and beyond overcome their issues — and find their why — in leading a multimillion-dollar expansion of Operation Warrior Resolution. That includes buying a new facility, a 6-acre site with two properties on it, in unincorporated east Manatee County, about three miles north of the intersection of Lakewood Ranch Boulevard and State Road 64. 

Operation Warrior Resolution paid $1.69 million for the site in June, Manatee County property records show. The parcel, with several undeveloped acres and the pair of homes totaling 5,000 square feet, replaces some properties OWR previously rented in Sarasota. One of those properties was destroyed during Hurricane Debby in August 2024. “We lost everything,” says Simpkins.

The new spot, says Simpkins, is both bigger and better. And in going bigger and better, the new OWR home represents both the high stakes need for more services for more veterans and the high pressure Simpkins feels to come through for the people she calls her tribe. She hopes to double the amount of veterans OWR sees in 2026, to about 800 from some 400 in 2025. 

Operation Warrior Resolution had $1.03 million in revenue in its most recent fiscal year, according to public tax filings, and $412,927 in assets. It has eight employees, and Simpkins wants to bring on a few more. Its core method of working with veterans is called brain-based healing. That’s an “approach rooted in neuroscience to rewire the brain so there are no longer any emotional disturbances from past or current events,” the organization says on its website. It’s fast and effective, and can be sometimes accomplished in one to three sessions, Simpkins adds in an OWR promotional video.

Beyond brain-based healing, other OWR services include tactical healing retreats; weekend retreats; family and children’s services; workforce training, including a partnership with FleetForce for truck driver training; and combat conscious yoga. 

“What we do is help the brain rewire how it sometimes views these past events,” Jerrod Klein, a U.S. Air Force veteran and trauma resolution specialist at OWR, says on the video. “And what sort of sets us apart from say traditional therapies is we get to the core of the problem ... not every organization sees the immediate results. We get to see the immediate results.”

All she can be

The granddaughter of a World War II veteran, Simpkins was born in Sarasota. She pursued a military life as early as a teenager, when she was a Junior ROTC student at Riverview High School in south Sarasota. She struggled at first with some of the physical tasks, she recalls, saying her instructor told her “I don’t think you’re cut out for the military.”

Simpkins ultimately proved that teacher wrong. She had a diversion at first, working as a waitress at some St. Armands Circle restaurants for about eight years. Then she joined the Army, eventually becoming an intelligence analyst in South Korea. “I always wanted to get into the service,” she says. “I felt like it was my purpose.” 

Photo by Mark Wemple

Simpkins was honorably discharged from the Army in 2010 after a traumatic injury. Declining to go into detail about what happened, Simpkins says it was a tough time in her life. “I know what it’s like to slip into that darkness,” says Simpkins, 43. “I know what it feels like when you feel like there’s no way out.”

Simpkins next went back to college. She graduated with a degree in psychology from the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee in 2014, then earned a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University in New York City in 2016. 

She moved back to the Sarasota area and started working in counseling in private practice. Yet traditional therapies in many cases, she discovered, created more hardships for clients — not less. “I was six months out of school and feeling burned out because I wasn’t seeing any progress in the people I was working with,” she says. “I thought there has to be a way out of pain that doesn’t cause so much pain.”

Namaste 

Those experiences, plus some gaps she found in services through the Veterans Administration, led Simpkins to start OWR. 

“Usually when a veteran reaches out for help they don’t know where to go or what they need or what will be useful for them,” she says on the OWR video. “And that’s OK because we do. And we can guide them in that process.”

From an operations perspective, Simpkins’ biggest challenge is having the infrastructure to support the growth she envisions with the new east Manatee campus. 

Loosely related, among the two people she aims to hire is an executive director, so she can get out of being both the head of operations and the chief fundraiser. About 65% of the organization’s budget comes from grants, while 35% comes from private donors. Simpkins would like to see that ratio be more like 50-50. (One recent grant was from the Barancik Foundation in Sarasota, which provided OWR $850,000 “toward the purchase of a permanent state-of-the-art facility from which to base its operations and improve the quality of its holistic mental health care services for veterans.”) 

Plans at the new site include providing space for equine therapy and building a barndominium to hold more yoga and meditation sessions.

In the meantime, Simpkins is focusing, she says, on making the new east Manatee space a “warm and welcoming” place for veterans to connect. “Community for the military is a real big deal to me,” she says, and so is creating a place “where (veterans) can find a common purpose and a common goal.”