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Hero Kids was founded by retired Navy Chief John Raniowski after he experienced first hand how nature helped bring his family closer. During his 25 years of service, he said he failed to recognize their service to the country in ways different, but no less important than his.

Hero Kids’ overall mission is to provide nature-based activities with an underlying goal of family counseling. The foundation targets uniformed workers and their families — active and retired military, EMS workers, first responders, police, firefighters, etc. 

The foundation celebrated its 10-year anniversary in October, but has only had the nature center in Suffolk for three years, which Raniowski bought the land for with his Veterans Administration Loan.  

Raniowski reflected on times when he would bring his young daughters to 7-Eleven while he was in uniform:

“I’m getting a coffee or a water, my kids are getting a Slurpee. [People would say] ‘Hey, shipmate, let me get your coffee,’ but no one said to my daughters, ‘Hey, can I buy your Slurpee? I just want to say thank you for what you’re doing to allow your father to serve.’”

As his daughters got older, they quickly found a talent for horse-back riding, and when Raniowski was home, he became immersed in a lot of their equine-based nature activities. They would muck stalls, stack bales of hay, clean horses, and load trailers together. Raniowski realized that it was during these kinds of activities that he was able to have tough conversations with his kids about his job and how it affected them.

“I was hearing what they were saying rather than being aggressive … or defensive,” he said. “That teamwork, that opportunity to grow allowed me to hear what their service was. It allowed me to hear how their perception of our family’s service was.”

This new connection and understanding Raniowski formed with his daughters through these activities is ultimately why he started Hero Kids, he said. 

Raniowski’s oldest daughter, Cora, said she definitely thinks bonding with her dad in this way had a positive effect on their relationship.

“Being out in the barn, being with the animals, I felt like it was easier to talk to my dad,” she said. “I felt like it was easier to open up to him. And I think that helping out, even in the limited ways that I’ve been able to with the foundation, I think that it has brought us closer together, and I think that we have a stronger relationship because of it.”

 

On the farm

The 20-acre nature center is home to a pony, a West African cow, sheep, goats, and chickens. There is also a pond, a nature trail, and fruit orchards. The foundation’s board members are trying to raise $13,000 for a new barn. This addition will better allow the animals to be rotated around different pastures so they don’t over eat the grass.  

While the main mission of Hero Kids is to provide an area of respite for uniformed workers and their families, they’ve also put a lot of thought into making things accessible for those with mobility challenges and people with autism. 

Executive Director Eliot Carlson pointed out their apple orchard and how they’ve trained the trees to grow shorter, allowing people in wheelchairs to be able to independently pick apples. 

They’ve also started to explore the use of tracked wheelchairs to help people with mobility challenges be able to access the nature trails. 

“The whole goal of Hero Kids is to get as many people as we can in nature the most natural way we can,” Raniowski said. “I saw videos of old army guys helping their buddies get out to hunt on tracked wheelchairs … Our goal is to find someone out there that we can partner with to bring a tracked wheelchair, or some of them, hopefully, to Hero Kids, to get these families out here.”

About two months ago, Hero Kids began a partnership with Action Trackchair. Raniowski said their foundation board members have been eager to start a fundraising campaign to get some tracked wheelchairs and he is excited about being able to offer this as an option to people.

“We’re going to provide something that no one is doing, no one is offering, no one is thinking about,” he said. 

Raniowski said they’ve also done a lot of research and worked with professionals to create a sensory garden space specifically designed for people with autism. They’ve found that horticultural therapy can be greatly beneficial. They hope to fully launch this horticultural approach next year.

By working with professional horticulturist Mary K. Scott, they’ve found that using water and radio frequencies can be comforting to people with autism. Additionally, he said providing warm, damp sand for them to play with is “exceptional.”  They also hope to include plants that are acoustic absorbers, which would mute surrounding noise.  

In addition to horticulture, Hero Kids also focuses on agriculture- and animal-based wellness activities. 

