The History of HeartSupport
“HeartSupport was birthed out of purpose. It wasn’t birthed out of greed. It wasn’t birthed out of ego. It wasn’t birthed out of pride. It was birthed out of purpose.”
— Jake Luhrs, August Burns Red, HeartSupport founder
The year was 2011, and Jake Luhrs’ heart was breaking.
As the lead singer of metalcore monster band August Burns Red, Jake had toured the country since 2006. During that half-decade, he’d found that their emotionally raw music resonated in the deepest, most troubled places of listeners’ lives. Every night, long after the final riffs had sunk into the cement floors of the venues the band played, Jake was still in the room. He reversed role from performer to listener, hearing the soaring highs and devastating lows of fans’ stories. Most nights, he’d stay until security asked him to leave.
On this particular night in 2011, Jake was sitting outside of House of Blues after another series of emotionally intense conversations with fans. He wanted to offer them so much more than one night of music, one conversation of care. He wanted to offer them a lifetime of support.
Jake prayed, contemplating how he could offer them something more, something that could reach beyond venue walls.
A spark of an idea lit in his spirit: if nothing else, he could remove every possible barrier between concert attendees and their chance at connection. He could formalize the aid he was offering. He would call the initiative HeartSupport — a name he attached to a blue tablecloth and set up beside the band’s merch, serving as his staging area for urgent and authentic conversations. He also started a blog, sharing his own story and life insights.
He never could have predicted how that spark would light a movement.
HeartSupport on tour
Two years after its inception, longtime August Burns Red fans Ben, Cherie, and Brian Herrman saw the immense value in what Jake was offering. They knew it needed to reach so much farther than one metal vocalist could manage on his own.
So the Herrmans stepped in and offered to fund HeartSupport’s presence on Warped Tour, still at its zenith of alternative music dominance. That same year, the band achieved 501(c)3 status.
“Brian took Jake under his wing and helped him get HeartSupport started with the right forms and 501c3 financial stuff, and he gave him a lot of seed money,” Cherie remembers. “Over time, I saw what they did, who they were talking to and interacting with. The people that HeartSupport is reaching out to are an unreached people group. They're the front lines on the mission field, and they're really trying to help.”
Manning a presence on the tour required manpower as well as funds. That came in the form of Nate Hilpert and Ben Sledge, both volunteers who were passionate about what HeartSupport was doing. The tour was an incredible success — so much so that Jake knew Nate and Ben needed to stay on board. Ben left a successful graphic design career to become HeartSupport’s first Executive Director. Nate had just graduated from University of Texas, stepping into HeartSupport as his first full-time gig. Their roles were largely supported by friends and family at first, a small community who believed in what was possible.
That scrappy passion brought HeartSupport onto every single Warped Tour from 2013 up to its final encore year in 2019. More tour placements followed, offering resources and pointing to the burgeoning communityl. Bands like Silent Planet and As I Lay Dying took HeartSupport’s mission on the road. Festivals like So What Festival, iMatter, Blue Ridge Rock Festival, and Furnace Fest followed.
The support wall
The support wall has been a fixture at the foundation of HeartSupport from day one. Peers were able to support each other online, first through a Wordpress site plugin, later through a Discourse open source forum interface in 2018, and finally through comment on social platforms like Instagram starting in 2018. By 2025, HeartSupport’s support wall would evolve to being dispersed across seven social media platforms. The forum version exists to connect the dozens of trained peer support volunteers who step in to reply to comments as music fans open up about their mental health.
At Warped Tour 2018, HeartSupport began experimenting with an in-person, physical support wall — a rig that initially weighed 800 pounds and required a specialty forklift extended to load and unload. In 2019, they refined the vision into a set-up more manageable, which has continued to show up at festivals across the country (including the org’s own HeartSupport Fest in 2023).
As of 2025, the physical support wall can be replicated in inflatable form, allowing it to be easily transported to the 12 festivals on the organization’s calendar. The wall is also available for installation at venue partners like The Champ, who have debuted the blow-up wall as a permanent fixture at their concerts.
