Country music star Charlie Daniels has been entertaining fans for decades with his music, but he just spoke out to say that it’s something entirely different that gets him excited every day.

Daniels, 83, explained that his main passion in life is helping veterans through his nonprofit Journey Home Project, which he created with the help of his manager and a group of  kindhearted folks who want to see change for the many veterans who have sacrificed for their country.

“My manager, myself and some other people started this Journey Home Project to help — we’ve come to find out there is a great need for assistance by veterans who are returning from their service. Most of the people that we deal with haven’t gotten that,” said Daniels. “We all know the agencies that are tasked with helping our military people are bureaucracies that, by nature, grind slow. So there are immediate needs and slow bureaucracies, and we kind of step in and try to help out.”

The nonprofit recently held it’s second annual “Charlie Daniels Patriot Award Dinner,” which earned $200,000 for America’s veterans.

“We’ve done things as mundane as buying a bicycle for a guy to ride to work. We’ve helped people get medical care, we’ve helped people get educated and try to help people get jobs. Just whatever we can do to help ease the burden on our veterans when they come back from [service],” said Daniels, who went on to lament the challenges veterans endure.”

“You know, you go into service for 20 years, and especially the people who were once in combat, you go into service and come back and you’re walking into a different world,” the singer said. “You’re walking from a regimented world where everybody gets involved in the same situation into a place where you’re dealing with a bunch of civilians who don’t know anything at all about what it’s like to put on your battle rattle and walk out into where there are IEDs and people shooting at you”

“It’s a whole other world that they have not been living in but they — of course, it’s an individual thing — some people need more than others need. Some people come back with bad cases of PTSD and they desperately need help, but it may be years after the fact until they discover this,” he added.

Daniels then said he was shocked and saddened when he learned just how many veterans kill themselves every day.

“We’re just trying to be there for them — for all of our veterans. One of our things now is the veterans suicide rate; 22 veterans die by suicide every day,” said Daniels. “When I found it out, I put it on my Twitter account — I now do that every day. I want people to know the stat. I want people to understand that. A lot of people are still just discovering it.”

Daniels concluded by saying that though his nonprofit is small, it can still do a world of good.

“…Because we’re a small foundation, we don’t deal in millions and millions of dollars but we find needs that our budget will fit,” he said. “Or we help other organizations that are involved in doing the same thing and we combine our money with theirs and they’re able to do a lot of good with it, you know? We find individual cases and people that are within our means to do something about it and we try to fill in.”

Find out more about Daniels’ commitment to veterans in the video below.