The point of the agriculture, Raniowski said, is to simply encourage people to, literally, get down and dirty with the plants. They invite people to help them plant, cultivate, and harvest the crops. One of Raniowski’s goals for next year is to establish a farm stand where they can give back those crops to the people who helped grow them. 

The animal-based wellness is very simple and popular, Raniowski said. The nature center has two groups of animals, livestock and chickens. Families are encouraged to come and spend time with the animals for as long as they’d like. Most of their animals have been donated from Hunt Club Farm and 4-H animal programs, so they are all very well socialized and used to human interaction. 

Another goal Raniowski has is to build smaller animal pens that will allow families to let in just a couple animals at a time and have some quality time with each other and the animals. Ideally, he would also like to work alongside their certified family counselors to come up with simple questions that can prompt some healthy family discussion.

In addition to these nature center offerings, Hero Kids also provides other programs throughout the year. They offer a law enforcement and first responder surf camp twice a year, which they are hoping to increase to five times a year, a family kayak trip, and the NASA GLOBE summer camp.

GLOBE stands for global learning and observation to benefit the environment and promotes science, technology, engineering, arts, and math research and learning. Hero Kids was selected by NASA to host this camp and are currently the only ones offering it in the state. 

Raniowski mentioned how he tries to get the whole community engaged in the GLOBE program, not just the families Hero Kids targets. 

“We try to really bring to the community, not just that we serve, but the community we live in, resources that they don’t have, and help those that are either considered or are marginalized in one way or another,” he said. 

Hero Kids is also piloting an organization called CARE — community arts resilience engagement — in partnership with Our Daily Gnome to provide mental and emotional wellness through art. Raniowski said they created CARE to be utilized by the GLOBE program. 

 

Where’s the money

Hero Kids runs almost solely on volunteers. Carlson said they only have three paid positions within the whole foundation — their social media manager, their bookkeeper, and their center manager. 

Hero Kids works closely with Volunteer Hampton Roads, and it’s been a very beneficial partnership.

“It saves us a ton of money, and it’s locally administrated, and it has been a fantastic way to communicate with people that we otherwise wouldn’t have reached,” Carlson said. 

One of their most popular volunteer opportunities is the PSD, chicken protective security detail, where volunteers sit in the free range chicken coup for a few hours and protect them from hawks.

Raniowski said they started out with about 100 chickens, and now they are down to around 60 because of a hawk problem. There are about six nests within a 200 yard radius, he said.

Because of the foundation’s values regarding the beauty of nature, Raniowski said they felt very strongly about not wanting to kill the hawks. Instead, he said they spent hundreds of dollars on various methods trying to deter the hawks from their chickens, but nothing was working. Then, PSD was born. What started out as a joke quickly became a cheap, fun, and beneficial way to protect their chickens.

“You’re literally just sitting with the chickens, protecting them,” Raniowski said. “We give you Cheerios, corn flakes, and honey nut Cheerios and you just feed them and they get a little friendlier and we have people who now will come to that who are like, ‘Hey, I’m just letting you know I’m here,’ and they’ll grab their Cheerios, they’ll grab their chair and they’re done and they’ll be there for four hours.”

Hero Kids also heavily relies on individual donations in addition to volunteer work. Material donations are just as helpful as monetary donations, Raniowski said.

The foundation has also been recognized by other groups in the city that bring awareness to nonprofits and help them raise money. Raniowski said Suffolk Business Women have put them on their list of approved nonprofits and they regularly donate, along with other local businesses, and he regularly applies for grants. 

“20 acres in general, especially now, is very difficult to get and it’s very difficult to create, and they’ve had a lot more support in recent years,” Cora said, “so I’m just very happy that everyone has seen the same value that I see in Hero Kids Foundation.”

Since Hero Kids’ inception, Raniowski has placed an emphasis on the Hero Kids family that anyone who is involved with the organization in any way is a part of, and they would not be where they are today without this family. 

“It’s really a team effort,” he said. “It’s that concept of an HKF family. Everyone’s got a role, everyone’s good at what they want to do and are able to give where they can. And we make that difference together as a team, and we provide and we meet that ‘giving light to those who serve at home’ [mission] by being that family, to that family.”