By Susan Gallagher
He grew up the only child of hard-working Arkansans--the first in his family to go to college--much less earn a doctorate degree.
A mixture of drive, commitment to helping others and intellect has been the force behind Walter Roberts’ illustrious career in education and advocacy and as a longtime American Red Cross volunteer.
After graduating from Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., Walter spent 15 years teaching history and government and later serving as a high school counselor, all while earning his license as a clinical counselor and his doctorate in counselor education.
In 1992, with his wife and two sons, Walter moved to Mankato, MN., where he spent 25 years as a professor of counselor education at Minnesota State University. In those years, he advocated for crisis prevention and intervention, violence prevention, school safety, mental health, and increased counseling services for low-income Minnesotans.
He also worked with therapy dogs in providing volunteer counseling services. “I helped set up a program in Minnesota with specially trained dogs—typically golden retrievers and rescue dogs,” Walter recalled. He made countless visits to Minnesota’s schools and universities, domestic violence shelters and hospitals. He even helped anxious and weary travelers at airports and worked with the prison population in Minnesota.
Walter now has combined his years of volunteer therapy work with another passion: disaster mental health response. In 2005, Walter was watching television coverage of the Katrina hurricane disaster that killed 1,800 in Louisiana.
“I realized I could not sit this one out. I needed to help,” he recalled. Walter went to Louisiana as an American Red Cross disaster mental health responder. Since then, he has also been deployed 16 times nationally to more than a dozen tornados, hurricanes, floods, train derailments and plane crashes---while also responding both in-person and virtually to literally hundreds of additional requests for disaster mental health assistance.
In 2017, Walter retired and with his wife, Laurie, moved to a log cabin in the Ozarks of southern Missouri.
But even from that rural outpost, Walter found a way to volunteer for the Red Cross. He now leads Disaster Mental Health Services for the American Red Cross of Missouri and Arkansas Region and is also very active in the Services to Armed Forces program, which offers support for military, their families, and veterans. SAF facilitates resiliency workshops on communication, reducing stress, dealing with trauma, defusing anger, and more, to some of the nation’s 180,000 incarcerated veterans.
The Missouri-Arkansas region began facilitating resiliency workshops in prisons in 2019 and since then, workshops, ranging from five to 20 veterans, have been conducted at one state prison in Arkansas, five prisons in Missouri, and one federal prison in Kansas. Eleven of the region’s volunteer licensed mental health professionals have conducted 90-minute workshops for prisoners either virtually or in-person.
But only Walter has combined his love for therapy dogs with his skills as a therapist to work with incarcerated veterans, bringing a therapy dog into Missouri prisons in Potosi and Moberly. Walter focuses most on the Red Cross workshop called “Emotional Grit,” which helps participants recognize signs of depression in themselves and deal with suicidal thoughts.
He has worked primarily with golden retrievers, with the dog Tchoupi (pronounced Chop-ee) being the veteran of the therapy dogs in the Missouri-Arkansas Region.
“Laurie and I have always rescued dogs, but we decided we would raise Tchoupi from a pup, and she’s been a therapy dog now for five years,” he added. “She’s a pro—nothing rattles her.”
Tchoupi also breaks the ice in what can be a very intimidating environment. “She lightens up the situation immediately,” Walter added. “As for me, I use humor, self-deprecation---stories about the silly things I have done like everyone else---to lower the tension. These sessions offer the veterans a sense of normalcy and are structured as a conversation. I am there for education, not individual therapy, and I let them know I want to hear whether the material is helpful to them.”
He added that when he goes to these prisons his focus is not on their incarceration but on their humanity and honesty. “I let the veterans know I want to learn from their experiences, and I encourage them to share their stories, while working through the material and seeing how it relates to them, which I believe can be very helpful,” Walter said.
Walter does find that participants seem to have a rapport among themselves that is unusually strong. “Their military service has given them a bond, a shared experience in dealing with challenges, and I focus on the value of their supporting each other, while respecting the individual stories they are sharing.” Still, he said he must be very alert to signals and mixed messages that participants may be sending in these discussions. Participants range from Vietnam to Afghanistan veterans. Some have been in prison for 40 years or more and may be on death row, while others are very young and have just arrived.
How does a highly educated, much honored retired professor relate to the imprisoned vets? “As one human being to another,” said Walter. “It makes no difference how many letters you have behind your name, if you cannot connect effectively with other human beings, then you are a failure. Those letters behind your name cannot be used as a barrier to connecting with others. Connection is what it is all about.”