What happens when a Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel realizes that medals, missions, and mental health treatment still aren’t enough?
Rick Wolf spent decades leading Marines. He watched warriors come home broken in ways that therapy alone couldn’t reach. What he found was a deeper wound, one rooted not in trauma but in identity. And he built an entire organization around addressing it.
Soul Survivor Outdoor takes active duty service members into the outdoors and creates space for the kinds of conversations that don’t happen in a clinical setting. Rock climbing. Whitewater rafting. Horseback riding. Not as therapy, but as a doorway. A way to lower defenses and open people to something more lasting than coping strategies.
In this episode, Rick and I talk about how Soul Survivor Outdoor started at 29 Palms with wounded Marines and no real plan, how the organization expanded from California to Texas, Tennessee, Colorado, and eventually Poland, what it looks like to scale a ministry without losing the relational core that makes it work, and why 30 to 40 percent of service members who attend a single day program walk away having made a spiritual decision.
This conversation is for anyone leading an organization built around people. The principles Rick lives by, authenticity over polish, relationship over program, identity over achievement, are the same ones that determine whether any mission-driven work actually holds together over time.
