SEASON 3 EPISODE 3 | BJ Ganem from Sierra Delta

In this episode, Founder Ben Keiser sits down with Marine veteran BJ Ganem, founder of Sierra Delta, to explore how a bond with a dog helped BJ heal after injury and loss—and sparked his mission to provide every veteran with access to canine companionship. BJ shares how Sierra Delta empowers veterans through dog training grants, a strong sense of community, and a “good foot” mentality rooted in purpose, adaptability, and connection. Together, they dive into the realities of veteran mental health, challenge outdated support systems, and highlight the transformative power of dogs.
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to vetted conversations. Our vision is to ensure that you, the listener, gain the knowledge and insights alongside us, your veteran and military family member host, to become more informed and engaged citizens.

SPEAKER_03 0:17

Today I'm talking to BJ Ganham from Sierra Delta about his plan to give a dog to every veteran in need.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

BJ, good to have you here, man. Thanks for having me. Nice to meet you. But also, what's the BJ stand for?

SPEAKER_02 0:33

So my full name is William Joseph Ganham. My mom wanted to call me Billy Joe when I was younger. I'm from Savannah, Georgia. There you go. Basically, an aunt started calling me BJ. It stuck. It was easy to spell in kindergarten. Yeah. You know, little did I know, by the time I got to fifth grade, I'd be fighting a lot. That's how you get this crooked nose. And then I just started owning it, right? So it's it's uh it's fun. Uh it it's a great icebreaker, right? Everybody wants to know. And of course, there's always a few that have some dirty jokes about it.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Well, so I'm Benjamin John. Okay, all right. There was a brief period of time that my parents thought that might be a good idea, but I think I was old enough to know that maybe it wasn't.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Okay, see. See? You were probably qualified to go to the Air Force, too.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Uh most likely. Most likely.

SPEAKER_02 1:13

But chose not. Chose not, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Uh so tell us about the Marine Corps.

SPEAKER_02 1:16

What'd you do? So I'm infantry. Right? So um I joined in 1996 after being politely asked not to come back to Georgia Southern University, posting a 1.3 GPA on the home scholarship. So uh, you know, I really didn't want to get a job. Yeah, I just wanted to travel the world and fight. And uh the only people offering that was uh the United States Marine Corps. So I planned the whole experience around being out of boot camp in time for St. Patrick's Day in Savannah. Okay. So I miss Christmas, New Year's, all the Super Bowl, all that stuff. Had my 10 days liberty party like you couldn't believe. Come back to Savannah and uh kiss my mom goodbye, head up the Campbell's Union. That's when it dawned on me, like, oh, I got four years. So we're in this now. Well, one of the best decisions I ever made. I got off active duty in 2000 by staying in the ready reserves in Madison, Wisconsin with golf company, two. Yeah, also infantry. Yeah, also infantry. And it was great because I got to train with these guys, the majority of them were all from Wisconsin. Um, and so we're still tight. We just celebrated 20 years uh from being in Iraq, and it's just crazy to say that. Like when were you alert? 2003. Okay. Very beginning. Very beginning, yeah. So we were supposed to go in three, but Turkey shut their borders, and so we got pinched until 2004. I see. And then um, but yeah, yeah, I knew a lot of guys that were on the initial invasion too, and all that shit.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

No, so uh I actually landed in a commercial aircraft in Kuwait the day the bomb started dropping. Oh, right on. So we are slightly behind it all, but yeah, nevertheless, Kuwait's wild, right?

SPEAKER_02 2:50

Because it's like being on the sun, it's just so flat. Yeah, it's like a moon. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Yeah, torturous. I still have nightmares. When I got back, I remember not liking the beach because it was too much. Right. Reminded me of that.

SPEAKER_02 3:07

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Yeah, anyway. Um, so tell tell me tell us the story about what led you to founding Sierra Delta.

