Nov. 8, 2025 is the inaugural Veterans Future Festival, in celebration of the service and community of veterans in the Ozarks and beyond, with a major emphasis on mountain biking. The event is hosted by UHP, a veterans education and services organization based in Gentry.
Matthew Moore: Wesley Northey is the director of experience at UHP. He joined me over Zoom earlier this week. And just a heads up, there is discussion of suicide among the veteran community in our conversation. Northey says the goal of UHP is to become the biggest destination for Veterans Day celebrations each year.
Wesley Northey: But we’re a transition organization for military U.S. service members who are going into the workforce and to the civilian world. And so we equip them with skills, certifications and a new sense of purpose and direction with their life after service.
Moore: Are you yourself a veteran?
Northey: I’m actually currently serving in the Arkansas Air National Guard.
Moore: Gotcha. Okay. So tell me a little bit about why this focus on veterans with the organization.
Northey: Yeah. Well, unfortunately, there’s a high number of—we’re all aware of the veteran suicide rate across the country. And so these are servant leaders who choose to make a commitment to serve our country, to protect our freedoms and homes and communities. And there’s many organizations across the U.S. that try to help serve veterans, and oftentimes it’s, ‘Oh, the poor, broken veteran.’ It’s more of a pity party and handouts oftentimes. And so we really wanted to get away from that model and recognize that veterans and service members are some of the most highly skilled, trained leaders in this country. And what we want to do is be able to empower them and really equip them to be successful and to thrive in the civilian world.
And we truly believe that the root cause of the suicide epidemic among the veteran community is from a lack of purpose more than anything. There’s no greater purpose to serve than when you’re in uniform and you get to serve so many people and serve your country. For service members, when they leave and they take the uniform off, a sense of identity goes with that, a sense of who they are and what value they have kind of goes with that. And the civilian world functions very differently than the military world. And so it can sometimes be really difficult to make that transition and to find out, wow, I still have tremendous value. I still have purpose, and reshape that new sense of identity with a new life.
Moore: For me personally, when I think about growing up around veterans, I think of people who fought in Vietnam or Korea. I typically associated veterans with people my grandparents’ age. And I imagine with your line of work, you’re seeing a lot of people who look like you and me—people in their 20s and 30s and early 40s—who are still very much functioning and not retired people.
Northey: You’re exactly right. There’s a whole new generation of veterans now that are out there. And there’s many people that for the majority of their life, they only knew America at war and all of those things that it meant. And so, because of that, we do have to learn to adapt and pivot as a country that wants to support veterans and those that chose and are still choosing to serve. We want to make sure that we’re not just providing a way for them to have a great retirement and what their later years in life might look like, while, to your point, many of them still are young and they have many years ahead where they can still be massive contributors in their homes and communities across the country now.
Moore: Why mountain biking and veterans?
Northey: Yeah. Well, it’s something unique to us here in Northwest Arkansas, in Bentonville, being the mountain biking capital of the world now. It’s something that we’ve done, I think, really well as a region in building out incredible trail systems to earn a title like that. However, we have lacked some really incredible jumps that other areas in the U.S. have. And so DRILL is a big part of Veterans Future Festival. We have over 15 of literally the world’s top mountain biking athletes coming out to compete in the biggest freestyle jump competition in the country. And so this is a massive, massive thing, not just for our organization, but the entire community of Northwest Arkansas, the state, and then also for the veteran community where we can do something to celebrate and bring community together around food and music.
We also have the Purple Heart Gravel Ride that starts the day that actually begins in Bentonville. It’s a 33-mile bike ride along the Purple Heart Trail that ends at our 800-acre campus. So between the Purple Heart Gravel Ride and DRILL, it’s going to be a really, really fun day. For those that—even if you’re not really big into mountain biking—it’s going to be exceptional to get to watch. It’s the first of its kind in terms of the viewing platform that’s available. Many times for big-air competitions, you kind of get one angle to look at the athletes as they jump. We have a 360-degree view where you can literally watch the jumps happening all around you. So it’ll be a ton of fun.
We do have, in the later portion of the evening, a VIP-only small dinner gala. But we do have a very special announcement coming directly from Governor Sanders, and it’s going to be something that’s going to greatly impact our entire state.
Moore: When I think about your conversation about how military life and civilian life are radically different from one another in a lot of ways, I imagine that for me personally, someone who’s not a veteran, I think about what is something I could do to have appreciation shown toward me. Structured competition may not necessarily be that thing, but I wonder if that’s an element of your thinking and your group’s thinking—as people who are veterans or actively serving—that this element of active competition and structure around these sorts of things is something you’re hearing from the community that they long for.
Northey: Absolutely. A competitive spirit is something that the veteran community thrives in. These are people that want to push themselves and have pushed themselves outside of their own comfort zones. It’s a very active community of people that want to go out and make a difference, that want to find the best version of themselves. They want to be amongst a community of people that are also doing the same thing. And so, yeah, we work with veterans from our student population from all across the country, and many of them have their own nonprofit organizations and their communities that they’re involved with, with all types of different sports and outdoor athletic competitions and things that they do. And so mountain biking is one of those that fits very nicely.
We also have a sister nonprofit that we work with called The Dirt Therapy Project. They work specifically with veterans and mountain biking, almost in a way that it’s very therapeutic, depending on the service member, the season of life that they’re in right now. Being able to be in a community again that’s active and pushing themselves is something that fits really well.
Moore: We talked a bit earlier about the suicide epidemic, as you called it here, thinking about veterans. I can’t help but wonder if having this sort of structured competition, this ability for people to build community in a way that they may not expect to build community within the veteran world, is a way to be a bit of therapy in and of itself.
Northey: It is. And that’s actually really similar to how we structure our core programs as well. We have right now, within the School of Health and Performance, a certified personal trainer program. We have an integrative health coaching program, which is kind of like a life-coaching, holistic coaching program. And then we’re piloting our third, which is a nutrition coaching program. We’re really excited about that.
But students come out to campus and they stay there with us for three weeks at a time, and they complete their certification. So they’re living out there, they’re training out there, they’re eating together, and they’re creating a new sense of community amongst one another with each cohort while they’re out there as well. And so, again, we’re training them to become world-class coaches in various fields, right now within health and fitness. But we’re also giving them all of those tools that they need to lead productive lives, to have a high quality of life, to have great relationships, both personally and professionally, and really giving them, again, that rediscovery of purpose in their life more than anything.
Moore: Wesley, anything I missed that we should touch on here?
Northey: No. For anybody that would be interested in attending Veterans Future Festival, they can go to —. There’s a tab there under Veterans Future Festival where you can either sign up to be a part of the Pure Life Purple Heart Gravel Ride, or you can RSVP to watch and come celebrate with us during DRILL, which is presented by our partner RAW. And so we would love to have everybody from the Northwest Arkansas community come out, show support. It’s for a great cause—again, supporting veterans and their future. And we’re just so grateful to be able to celebrate in this way this year.
Moore: Wesley Northey is the director of experience with UHP. The Purple Heart Gravel Ride begins at 8 a.m. in downtown Bentonville, and the RAW DRILL Freestyle mountain bike competition runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at UHP campus in Gentry.
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