Our Learning Community

Optimizing quality of life for veterans, military families, and the communities that support them.

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Valor Institute Centers

The Centers fulfill the scholarly mission of our learning community. Each Center focuses on a core area of sustainable quality of life through research, research synthesis and integration, knowledge development and dissemination, and technical assistance. The knowledge developed is applied in novel ways to solve quality-of-life challenges through programs tailored to the communities of interest.

Adbrook Center for Lifestyle Wellbeing
Center for Quality of Life Innovation
Center for Community Resilience
Center for Organizational Health
Center for Healing Spaces

AdBrook Center for Lifestyle Well-Being

Anchors values clarification, storytelling, and creative expression as protective factors for wellbeing. Guides individuals and families in creating meaningful, values-centered personal, social, and intergenerational legacies. Supports the Center for Lifestyle Wellbeing.

A man in military uniform sits on a couch with a woman and young girl. The girl touches the man's cap. The woman smiles at the girl. They are in a well-lit living room.

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Center for Quality of Life Innovation

Bridges law, psychology, and public health to support individuals and families through legal and fiduciary transitions. Provides plain-language guidance, trustee support, stress management, and conflict prevention, serving as an innovator in justice and advocacy. The Legal Navigation Center is our flagship program for the Center for Quality of Life Innovation.

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Center for Community Resilience

Providing a one-stop resource center for all things related to family and friends who have come to feel like family. Only half of the military force is married, so family takes many shapes and sizes, but coming home to a supportive like-minded group provides a sense of belonging and community that reduces the strain that occurs in every life.

Center for Healing Spaces

A resilience-based workforce development and community empowerment initiative. Applies psychology of purpose, social networks, and resilience science to foster belonging, preserve
artisan skills, and strengthen protective factors against isolation, incivility and other breakdowns in community and personal capacity. Supports the Center for Healing Spaces and Eco-
environmental Well-being.

Center for Organizational Health

Extends the Center for Organizational Health by blending business innovation with public health. Supports veterans, families, and community leaders in launching purpose-driven enterprises, applying a population-level approach to economic resilience.

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Application

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Valor Social Enterprise Catalyst (VSEC)

The Social Enterprise Catalyst addresses the quality of work life for veterans and military families within the context of the communities in which they live and serve.

It applies a public health approach, seeking to raise the level of social entrepreneurship for everyone. The SE Catalyst seeks to weave the MVF community into the existing entrepreneurial ecosystem, integrating it into the fabric of the social enterprise community.

The primary aim is to develop a social entrepreneurship hub that addresses the full continuum of business development stages for underrepresented nonprofit and business-with-purpose organizations. This will necessarily call for cross-organizational partnerships and more inclusive ecosystems that address high-density military communities, often found in rural locations. It also promotes psychosocial support and increased control to reduce the stress of entrepreneurship by generating networks and partnerships among organizations and participants.

The VSEC serves as:

Social Enterprise Landscape Architect

More is not always better; we choose quality over quantity. Sometimes you have to clear the clutter and design a system with intention.

There is no need to duplicate resources, such as existing incubators and accelerators. We seek to spark a change in services to better meet the needs of the MVF community and other meaning-driven entrepreneurs—without adding more, but by making the services more effective, comprehensive, and relevant. VSEC will change the landscape of the ecosystem using a new design philosophy, creating a framework to add structure to hold the fragmented pieces together and social glue to keep them connected. We then seek to catalyze service development to fill identified gaps and consolidate services that are duplicative or have outlived their usefulness—transforming them into relevant resources for current communities of practice rather than services based on the echoes of a sound bite from yesterday.

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Organizational Matchmaker

We envision a cohesive virtual system of like-minded entrepreneurs to generate a teamwork environment for the isolated self-employed community.

Teamwork is identified as a critical missing resource by military entrepreneurs. Through partnership development among organizations and colleagues, we seek to develop collaborative, cooperative, and integrated systems rather than stove-piped and competitive ones, catalyzing change in the social interactions within the ecosystem. Organizations and entrepreneurs need not stand alone; it need not be lonely at the top of the entrepreneurial ladder. Increasing collaboration also increases psychosocial support and control—the only two scientifically proven methods to reduce stress.

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Idea Translator

The organizational process relies on translational research and best practices from implementation and dissemination sciences in the context of a learning community.