Marrying music and mental health
Music listeners were not the only ones who resonated with the mission: musicians themselves did too. They began devoting their time to the work both on and off tour. Fit For a King published a book, Embrace, in partnership with HeartSupport. Bands like Papa Roach, Black Veil Brides, Memphis May Fire, We Came As Romans, Motionless in White, Beartooth, and BlessTheFall all contributed deeply personal stories to offer solidarity to anyone struggling. Merch collabs with bands like Fit For a King, As I Lay Dying, and Disciple have been steady sources of visibility.
Of course, August Burns Red’s partnership remained central. In addition to tours and merch, Jake Luhrs also wrote a book covering themes deeply integral to HeartSupport’s mission, titled Mountains. August Burns Red even attached a donation to ticket prices on their 2023 Rescue and Restore Tour.
Most recently, the fusion of mental health and music hit a new level with the Therapist Reacts series.
The first Therapist Reacts went live in the first half of 2023 during a pivotal moment for the organization. HeartSupport had hit an organizational wall when they had to decide how to move forward through shaky finances and stuck growth.
Enter the Therapist Reacts series of videos, where licensed therapist Taylor Palmby began addressing the deeper meaning behind metal songs from a mental health lens. By the end of that year, they were picking up steam. Suddenly, the videos went from 60,000 views a month to 1.1 million views a month. The YouTube channel hit 100,000 subscribers in July of 2024. Just six months later in February 2025, it was 200,000.
Some of this growth was due to active partnerships by bands themselves. Slipknot in particular became a critical partner, with Taylor covering all of their major tracks. Eventually, formal collaborations would come with Nothing More, Shinedown, Skillet, and Deadlands.
Looking ahead: HeartSupport’s present and future
“There has never been a better time at HeartSupport,” offers Nate Hilpert, who in 10 years has gone from being a volunteer to the organization’s current Executive Director. “In 2024, we doubled our impacted, 30Xed our reach, backed everything we do with research, and greatly invested in our volunteers and our programs. By doing less, we’ve been able to go deeper in our focus to help heal the scene. We feel the momentum, and we know thousands of lives are going to get changed through this movement. It’s already happening, but to see it grow and take on a mass of its own is beautiful to see the scene really rallying behind caring for its fans.”
In fact, HeartSupport can confidently say that in its history, at least 50,000 music listeners have opened up about their mental health to date. In 2024 alone, HeartSupport processed 4,000 mental health support requests from 83,400 comments on YouTube. Continuing work propelled forward by a merger with Brittany Mullins’s mentorship organization Beneath The Skin, HeartSupport is continuing one-on-one support calls to provide more in-depth care.
In short: HeartSupport is impacting the most people they have ever impacted. And they’re still just scratching the surface of what’s possible when the music community rises up to heal the scene together.
“I’ve always wanted a home. The music scene is my home. There’s something that is in me that desires to protect it,” Jake Luhrs explains.
That protective nature is perpetuated by a passionate community that now numbers in the thousands, people who have stepped in to donate, to volunteer, to comment — people like you.
If you would like to learn about getting involved on a deeper level, you can learn more about volunteering at heartsupport.com/volunteer. You can invest in this growing mission at heartsupport.com/donate.
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50,000+ music fans have opened up to HeartSupport about their mental health
150+ tour dates and festivals have been served
Over 40.6 million YouTube views
400,800+ cumulative followers across all social media channels
XXXX current number of volunteer repliers
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Mountains by Jake Luhrs of August Burns Red
The Embrace by Ryan Kirby of Fit For a King
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1337 Capital
BetterHelp Therapy
Weinstein Legal Team
Seen Merch
Hot Topic Foundation
Project34
Rivera Physical Therapy
Capital One
Access Foundation
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Jake Luhrs
Lou Rivera
Dr. Michelle Saari
Casey Faris
Dan Bernard
Matt Cavanaugh
Bryan Fevold
