Swim With a Mission co-founder Phil Taub and Hidden Battles Foundation founder Scott Hyder
Phil Taub
Scott Hyder
Phil Taub, with his wife, Julie, co-founded Swim With a Mission, a Bedford-based nonprofit that raises funds for veterans services and holds several fundraisers throughout the year, including its signature swim race at Newfound Lake in July.
Army and police veteran Scott Heider founded Hidden Battles Foundation, a Dracut, Mass.-based nonprofit that helps veterans and first-responders, both active and retired, cope with mental health issues.
This interview was adapted from NH Business Review’s “Down to Business” podcast.
Q. You both raise funds for veterans services. How did your nonprofits evolve?
Phil Taub: Back in 2016, my wife, Julie, and I really started to become much more aware about the issues our veteran population was struggling with then and is still struggling with now. It was like peeling back an onion. We met some veterans who were telling us we don’t know where to find services. The VA does work for about a third of our veterans. And for those veterans, they do a good job, but it doesn’t work for all of our veterans.
Our veterans are in different places.
And they’re struggling. Sometimes it’s something very, very tough, like a traumatic brain injury, or it could be a loss of a limb. But sometimes it’s just the loss of their teammates and a loss of a purpose, something greater than themselves and having a really tough time finding a good job and reintegrating into civilian society.
My wife and I have been blessed to be involved in a lot of charities, and we’re good at raising money. We’re not veterans ourselves, so we didn’t know a lot about what services to provide.
But what was very clear to us was that we have a lot of great veteran service organizations in New Hampshire, more than 40 of them, but none of them knew each other at that time.
Our thesis was very simple when we started. We were going to put on this little swim race up at beautiful Newfound Lake, and we’ll try to raise some money, and we’ll give it to some veterans service organizations.
Right before we started our event, we ran into a group of Navy Seals down in Florida, and I invited them to come up and they agreed. I went all around the Lakes Region putting up signs. Hundreds of swimmers showed up that first year, and more than 1,500 people showed up to see the Navy Seals. We were really hoping to raise about $45,000, and we ended up raising $450,000.
When we started to sprinkle that money around, we quickly realized like, OK, because we’re asking all these groups, what do you do? How many veterans do you service? We started to realize it’s like a jigsaw puzzle.
Scott Hyder: I’m a 10-year Army veteran, I’m a disabled veteran, and I’m a retired police officer. Hidden Battles was founded almost by accident. My brother was a corrections officer, and he had taken his life after 20 years in service. And I was really struggling with a lot of that.
I had gotten involved in suicide prevention, but I was really kind of masking what I was going on with my own trauma, and experiences I was dealing with from the Army and being a police officer. I started to reach out to all my Army buddies and say, what can I do?
I started to ruck, which is a military term for backpack hiking. And I reached out to a bunch of military groups on social media. People started to join me, and I realized that this was bigger than I was and that there were a lot of other veterans struggling.
What we wanted to do originally was just do a scholarship in my brother’s name and raise about $1,500. We’ll sell T-shirts and whatever. What happened was it exploded. A lot of money started coming in, and we were starting to think, all right, so how do we do these programs and how can we help other people?
We have to really mix it up because not everybody can ruck. We came up with a bunch of different programs to really pique the interest of other individuals. We started to invite the families because we understand that to help the individual, we really need to give them that support system.
The wonderful thing that happened to me was we were up at Newfound Lake. We have a place up there, and we were driving around the lake one day, and we saw these signs that were out everywhere saying, “the Navy Seals are coming.” We ended up coming to the first one, and Phil was really busy that day, and I wanted to talk to him because we had started Hidden Battles around the same time that Phil had started Swim With a Mission.
Phil has given us the guidance to understand how we can build our community and be positive. He’s developed this community of other nonprofits that we never would have met before, or it would have taken us years to meet. We all rely on each other now.
