A bushy-bearded man in shorts, T-shirt and a heavy backpack entered the Texas Capitol earlier this month. He had a special delivery for the governor, the man said, and he had come a long way to deliver it.
Tom Kennedy, 64, hiked almost 300 miles from Houston to Austin—via San Antonio, no less—to hand-deliver about 700 postcards written by Texans to the office of Gov. Greg Abbott.
The effort was to raise awareness about the stigma of mental illness.
“When I was a child there was a huge stigma about breast cancer,” Kennedy said. “When a woman had breast cancer nobody talked about it. Now that stigma is gone.”
Kennedy is vice president of HIKE for Mental Health, a non-profit that organizes volunteers to hike on the Appalachian Trail and all over the United States. Each hiker raises a minimum of $100 through donations that go mostly to mental health research. A smaller percentage goes to the preservation of natural trails.
[For more of this story, written by Omar Rodriguez Ortiz, go to http://reportingtexas.com/texa...amp;utm_medium=email]
Comments (0)