We are building a coalition of champions for this cause. Will you join us?

Protect Our Protectors was inspired by a simple but powerful lesson from Texas: peer support works best when the people who need help know that asking for help will not be used against them.

In 2021, Texas created the Texas Law Enforcement Peer Network through S.B. 64. The law did more than fund a peer network. It used an occupational-code privacy expansion to help protect law-enforcement officers who seek peer support, making it safer for officers to ask for help without fearing that responsible help-seeking would damage their career, reputation, license, or standing inside the department.

Texas later expanded the same peer-support concept for firefighters and EMS through H.B. 35. Public reporting and program-facing materials have credited the Texas model with helping reduce law-enforcement suicides in Texas by approximately 75% since launch. That result is too important to ignore.

We are working with leaders connected to the Texas model and using that blueprint to help take the framework nationwide.

The point is not only that Texas created a peer network. The point is that Texas recognized the fear that keeps many people from using one. If someone believes that asking for help could damage their career, reputation, license, clearance, family stability, or standing inside the team, many will stay silent until the problem becomes a crisis.

That is the heart of Protect Our Protectors.

HIPAA alone is not enough. For many first responders, veterans, operators, and other high-trauma service communities, the question is not simply whether help exists. The question is whether seeking help feels safe.

Your support for the families of the wounded and fallen, scholarships, individual needs, brain health, trauma treatment, and the broader legacy reflects the same principle at the heart of this effort: no one left behind and no one forgotten. Protect Our Protectors is being developed to help protect the people who protect America by advancing confidential peer support, suicide prevention, recovery support, emergency mental-health reset options, career protection, and responsible access to better treatment options.

The Texas model shows why legal protection matters — why trusted community support matters. Together, those lessons point toward a stronger national effort: protect the first step of asking for help, strengthen the organizations people already trust, and make sure those who come forward can access care worthy of their sacrifice. Nobody should be forced to choose between getting help when they need it and risking the well-being and financial future of their family. Nobody should be forced to struggle with inferior treatment options when higher-efficacy solutions are available, lawful, medically supervised, and clinically appropriate.

The purpose of the Protect Our Protectors Coalition of Champions is not to replace trusted organizations. It is to stand beside them, strengthen what already works, help expand funding, support existing peer networks, help build new ones where needed, and bring the best ideas in law, peer support, recovery, and treatment together with one voice.

Archimedes is remembered for saying, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” We are not so idealistic as to think we can solve these problems overnight. But when protector-focused groups come together with one voice, we lengthen that lever, strengthen the fulcrum, and create the force to pull on it together. For many who would otherwise be left behind, I believe we can move the earth for them and their families.

Support Protect Our Protectors as a national effort to help the people who protect Americans seek help before crisis becomes tragedy.

This is the Texas model at national scale:

• Fund the network.

• Protect privacy.

• Change the occupational code.

• Make it safe to ask for help.