How CreatiVets Is Building A 24-7 Creative Home For Veterans - And How You Can Help
What began with nine veterans in its first year now supports more than 1,200 annually across 15 states and Puerto Rico. | CreatiVets
Most mental health systems still treat creativity like decoration, something you add after the real work is done.
Richard Casper has spent the last decade proving the opposite.
A veteran once told Casper there was one story he could not say out loud, not to his wife, not to anyone. Then he wrote it into a song. A few hours later, he was texting that song to her. “Babe, listen to the song I just wrote.” What had been locked inside finally had a way through.
Casper is a Marine veteran who discovered songwriting “could possibly save my life.” That realization set him on the path to co-founding CreatiVets, a Nashville based nonprofit that uses art and music education to help veterans heal, reconnect, and build community. CreatiVets started in July 2013, serving nine veterans in its first year. Today, it supports more than 1,200 veterans annually through programs across 15 states and Puerto Rico.
Now Elevate Prize winner Casper is making a bigger bet on what creative healing can look like at scale. CreatiVets is building a first of its kind 24 hour art and music center in Nashville for the moments when PTSD hits late at night, and the usual options are the worst ones.
Richard Casper, Founder of CreatiVets | © Jason Myers
A founder story shaped by survival
Casper’s own story shapes the way he builds. “I went from a Marine who grew up in a super poor family on food stamps to executive director of a non profit.” He joined the Marine Corps, went to war, returned injured with a brain injury, and found his way to art and songwriting.
“I launched CreatiVets in 2013 on kind of a whim, just knowing that art and music could save, it saved my life and how it could save others’ lives,” he said.
The invitation comes first
Casper believes too many veterans who need support will never go looking for it. So CreatiVets designs programs that feel magnetic, where veterans can show up as artists, not patients.
“If you can outweigh veterans’ anxiety and depression with excitement, you can get them to do anything,” he said.
Songwriting remains the anchor. CreatiVets has written backstage at the Grand Ole Opry and built relationships across the music ecosystem, including collaborations tied to artists like Howie Dorough and George Strait.
The nonprofit has also expanded into other art forms. One program brings Native American veterans into astrophotography, a community Casper says has the highest suicide rates in the veteran space. The work is shaped around culture and ancestry, taking veterans to McDonald Observatory to photograph the stars and reconnect with what has always been above them.
CreatiVets also runs Scars of Scripts, a screenplay writing program where veterans’ scripts are performed by actors including Charles Esten and D.B. Sweeney. And it supports accredited art programs in multiple cities, covering tuition, housing, and food so veterans can study art at university level.
Casper is clear about how he frames it. “You’re giving these veterans education, life saving tools to save themselves through art and music education, not art music therapy.”
When a song becomes a bridge
Over the years, Casper started noticing a pattern. Veterans would come into songwriting sessions carrying stories they could not share with the people closest to them.
“These are songs where they’d tell me personally, Richard, I cannot tell my wife this,” he said.
Casper has learned that the song is not the end of the process. It is the beginning of a conversation that trauma has been interrupting for years. “It’s like we remapped his brain right in that instant,” he said. The memory does not disappear, but it shifts shape, from something that isolates to something that can be held, together.
“That was the moment I knew that we could prescribe music to people to get them to open up faster,” Casper said.
A prescription music platform for care settings
CreatiVets is building a prescription music platform, imagined as a CRM like tool that could one day live in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs system, including VA hospitals and clinics, as well as other clinical settings.
Casper described how a clinician might use it, entering keywords like Marine, faith-based, suicidal ideation, Fallujah, and traumatic brain injury to surface the most relevant songs.
The platform is paired with an app that allows veterans to explore songs on their own terms, and for listening habits to become insight for follow up conversations. The goal is not to replace care, but to speed up trust.
A 24 7 creative home for the hardest hours
Casper is also building a first of its kind 24 hour art and music center for veterans in Nashville. “Most veterans, when PTSD, it’s not at a time that’s convenient for anybody, and it’s usually late in the middle of the night.”
CreatiVets purchased a 19,000 square foot abandoned church on 2.5 acres for $3 million USD and is now fundraising to build it out. When the organization was trying to secure the purchase, Casper said he had about $500,000 USD committed and still needed to move fast.
A major catalyst was a gift from Gary Sinise, the actor and longtime veterans advocate behind the Gary Sinise Foundation. Sinise spoke about his late son, McCanna (Mac) Sinise, a musician and composer, and then made an offer Casper says he will never forget. “I want to give you a million dollars to help support your auditorium and name it the Mac Sinise Auditorium, so Mac’s life could live on.”
From left to right: Gary Sinise and Richard Casper | CreatiVets
What CreatiVets needs now
For Casper, that $1 million USD gift de-risked the project and helped make the $3 million USD purchase feasible.
CreatiVets is looking for partners to help equip and sponsor the new center, from instruments and studio gear to IT infrastructure and furniture. He’s open to brands from Fender to Ikea to Microsoft who can donate the essentials to get the center up and running.
CreatiVets is building a future where a veteran in crisis at 2 a.m. has somewhere to go, and where a clinician trying to reach a guarded patient can start with a song that makes them feel understood.
It’s time we got involved to help.
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