Responders First
The first thing you notice about Jesse Diaz-Franco is what he doesn't do. He doesn't shake your hand and immediately tell you about his organization. He doesn't lead with his credentials — and he has them, a master's in social work and an Enhanced Practitioner designation in Accelerated Resolution Therapy held by only a select number of clinicians nationally. He sits. He listens. And somewhere in the second or third minute of the conversation he has already understood something about you that took your closest friends years.This is, as it happens, useful when your life's work is sitting across from people who have spent a lifetime not being asked the right question. Diaz-Franco runs Responders First, the Spring Hill nonprofit he founded in March of 2019 to do, for free, what most of the American behavioral health system charges for poorly. A five-day wellness program for the police officers, the firefighters, the paramedics, and the veterans of Hernando County and beyond — and, just as deliberately, for their spouses and their children. No insurance. No paperwork that follows anyone home. No employer is ever notified. Just the work, and the people willing to come do it.