SPEAKER_02 3:14

So I got injured uh Thanksgiving night of 2004, like my 13th IED I went to, really damaged my left leg, my right leg, some other retained shrapnel. Uh, luckily, you know, it's fine. My gunner, Ryan Ktafiu from Beaverdam, Wisconsin, was killed at, you know, instantly. Just took shrapnel right to the juggler above his is um neck guard. Yeah, nothing we could do. There was a small ambush afterwards. The unit held up brilliantly. They got me out of there into back to Mamadia and then through you know Ludafia, or excuse me, um, Pilot into Longstool, yeah, over to DC. And um what really irked me, what really bothered me is that I wasn't gonna finish the deployment. And coming back, there was a lot of love. There was that's when I first met President Bush, and he ends up painting me in the portrait of courage later. And um, when I get home, you know, I'm glad to be home, right? Like, I'm glad to be home, but I'm also feeling less than. Yeah. And wasn't completely ready to be done with the Marine Corps, but wasn't gonna stay in and be uh a desk jockey, right? So, like, yeah, you know, if I can't be an infantryman, there's no reason to be in a Marine. I know the feeling, right? So get out, uh, do all the stereotypical things, right? Get in trouble with the law, get you know, drinking too much, fights, uh, you know, end up going through a bad divorce, some bankruptcy, facing DUI charges, and I just figure, man, it should have been better if I would have died that night. And um rationalizing all this stuff away in that depressive mindset. I get to my dog, which is an old English bulldog that I bought on my first convalescent reach from Walter Reed, brought it through Craigslist, you know, uh 800 bucks about all I'll go for. No special breeding, no special training, no real special talents other than getting slobber in places you thought was physically impossible to get slobber into. Yeah. And like here in the room with his farts, right? And um can he skateboard though? Right. No, he couldn't. Uh he could ride. So one of his favorite things to do was go to McDonald's drive-thru and get cheeseburgers, and he'd be in the front seat just foaming at the mouth. And then literally I'd take it out, be piping hot, and just gone.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

But, anyways, no no good tricks like riding skateboards. We uh we would take our dog to Starbucks for a pup with a puppy. Yeah, yeah. She'd start barking at the lady.

SPEAKER_02 5:37

Yeah, but it's coming. Yeah, so he was the one thing I couldn't rationalize away because if I quit, if I check out, he's gonna end up in a shelter and be euthanized like the other 800,000 healthy, trainable, adoptable dogs we killed every year. Yeah. And so that was enough impetus, enough purpose for me to pull my own head out of my ass. And I came up with the good foot mentality, which is no matter what foot was bearing the weight of my life, whether it was the carbon fiber and steel given me by science or the flesh and blood foot giving me by God, I was gonna be able to handle it.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

We're gonna figure it out. You gotta explain the double entendre there for the folks who don't know what the goodfoot mentality kind of, you know, how that resonates with us Marines from the cadence. That's right, the left foot is the goodfoot.

SPEAKER_02 6:26

It's funny that I lost the left foot, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:28

But but nevertheless, I mean when you're when you're marching and they you're doing that cadence and you hear them talking, it's good foot. Yeah, that's that resonates with the Marines.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

It does. And again, it was a James Brown song that I always loved growing up, you know, get on the goodfoot. I got a funky job and I'm paying the bill on the goodfoot. So again, there's a lot to it, and um, and we all do, like, hey, we're gonna fall down, we're gonna fail, right? We just need to get back up and just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and like the Marines taught us, right? Everything's on that left foot, stay in time, and it's the good foot. So eventually, I you know, I quit the job at Kraft Foods. I no longer want to climb the corporate ladder. I stopped chasing a business degree. I've got like a few credits left. I switched, I get an undergrad in psychology. Okay, I get a master's in social work with emphasis on military life for the University of Southern California. I go on to become an accredited veterans benefit officer. I'm running uh Madison, Wisconsin, like at the County Veterans Service office, helping them file claims, but just really disenfranchised in how the government system worked. Um left out after a couple of years and joined up with Super Five Fund. Yes, worked in uh the V2V program for a while and helped stand up a lot of programs. And and they've been great. I've known them from the beginning. When I first got injured, I was accidentally put on the kill roster, and it took them three and a half months to fix it. So I'll they stopped my pay like immediately. If it wasn't for the Super Five Fund, like I probably I mean they paid my mortgage, they paid all the bills back home. Clerical error and it never asked any of it back. So they're a phenomenal organization, too. I mean, there's so many good ones. Yeah. But then um, I'm doing a lot of speaking, I'm talking about like I'm seeing like the systems, the way we're delivering services to the veterans is actually causing more harm than good. Sure. Because we've segmented everybody, we are making them prove that they actually have a need versus just meeting them where they're at and helping them understand that they still have strengths. Yeah. You mean this was around what year or two? This is 2017, by the time that I step out from Semper Five Fun and start Sierra Delta. And the whole premise was we're gonna focus on dogs because I was noticing how many veterans had dogs, right? Whether they're old veterans, young veterans, and it was really resonating. Like by this time, between group therapy, between like hosting group therapies, between just doing veteran events, between veteran counseling benefits, I've worked like over 25,000 vets, and like feel like I've got a good sample size now.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

Right, it is, and you know, if you if you notice kind of what their needs are, and you're seeing like the ones who have dogs, how you know they have different challenges, but some of them are taken care of, right? Yeah, I get it. Right.

