Wounded Warriors Canada aims to raise $500K with National Ride for Mental Health

The annual National Ride for Mental Health , organized by Wounded Warriors Canada, is taking place on Aug. 23 to raise funds to support veterans, first responders and their families.

The funds raised at the two main rides in Edmonton, Alta., and Orillia, Ont., as well as the many individual and community rides across the country, will be used to support mental health programs provided by Wounded Warriors Canada.

Ambulance Paramedics of BC (APBC), which represents B.C.’s 6,000 paramedics and dispatchers, released this month a statement saying that 30 per cent of their members are either off work battling mental health challenges or working while receiving treatment. A report from 2024 also reveals that up to 10 per cent of war-zone veterans in Canada will experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

National Post spoke to Ian Norman, a firefighter in Leduc, Alta., about the importance of the mental health fundraiser and how it has impacted his community.

Wounded Warriors Canada is a nationally recognized charity that develops and promotes programs that focus on operational stress injuries and post traumatic stress disorder in veterans (serving as well as retired), first responders (that would be fire, ambulance, police) and also their families.

The ride for mental health is a national charitable ride. We have multiple locations across the country. The Edmonton ride is my local stomping ground. You can head out to the Garrison here on the CFB Edmonton, climb on your bicycle, and there’s a couple different routes that are fully supported. One is 54 kilometres, the other is 90 kilometres. Sounds like a long distance, but not really if you’re supported, riding with a group and chatting the whole way. That allows you to immerse yourself in not only the Wounded Warriors culture, but also get an opportunity to speak with similar individuals.

It’s completely open to everybody. The ask, of course, is that you generate some sort of charitable fundraising in terms of support for Wounded Warriors Canada. But the ride for mental health isn’t just about riding in a group or riding on that specific day. You can actually ride as an individual on your base or around your own neighbourhood

This is the third year that the ride for mental health has been in place. It was originally a two-day ride on the Highway of Heroes from Trenton, Ont., to the Parliament Buildings in Toronto. But Wounded Warriors Canada thought it would be a great means of engaging the entire nation, for those that couldn’t make it out to the Highway of Heroes ride.

The fundraising goal right now nationally is $500,000. Last year, in 2024, they raised $450,000 in a single day of riding. That’s always the goal (to raise) more. We have warrior kids programs, we have service dogs. All of them have been proven to help people cope with the trauma that comes from that operational stress injury. Now, there’s no cure for PTSD or occupational or operational stress injuries, but there’s ways to handle that trauma and ways of developing strategies so that you can help mitigate some of that damage and then reformulate families, rebuild them.

In 2014, I came across the battlefield bike ride. It’s this ride in France, at the time. You raise money, you pay your own way, you get to see some sites, but you also have an opportunity to ride with other veterans and first responders and just kind of engage. And at this point, I had been a first responder for about 14 years, and I thought it was important.

I grew up in a military family. My father was a military policeman for 22 years. I’d lived all over the country. Both my grandfathers were serving members of the Canadian military. And I thought it was really important to get invested into something, like Wounded Warriors Canada, because I wanted to promote not only the charity, but the mission of what Wounded Warriors was. And it just seemed like the most logical step. And then after the ride, I was, for lack of a better phrase, absolutely bitten by the cause. It becomes one big, amazing family. I’ve been committed to it for 11 years now, and I don’t plan to stop anytime soon.

I have met hundreds of people that have had the opportunity to work within those programs and seen a categoric change in their personality.

The nice thing is, once you begin investing your time with them you develop a very strong family-orientated environment. I know that I can make a phone call at any point in time to anybody if there’s ever an issue that arises within me.

You can volunteer, you can donate , you can participate, you can actively promote in the public. Anytime we get a single person to join the movement to try and motivate people to this cause, it’s a moment of celebration for us.

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