April Impact Artist of the Month - “SemperFiedArtist” Marine Cpl kenneth james
The stars aligned to cause disabled Marine Cpl (veteran) kenneth james to first be tapped by #EndVetMedDebt to have his artwork – “Suicide Bridge” – become the landing page art for a major campaign launch regarding veteran medical debt, and then to become selected as our Impact Artist for the month of May. A month officially designated as Military Appreciation Month, coincidentally.
The End Veteran Medical Debt campaign and its website was launched earlier this year by Let’s Rethink This (LRT) for the express purpose of motivating and enabling the VA Hospital System to make the millions of dollars in unpaid and unpayable medical debt in its coffers available for full and complete forgiveness.
“What better person than someone like Cpl. james to not only be the artist who can best put a serviceman’s soul into the work he needed to do to work his way back from the despair of being disabled, homeless and fighting PTSD, but to serve as a reminder that America still has a long way to go to bring its warriors back to health when they return home,” says LRT’s founder and Navy veteran, Jerry Ashton.
The art piece, “Not on My Watch - Suicide Bridge” came out of an event by Wellness Works of Glendale in which james participated in for several years in order to help veterans and reduce veteran suicide.
“i am hoping that (this artwork) can bring healing to those who suffer from PTSD as well as depression and other related disabilities,” says james. “i hope it adds beauty to the lives of people with an added element of opening up communications of how we can love people and our world better.”
For more information about this artist and access to a gallery of his work, go here: https://1-kenneth-james.pixels.com.
Editor’s Note: Cpl. kenneth james prefers to refer to himself using lowercase letters.
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Jerry Ashton
Jerry Ashton walked into Occupy Wall Street in 2011 as a debt collector, and walked out of that experience two years later as a debt forgiver – literally rethinking his profession to co-found RIP Medical Debt in 2014 to reverse the ills caused by that industry. Six years later at the time of his retirement, his charity had successfully abolished over $2.7 billion in unpayable medical debt for over 1,800,000 Americans across the U.S. As of this writing, the total debt abolished is over $5 billion over almost 4 million people.
Jerry founded Let's Rethink This in late 2020 with the intention of seeing that lightning can strike twice. This time as a “B” Corp and not a charity, Jerry and his co-creators intend to bring about $1 billion in social and economic good this time through a unique Searchlight/Spotlight/Ignite model.
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