Built from love.
Driven by a system
that failed her son.

Amanda Robinson spent twelve years as a licensed clinical social worker in Colorado's community health system before she understood — truly understood — what trauma looks like from the inside.

She grew up in a stable home in Colorado. She went to school, earned her MSW from the University of Denver, and spent over a decade working at the intersection of trauma, family systems, and community health. She knew the clinical language. She knew the research. She thought she knew the experience.

Then her son Garrett came home from Afghanistan and she learned that knowing about trauma and living inside someone else's is entirely different.

Garrett enlisted at 20. He served two tours. He came home at 23 carrying things she could see in his eyes but that he had no words for.

What followed was a two-year education in the gaps of Colorado's veteran support system — not from the outside, but from the inside of it, desperate and determined. Amanda navigated every VA program, every county resource, every housing navigator and mental health referral that existed. She sat in waiting rooms for appointments scheduled months out. She called caseworkers who managed caseloads no single person should carry. She learned every workaround and loophole and back door in a system that was technically built for her son but practically not ready for the urgency of his need.

Garrett lost his apartment in Colorado Springs in 2021. He was sleeping in his car when Amanda found out. He had been on a VA housing waitlist for four months.

He survived. Not because the system worked — but because Amanda refused to stop pushing it.

When Garrett was finally stable, Amanda sat with two questions she could not stop hearing: what happens to the veterans whose mothers don't fight the way I did? And what happens to their teenagers — the children who watched a parent come home and slowly disappear?

Restoring Hearts Supporting Hands is her answer to both.