We Love Veterans: Dallas Commercial Realtor (and Former Navy Seal) Wins Good Works Award

Two former  U.S. Navy SEALs, Clint Bruce and Stephen Holley, co-founders of Carry the Load,  snagged The Dallas Foundation’s 2013 Good Works Under 40 Award at Trammel Crow’s Old Parkland Hospital Campus Thursday night.

Holley is a 2000 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who completed four military deployments and now works in commercial real estate.  He is with the Dallas office of Jones Lang LaSalle.

Bruce is also a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, was deployed multiple times, and lives in Dallas. He founded a private risk-management firm, Trident Response Group LLC, and a speaker’s bureau called Thirty&3.

The young men were honored for founding Carry the Load, a charitable organization that raises money for and honors people who have served their country: veterans, active-duty military personnel, first responders and their families. Carry the Load sponsored a 20-hour march in Dallas last Memorial Day weekend. Some participants carry heavy packs as they march. The agency has raised more than $1.5 million this year and helped support Heroes on the Water, Friends of Dallas Fire-Rescue, Assist the Officer Foundation, Tip of the Spear Foundation and Sons of the Flag Burn Foundation.

As winners, Bruce and Holley will receive an $8,000 contribution to their organization from  The Dallas Foundation, in partnership with The Dallas Morning News.

The duo were one of five finalists for the Good Works Under 40 Award selected and honored by The Dallas Foundation. The finalists were  Brittany K. Byrd, a Dallas attorney who founded Girls Embracing Mothers, an organization that helps girls aged 7 to 17 visit their mothers in prison; Paige Chenault, founder of The Birthday Party Project, an organization that provide birthday parties to homeless and disadvantaged children; Cassie Evans, a Dallas attorney and the youngest board member of the SPCA of Texas, who has raised more than $225,000 for spay and neuter clinics and spends every day of her life as an advocate for animal kindness; and Dr. J Mack Slaughter Jr., who volunteers with Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children ans created a nonprofit that supplies soothing music to comfort seriously ill patients, Music in Medicine, or MiM.

In a sense, each finalist was also a winner: they received a $2,500 contribution to the nonprofit he or she supports.

Full disclosure: I am the very proud mother of Cassie Evans. And I am so impressed with the sincere efforts of these young people, being at the event and meeting them was a true inspiration, especially on Veteran’s Day!