Dorman graduate leading voice for SC women veterans through Battle Betty Foundation

Correction: This story has been edited to correct Hardy's alma mater to Dorman High School. 

It started after DeAndria Hardy returned from a deployment with the Marines in Senegal.

Unresolved mental health issues led to physical health problems and a downward spiral that left her discharged from the military, unemployed and couch-surfing after losing her home. 

Hardy, a Dorman High School graduate, tried to find help through traditional veterans services, but she said found the system often difficult to navigate.  

She was in need of some help – and as she found it, she also realized that her fellow women vets needed help, too.  

Hardy founded the Battle Betty Foundation in 2018 with the goal of meeting struggling women vets where they are, providing immediate assistance and trying to guide them to resources that will help them to emerge into a healthy, productive post-military life.    

The foundation operates a women veterans’ resource center, the first of its kind in South Carolina. It opened in the fall of 2021. 

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Hardy has become a leading voice for women vets statewide and has big plans for the foundation’s future.

‘Mission First’ takes a toll 

When Hardy got word she was deploying, her first reaction was excitement.  

It was July 2012, and her Marine combat logistics unit was headed to Dakar, Senegal. Hardy was one of about 600 American troops taking part in Operation Western Accord, a joint training and peacekeeping mission with units from Senegal, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Gambia and France.  

“I was going to get to go to Africa,” Hardy said, adding that as a Black woman that had been a dream of hers, “to see the place where they say we’re from.”   

Hardy had joined the Marines in 2009 when she was a student at the University of Tennessee. She served as an ammunition tech, handling artillery rounds, bullets and magazines, grenades and explosives – it’s a job that requires a steady hand and quick thinking.   

Hardy was prepared for the potential danger posed by live-fire training.   

What she wasn’t ready for was the treatment she got from some of the soldiers from partner nations, soldiers who were supposed to be allies.  

“I was a victim of military sexual trauma,” Hardy said “It happens a lot stateside, too, but especially when women are deployed overseas. When I was in Dakar, there were less than 10 women in the entire group that was deployed.”  

She says that she tried not to let it affect her outwardly and focused on doing her job. “We’re Marines. It’s always ‘Mission First’,” she said.  

Hardy: ‘I kept saying I was fine’    

But after she returned from Dakar, Hardy says she started having a lot of physical and mental health issues. Those issues eventually took her out of the service.  

In 2014, with an honorable discharge and a college degree she was able to complete during a year of limited duty, Hardy returned to civilian life.   

Her service was at an end. Her struggles were not.   

“I tried working in the civilian corporate world, but I couldn’t sustain that for very long,” she said.   

Because much of her service was in the reserves, she wasn’t immediately eligible for some benefits from the Veterans Administration.   

Hardy says she also kept trying to avoid seeking the help she needed. But it didn’t take long for it all to catch up with her.   

"I kept saying I was fine until I wasn’t,” she said. “For almost a year, I wasn’t able to leave my home. Of course, that meant that I lost my job and eventually I lost my home, and I lost my car.”  

With help from friends and relatives who are also fellow female veterans, Hardy was gradually able to seek help and to take it.   

“They said ‘we’ve got your back and we’re going to make sure you get through this.’ They checked on me even when I didn’t care to be checked on. If I didn’t answer the phone, they’d say ‘OK, we’ll check on you tomorrow.’ And they did. And they kept doing it.”   

Hardy recognizes the need for assistance for women veterans 

The VA says that there are about 2 million women veterans nationwide, about 10% of all veterans and the fastest-growing segment of the veteran population.   

In South Carolina, there are about 46,000 women vets, and about 1,700 of them are in Spartanburg.   

But as Hardy was beginning to seek help, she made a troubling discovery. Though she was beginning to navigate the process at the VA, there wasn’t much private help available for women veterans in need of support.   

It occurred to her that there were likely many other women vets who need a female “Battle Buddy” - a “Battle Betty.”   

“Remembering what those women did to help me – my cousin, my sorority sister – I’m like, ‘I can do that for somebody else,’” Hardy said.   

Battle Betty started off small. “Just giving them somewhere where they could talk to someone who knows.” At first, Spartanburg Community College downtown let Hardy use a classroom for once-a-month meetings.   

As the scope of the need became clear and as Hardy was able to do more, Battle Betty grew.   

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Battle Betty gets own HQ in Jonesville 

In the former municipal building in Jonesville. Battle Betty now operates South Carolina’s first women veterans’ resource center. It opened last fall.   

Those resources include a shelter where women vets experiencing homelessness can get temporary housing, as well as "a clothes closet and a gear locker.”  The center also offers a base for Hardy and volunteers to do street outreach.   

There are much bigger plans as the organization and its resources grow, Hardy said.   

The city of Spartanburg has already committed property on Zephyr Street on Spartanburg’s Northside for a transitional home. It’s part of Battle Betty’s strategy of H.E.R – Housing, Empowerment and Reintegration.  

Farther down the road, Hardy said the foundation plans to develop a tiny home community that will include 15 homes and a resource center.  

“It would be a safe space to help them transition. A lot of shelter programs are 90-days,” Hardy said. “But for a lot of women who are struggling, sometimes 90 days just isn’t quite enough. Having a tiny home community gives extended time and space and would help with reintegration.”  

Hardy says she has learned – both through the foundation’s work and personal experience that housing is almost always the most critical need for a struggling woman vet.   

Hardy says that one of the core objectives of Battle Betty is to eliminate barriers to assistance.   “The biggest thing, which I was very intentional about, is that as long as you have served, we can help you. I don’t care if you have a VA rating or how long you served or if you were honorably discharged, we can help you. That’s the thing I’m proudest of. We don’t turn anybody away.”  

Hardy says that she works with other organizations, like the Disabled American Veterans, who can often help with navigating the VA. But first, she wants to offer a place to stay so that a vet can begin that process from a safe, secure place.   

The word about Battle Betty is getting around

Hardy is on the South Carolina Department of Veterans Affairs task forces for both women veterans and veteran homelessness.  

“We try to make sure we’re as connected as possible so we can help as many people as possible,” Hardy says. 

She even gets some referrals from the VA, now.   

It’s taken four years, but Hardy says that she thinks that, armed with a lot of hard-won knowledge, Battle Betty is moving in the right direction.

“Because of my experiences, I take it very, very seriously. Any time I have a chance to learn a little bit more so that I can help somebody a little better I want to do that.” 

This story appears in the fall issue of Spartanburg Magazine.