CarePossible · 2024
Vechi Mutum Named Veteran Champion of the Year
Our founder and CEO was recognized by CarePossible for his work getting veterans and military families into treatment they could not otherwise afford.
The Award
CarePossible is an Orange County nonprofit that has distributed more than five million dollars in mental health and addiction treatment scholarships to veterans in crisis since 2013. Their work is simple to describe and very hard to do: a veteran who needs care and cannot pay for it gets care anyway.
CarePossible named Vechi Mutum its 2024 Veteran Champion of the Year at the 12th Annual Salute to the Military.
The recognition acknowledges a specific kind of work. Not fundraising. Not awareness. The unglamorous logistics of moving a veteran from a phone call at 2 a.m. into a licensed bed the same week, and covering the gap when insurance and savings do not.
Nobody gets sober alone. Somebody made a call for me when I could not make one for myself. That is the whole job.
Vechi Mutum, Founder and CEO, The Runway Recovery
Veterans and supporters gathered for the evening's program.
The work the award recognizes continues the next morning: a phone call, a bed, a plan.
Why This Recognition Matters to the Families We Serve
An award is only useful if it tells you something you can act on. Here is what this one tells you.
- The person who built this program has been where your family member is.
On November 23, 2011, Vechi was homeless and out of options. He accepted a bed at an indigent detox in Costa Mesa, ending a ten-year run with drugs and alcohol that had cost him nearly everything. He rebuilt from a sober living house, worked his way from house manager to director, and has spent the years since in admissions, business development, and national speaking work on recovery.
- The Runway takes veterans seriously as a population, not a marketing line.
We are in network with TRICARE. We maintain working relationships with veteran-serving nonprofits so that a veteran without coverage or savings still has a documented path to care.
- Cost is a clinical problem, not just a financial one.
A veteran who delays detox because of money is a veteran at higher medical risk. Advocacy work exists to shorten that delay.
From an Indigent Detox in Costa Mesa to Running One
Vechi grew up in a home shaped by domestic violence and his father's alcoholism. In 2000 he joined Long Beach Search and Rescue, work he was good at and proud of, until an injury introduced him to prescription opiates. What followed was methamphetamine, incarceration, and the loss of every stable thing in his life.
He got sober in 2011 in a detox that took him because he had nowhere else to go. He moved into a sober housing community in 2012 and started over there, first as a resident, then as a house manager, then as a director.
He founded The Runway to build the kind of program he needed and did not have: medically supervised, clinically credible, and unwilling to turn someone away for the wrong reasons.
About CarePossible
Founded in 2013 by Randy Moraitis, CarePossible provides free mental health and addiction care to veterans and low income families. The organization recruits treatment scholarships from behavioral health providers across the country and distributes them to veterans who apply for assistance.
To date, CarePossible has distributed more than five million dollars in scholarships and supported more than eight thousand therapy and counseling sessions.
If You Are a Veteran or a Military Family, Start Here
Call us and tell us where you are. If The Runway is the right fit, we will tell you. If it is not, we will tell you that too, and point you toward the organization that is.