SPEAKER_02 9:10

So, I mean it's like do I have like a collegiate study on it? No, it's more intuition, yeah, right, but it makes sense. And so when I first started out, we were focused on the service dogs because I was looking at all the literature and I and I thought there was something more spectacular about it. But when you see like blind and deaf people aren't using dogs as much anymore because of the technological advances, right, you understand that an industry switched to the veterans without really checking in with us to see what we needed. Okay, that's a you know same, like so they're pre-training these dogs and taking like two, three years of doing$50,000 a dog to give the veterans when if you do it that way. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying that we're withholding 80% of the medicine from 99% of the population because the majority of us don't need that ADA dog. Right. Yeah, and if we work with trainers, we're getting service, they're passing the test with veterans that are working with trainers. So and that's costing us$3,500, Margaret. You see what I mean? So, like, yeah, if we invest in the in the veterans, we remind them, hey, what were we taught? Improvise, adapt, overcome. You're a leader. 15 to 1 efficiency on the right, right? Yeah, you're a leader. We're gonna bring in the professional to help you understand how to connect with this dog, but it's gonna be you, and we're gonna hold each other accountable through having fun. That's great, right? And again, all veterans can come in. The only thing holding me back is if we run out of money for that quarter. But this quarter, we're doing 60. I've already done 20 in the month of January. You know, we're gonna do another 40 before the quarter's out, another 60 in quarter two, a 90 in quarter three, 90 in quarter four. However, being here in Super Bowl, I'm out here spreading this message. If we can get more people to donate at SierraDelta.com, we can go faster because all we're doing is coaching the veterans on how to vet and find a local trainer. Yeah. Like we already said, two-thirds of them already have a dog, so we don't need to find a dog. Yeah, right? If we do, we have Put Finder where people, if they want to donate one of their breeds, or if people want to tell you what's in their shelter, like we can show it. So it's a full digital platform. That's amazing. But it's it's under lock and key with ID me, so only the veterans can get in. I love that. Wait, but it's all veterans. Like, so get rid of it.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

If you don't like anybody, just get it to a different group. And you know, uh, you you probably want the message to go out that you know you don't have to be approved by the VA or anything like that.

SPEAKER_02 11:37

I surveyed all the major medical colleges in this country. You know how many are teaching doctors when to prescribe a dog? Nine zero. Yeah. So why is that even a thing? We already have HIPAA. This has nothing to do with disabilities, it's about the training. Yeah. Because when they passed the Pause Act and made mental health a reason to have a service dog, then you knocked off the the left and right lateral limits to this whole thing. Because how are you going to say who's got more mental health issues than this person to have a trained dog shore? Right? But why don't we are capable individuals still after service. So why aren't we just sitting down with a veteran and be like, hey, what do you want from a dog? So we got people training for agility, for hunting, shed hunting, mushroom hunting, bird hunting. You got people doing dock diving and agility courses and some service work. Most of it is just they just want a really good dog, right? To run with, uh to go on hikes with, to go wakes with dogs.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

Right. Like your senator, your dog's not gonna let you get away with that, most of them. Most of them, right?

