John Raniowski put his country first throughout a 25-year Navy career. Teammates and self followed; a mindset, he said, which was required to complete their mission.
The retired corpsman from Pennsylvania deployed with Marine Corps units and later with Marine special operations and the Navy SEALs.
“My daughters saw a father who was returned from combat three different times injured,” said Raniowski, who now lives in Suffolk.
“I put them through some very challenging times.”
Raniowski withdrew after returning from deployments; he’d drink and spend hours disassembling and reassembling his kit in the garage.
Raniowski recalls his 10-year-old daughter, Cora, asking him before a deployment who would ensure that he, his team’s corpsman, came home alive.
“I was not, at that point, insightful enough to realize the impact,” Raniowski said. “But I started to pay attention to where that was coming from.”
After he retired in 2012, he established the Hero Kids Foundation in 2014 as a form of penance for his daughters and as a service to military families.
Hero Kids offers programs, such as family surf camps and a STEM summer camp, which has recently entered into a partnership with Old Dominion University and Booker T. Washington Elementary School. A horticultural wellness space is in the works.
The latest offering will teach 10- to 17-year-olds how to create videos about their experiences as part of a military family. Hero Kids was awarded $1100 from the Virginia Humanities' regional humanities center at WHRO to get it started. Participants will learn technical and storytelling skills, as well as some history of photography, to have a creative outlet for navigating the good and bad of military life, including sometimes trauma and loss.
The video storytelling also fits in the foundation’s mission of supporting familial connections and communication.
“That’s the key to all of it,” he said. “It’s through the kids we’re trying to help the family as a whole.”
Aidan Hjelsand leads the program and is writing its curriculum. Hjelsand, a freelance videographer, is the son of Raniowski’s best friend, Leo, and has produced videos for Hero Kids. He said the program with start with a group of five and equipment and editing software will be provided.
There are some caveats for age-inappropriate content or when a child reports about dangerous living situations. Raniowski said mentors won’t be telling children what they can record. The application process will also require parental consent and an interview to explain what the program covers.
“We want the parents engaged,” Raniowski said. “This is their child looking at the family, so they need to understand that there is going to be a commitment from the family, too.”
Raniowski acknowledged that some parents might be surprised by their child’s perspective, or that they may be anxious about the story their child might tell. But it’s more important to understand their child’s perspective.
“I can’t take away what memory my child has of their service,” Raniowski said. “But I can acknowledge how my daughters saw it and I want to do everything I can now to ensure that I don’t have that same impact on them and that I always acknowledge the need for communication and the need for us to be honest with each other about what’s going on even if it’s challenging.”
He’s exploring how to showcase the videos at a community event and hopes they, along with the program, can open discussions about the “invisible service” of military children.
“Whether they become doctors, lawyers, farmers, talented artists, they’ll always have that ability to tell their story honestly and openly and to be able to give light to where they see the need.”
Editor's note: WHRO Public Media is home to Virginia Humanities' regional humanities center. Virginia Humanities has no involvement in the newsroom’s editorial decisions.
