Purpose
Built
Families
Foundation
A foundation for...
Life,
Liberty and the
Pursuit of
Happiness
Purpose
Built
Families
Foundation
A foundation for...
Life,
Liberty and the
Pursuit of
Happiness
Intentional Community
Tackling Underlying Causes and Disrupting Homelessness, Suicide
Purpose Built Built Families Foundation delivers evidence-based PAIRS relationship skills training to strengthen connections with family, friends and social support networks.
- Key Dates
- 1977Lori Heyman Gordon creates semester-long “Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills” course.
- 1983Virginia Satir launches PAIRS Training for Professionals.
- 1996Family Therapy publishes longitudinal study indicating, “Intimacy is a skill that can be learned.”
- 1999Brief PAIRS courses offered.
- 2003Building Intimate Relationships: Bridging Treatment, Education and Enrichment through the PAIRS Program published by Routledge.
- 2006DHHS provides $5 million grant funding to deliver and evaluate PAIRS impact among low-income participants.
- 2008Research validates efficacy of PAIRS brief programs, suggesting majority of marital breakdown among low-income couples may be preventable; PAIRS relieves symptoms of anxiety and for individual participants.
- 2009VA Chaplains begin grassroots efforts to provide PAIRS to post-9/11 couples.
- 2010VA recognizes PAIRS as Best Practice in Marriage Enrichment.
- 2011Operation Sacred Trust Launches to Disrupt Veteran Homelessness.
- 2012PAIRS San Diego VA Health Care Systems Program Recognized with Spirit of Planetree Award.
- 2017Miami-Dade County Declares End of Chronic Veteran Homelessness.
- 2018VA Licenses PAIRS Intellectual Property for National Integration; Plans to Train 7,500 Facilitators.
People overcoming foundational barriers to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Purpose Built Families Foundation is a nationally accredited nonprofit delivering preventative and reparative services to overcome foundational barriers to the quest for “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Reparative services are delivered through (1) the agency’s Operation Sacred Trust (“OST”) collaboration disrupting and ending homelessness for thousands of Veterans and (2) Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills (“PAIRS”) classes offered nationwide under the “PAIRS Essentials” and “Warrior to Soul Mate” brands helping couples overcome marital instability.
Preventive services are delivered to youth and adults - empowering interpersonal relationship competence through a triad of practical, usable skills to improve communication, conflict resolution, emotional understanding and connection.
01 // Purpose Built Families
How can one measure the lives literally saved from suicide, the children not touched by divorce, the costs not incurred by stress-borne illnesses or homelessness?”
- Chaplain Dick Millspaugh
Chief of Chaplain Services
San Diego VA Health Care System
Person = Person
Honoring the dignity, worth, capacity, and potential of every human being.
Human Relationships
Empowering human connection as a foundation for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Competence
Skills-based, experiential learning that consistently delivers tangible, sustained
benefits among diverse communities.
Code of Ethics
Honoring the dignity, worth, capacity, and potential of every human being.
Welcome
Our first priority is to those who have borne the battle and their loved ones: Veteran and military families who safeguard the opportunities for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness that are the promise to every American.
It will never be acceptable that America’s warriors lose their families at the cost of protecting others. Who could face the spouse, partner, or young child of a brave warrior and demand that price?
Purpose Built Families Foundation’s approach is built on fundamental skills and concepts underscored throughout the Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills program, widely known as PAIRS.
People who master the art of war, medicine, law, science, business, and many other noteworthy endeavors typically draw on those same competencies for different missions in life -- because that’s what they know.
Over the past half centuryfewer and fewer have grown up in families that provided a model for the lives we seek for ourselves and those we love. How would we know how to nurture a stable, healthy relationship between peers, successfully parent children, or sustain feelings of love through life’s natural challenges and transitions if we’ve never seen that happen?
Rarely are the issues that lead to family fragmentation about core values or differences. More often, decisions that have painful, generational consequences for self and loved ones are rooted in an awkward truth: we don’t know what we don’t know.
It will never be acceptable that America’s warriors lose their families at the cost of protecting others. Who could face the spouse, partner, or young child of a brave warrior and demand that price?
“This not only saved my marriage, it saved my life.”
— Combat Veteran after PAIRS Warrior to Soul Mate class
02 // OPeration Sacred Trust
“I was involved in every step. They had me do my part and they did their part and it worked out just perfect.”
- Formerly Homeless Veteran
“This is the best services, best help this disabled Veteran has ever had ... they’ve helped me more than anybody in my life and this has made the biggest change in my life.”
- Formerly Homeless Veteran
Operation Sacred Trust
Supportive Services for Veteran Families
Operation Sacred Trust (“OST”) was established in 2011 to end Veteran homelessness in South Florida. The OST collaboration began when South Florida was a primary hub of Veteran homelessness in the United States. Since 2011, OST has prevented and ended homelessness for thousands of very low-income Veterans in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.
In 2018, Miami-Dade County became among the largest urban communities in the nation to achieve HUD benchmarks to declare an end to chronic Veteran homelessness.
Operation Sacred Trust is unique in that it combines proven traditional outreach and case management best practices with novel nontraditional service delivery methods. From inception, funding has been awarded by the Veterans Administration Supportive Services for Veteran Families program.
Veteran homelessness reduced by more than 60 percent
Comprehensive
services
OST delivers comprehensive supportive services under one roof.
From engagement to care management, health care navigation support, legal assistance, benefits help, and housing search services, OST delivers the full range of services homeless and at-risk veterans need - all under one roof.