SPEAKER_02 12:39

And if you want the training to stick, you gotta keep doing it. It doesn't matter if you send us. So that's what we saw in the beginning. We were following all these traditional ways of sending the dog to the kittle, and now it's in a controlled environment working with a professional. Of course, it's gonna come out doing all the things. Yeah, but no one's taking the time to work with the veterans. The veterans sit on a wait list while other lay people train these dogs. They're sending them to prisons, they're sending them to college campuses, they're sending them to their donors, they're selling naming rights. Yeah, like you're telling me that these veterans can't even name their own dog.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

That's that's pretty insane. Okay, so I'm sorry, yeah. No, not at all, not at all. So, um question for you then. How can folks get involved? I know some organizations are like, hey, we just need money, then, you know? Yeah, but you talked about maybe needing some advocacy, some people are like, should they be should they be calling the VA? Should be calling the government.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

No, no, like leave the government out of it. Okay, fair. We do not need I don't take any government money, and I never will. Yeah, it's wrong. And look at it. Just look, I mean, you were in the military and you've been out. I mean, I still go to the VA, even though I've got other healthcare options, yeah, because I need to keep a pulse on what's going on. It's not working. Stop trying to pretend that it is, right? Yeah. And I can't change the government. I don't even want to try anymore. I don't need it because I got America, right? We partner with Blue Buffalo that runs an annual campaign at Walmart that that generates$600,000 worth. That is like 60% of our annual operating budget. Yeah. Think about all the other businesses out there, all the mom and pop stores. Like, just tell me what percentage you want to throw towards this, because the only thing holding us back truly is money. We have the digital platform. We are working with American Legions and VFWs because that gives us 18,000 in one clubhouses that are underutilized and in both rural and urban areas. Okay. Right? And then you've got all the training facilities. Plus, you've got public space where dogs and veterans and trainers are allowed to get together. We don't need any facilities, right? I don't have any employees. It's my consulting firm we I manage, which is basically me, my board, other veterans. We've got ambassadors here, veterans that benefit. So one of the things that we ask is once you graduate the Life Buddy program, or if you don't want anything with the dog, you can go into the Life Force program. And that's what we're figuring out, that's where we're training you on peer-to-peer mentorship, right? You could host your own little room in our community. You can put out there like what you're talking about. And people can join up and be there. I mean, we got people trying to do Bible classes, people trying to do about video game gaming club or you know, golf, or all these things. They just want to hang, right? And it's literally like I don't care if you're disabled or not disabled, or if you served in combat or not combat, or if you're pre- or post-9-11, what we need is community. So our core values are empowerment, purpose, innovation, and community. The empowerment piece is you tell me what you want in a dog in your life that's gonna help you either improve or enhance your life. The purpose is that dog needs you, right? That dog is not gonna be able to do things on its own, so you can't just quit, lock yourself in your room or in your basement or whatever. You're gonna have to improvise, adapt, and overcome. The innovation, why are we using the technology that's at hand? Like, why are nonprofits still asking people to send their DD214 over unsecured email with all their vital information? And then where are you storing that information? How I know that it's safe. Why don't you just get ID me? It verifies you the VA uses it. Like, I don't even understand how DOD can't tell VA who the veterans are that they have to pay millions of dollars to a private company to verify that. It's ridiculous. Yeah, yeah. Well, and in the community piece, I'm sorry, it's the last week and it's the most important. You're good. And here's the thing about that I know most civilians won't understand what we've been through. And we really can't explain to veterans what we've been through. Like, I try to dumb it down. Joining the military is like painting by numbers. Literally anybody can do it if you actually stay committed to it. When we were overseas, I wasn't thinking about the people back home or the freedom, or especially not our government. I was thinking about the men to the left and right of me. Yeah, and that's why we did it. We can reincarnate that here in America through community. And the best way, I think, for everybody to come together, all politics aside, all military, non-military aside, is that we all love dogs. 68% of American households have a dog in it. Dogs and humans have been working together for 35,000 years.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

Yeah. Why have we made this so complicated? And anybody who wants to get involved with the community side of the program, yeah. Sierra Delpha Dog.

SPEAKER_02 17:12

Yeah. Just get into Sarah Delpha.com. There you have it. That's right. Join the community. You got DME. We've got uh we've got Sunday, the Sunday after Super Bowl, which is February 15th. We're doing a live Zoom session. Anybody can join, come in, we'll have veterans talking about their experience, what they're doing, what their plans are for the future. I'll be there. We hold these constantly. Like, get in here, ask the questions. We are completely transparent. We're raising as much money as we can to provide as many dog training grants to as many that want it. I love it, man. Thank you for stopping by. And thanks for having me. Thanks for helping us um promote this. Yeah, my pleasure. And I hope we can work together. I know you guys are doing some great things too at Military 250. We are, yeah. I would love to get involved in whatever way we can do it.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Deal. Deal. Cheers, brother.