Fisher House of Greater Cleveland Inc.

Greater Cleveland Fisher House assists the Cleveland VA Fisher House in providing a temporary "home away from home," free of charge, for military and veteran families while their loved one is receiving care at the Louis Stokes VA Medical Center or other Cleveland-area hospital. Families must live 50 miles from the treatment facility to stay at Fisher House, where they can interact with other families and know they are not alone.

Decades from now, we want Greater Cleveland Fisher House to still be providing a safe and comfortabl

Goal One: Create more awareness of who we are as an organization and what we do to support servicemembers, veterans and their families.

Goal Two: Increase community support for our organization, so that we have a healthy amount of volunteers who can help spread our mission.

Goal Three: Enhance our fundraising capabilities, so that we can continue to provide everything these very important guests want and need--now and well into the future.

Our organization made the decision to hire an Executive Director within the last year, and she started the new position January 2023. One responsibility of this role is to connect with the national Fisher House Foundation, to network with other Fisher Houses across the country and learn new skills that will help give her the tools she needs to succeed in furthering the organization's mission and goals. Our board members (and now our Executive Director) also attend the national Fisher House Foundation Conference in Washington, DC, each year, to learn more about the organization as a whole, the challenges and successes other Fisher Houses face, how their leadership works together to accomplish their goals, and much more.

Most of our board members are veterans. Several serve on other veteran-focused boards, some work with organizations that provide community resources to veterans, and some are veteran business owners themselves. All of this outreach helps ensure our mission is being communicated to the groups we serve as an organization, so that they know Fisher House is another resource available to them.

The Cleveland VA Fisher House opened in June 2019, then the pandemic hit less than a year later. During the pandemic, Greater Cleveland Fisher House faced challenges like so many other organizations, but we did not stop providing the level of compassionate care we offer our servicemembers, veterans and their families. Our Fisher House also served as a model for others, in that the VA staff turned one of the two houses into a designated safe space for VA hospital employees to stay if they did not want to go home between shifts (to help limit COVID-19 exposure to their families). The board continued to look into how we could forge new community partnerships, raise funds, and create more awareness of our organization--and simply just let people know that we were still open to serve them during their time of need. And, again, hiring an Executive Director this past year meant we were ready to be laser-focused on our goals and move forward with our mission, with a dedicated person in that position, and despite the unstable environment all of us around the world were continuing to experience.