At Veteran Service Centers in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, OST professionals serve as many as 350 of the community’s most vulnerable veteran families on any given day.
The far majority of veterans engaging with Operation Sacred Trust exit the program in stable, sustainable housing.
In the communities served by OST, veteran homelessness has been reduced by more than 60 percent since the establishment of the OST Supportive Services for Veteran Families collaborations.
What happened to your dreams?
Words Matter: Built on a foundation of compassionate, trauma-informed care
Veterans served by Operation Sacred Trust receive client-centered, compassionate, trauma- informed care that strives to ensure every point of contact reflects agency values and ethics.
On average, PBFF offers positions to one out of every 100 applicants, regularly looking for the needle in the haystack for whom a career in supportive social services is the ultimate reward.
OST professionals are selected for their motivation, ability to work collaboratively, and their keen problem solving skills.
Services begin with a consistent, single question: What happened to your dreams? From the response, team members collaboratively help each veteran family build a bridge to a future in which those dreams have the best chance of being realized..
PAIRS
Programs
“PAIRS is exactly what we were looking for in terms of real relationship skills for combat-returned and wounded warriors and their spouses. Our survey before and after PAIRS shows a profound impact on both couples’ perception of their relationship and hope for the future ... helping our heroes and their families reconnect after combat, and giving them the skills to improve their relationships and communication.”
- Laurie Ott
CSRA Wounded Warrior Care Project
Bonding,
the unique combination of emotional and physical connection, is a lifelong biologically-based need
WWW.PAIRS.COM
What is PAIRS?
The PAIRS semester-long program was first created in 1977 by Marriage and Family Therapist Lori Heyman Gordon as a graduate course for future counselors. The program evolved into the preeminent model of relationship skills education. Couples and families throughout the world have been impacted by PAIRS.
In PAIRS classes, a trained facilitator demonstrates and guides participants through exercises to develop a critical triad of practical, usable relationship boosting competencies: communications , conflict resolution, emotional understanding and connection.
THE GOAL IS RELATIONSHIPS THAT EMPOWER
LIFE,
LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
Proprietary, progressive lesson plans refined over more than 40 years have led to popular acceptance and positive, lasting benefits. PAIRS skills help people make decisions, learn, and grow from the interactions that occur in interpersonal relationships.
Warrior to Soul Mate
Beginning in 2009, a grassroots effort began among U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs chaplains and social workers to incorporate PAIRS classes into the array of services available for couples impacted by post 9/11 deployments. The program became widely recognized as a modernized, highly cost-effective, time saving, customer service driven approach that advances VA’s most urgent priorities.
VA leaders saw that participation in what became known as “Warrior to Soul Mate” classes helped Veterans and their significant others better disrupt remarkably common underlying contributors to Veteran suicide, homelessness, and opioid abuse through increased capacity to create and sustain relationships with family, friends, and social supports.
By allowing and encouraging Veterans to include spouses, partners, and caregivers, in Warrior to Soul Mate training, Veteran families
Skills for sustaining love and intimacy are different than those that protect warriors on a battlefield.
“The costs are low, and the results are dramatic.”
have been able to increase self-knowledge, develop their ability to maintain enjoyable intimate relationships, lower levels of anxiety and conflict, increase intimacy and affection, and improve relationship cohesion.
Customer Service reports have indicated greater than 99% of veterans who complete the 12- to 16-hour training recommend Warrior to Soul Mate.
An ROI analysis found that implementation of Warrior to Soul Mate had a significant, positive local budget impact, including a greater than 30% return on investment resulting from:
- Decreased emergency room days
- Decreased psychological visits
- Decreased chaplaincy visits
- Decreased medication costs
- Decreased inpatient psychiatric admits
- Decreased suicide flags
A 2019 White Paper published by the VA National Chaplaincy Center encouraged every VA Medical Center to rapidly adopt the program:
“Offering W2SM to every Veteran has the potential of dramatically improving levels of wellness and participation in managing their own healthcare for the cost of an education class. Building on the extensive history of development and incremental learning on how to execute the finest possible relationship program can provide benefits throughout the VA, especially: suicide prevention, family resiliency, and whole health. Staff participating in delivery of the program are universally proud of the results and are deeply invested in the program. “The costs are low, and the results are dramatic.”
Impacting
Community
PAIRS
Licensing
Independent research has demonstrated that PAIRS works for all groups under all circumstances evaluated.
Learning
Through Experience
PAIRS Licensing
Impacting Community
In 1983, Virginia Satir officially launched PAIRS as honorary founding chairperson. Ever since, the PAIRS mission has been to teach those attitudes, emotional understandings, and behaviors that nurture and sustain healthy relationships and to make this knowledge broadly available on behalf of a safer, saner, more loving world.
A global community that increasingly embraces this vision, volumes of research validating the emotional literacy, systems approach upon which PAIRS is built, and technologies that provide accessibility to powerful tools for collaboration and connection, offer unprecedented opportunities to bring this vision to life.
In 2017, Purpose Built Families Foundation accepted exclusive worldwide rights and responsibility for the marketing, production, distribution, licensing, accreditation, and related activities for PAIRS intellectual properties. This collaboration brings significantly greater human, financial and systematic resources to advance PAIRS mission throughout the world.
To learn more about professional training and licensing opportunities:
Call (888) PAIRS-4U x843
or Email: support@pbfamilies.org
Purpose Built Families is a nationally accredited, nonprofit improving opportunities for people and communities impacted by trauma.
Skills for Successful Relationships®
A foundation for LIFE, LIBERTY,
and the pursuit of HAPPINESS.
