I never served in the military. And yet I find myself helping those who did serve, every day.
That’s not by coincidence.
I grew up in a military family where pride, honor and service were all part of our ethos. Our license plate says “Oorah”; my first stuffed animal was a bulldog. Military is very much part of who we are. My father was a Vietnam veteran, and though he didn’t speak much about those days, you could tell he thought back on that time with incredible fondness. I wanted something like that. To be part of something bigger than myself.
Whenever any one of us left the house, my mother always used to remind us, “Remember who you are.” It was a constant reminder that we were representing the values and strength that military families must have.
So serving was something I was expected to do, and it’s something I wanted for myself. Which is why when it came to going to college, I’m sure it was odd for my father — a 26-year veteran — to hear that I would be not attending a military academy or even registering to be in any branch of the military.
Instead I had an incredible opportunity to play soccer at school, which tore at my heart. Would I be letting down my family? Is this not the opposite of how I was raised?
My father calmed me down and told me something that I would never forget, and that I carry to this day. He said, “Meghan, go to school and get a great education. You’ll find your way to service. Go be the best you can be.”
And I did. I eventually found my way into finance at Lehman Brothers in 2005 and moved my way up the corporate ladder. But a few years and thousands of layoffs later, I stopped and had to ask myself what I was doing — was this really the service I was meant to do?
Service is meant to be selfless. My father talked about his time in service not with pride for himself, but with pride for his peers. But at some point in everyone’s time of service, there’s a realization that whatever help you’re giving often ends up bettering your life too. And I just wasn’t feeling that with where I was.
It was around that time when I was approached by a friend who told me about a one-armed Jesuit priest named Father Rick Curry who wanted to start a nonprofit for veterans in Washington, D.C. I just had to meet him.
I sat down with Father Curry for a whole weekend, and he sold me on this vision he had, built around men and women veterans who — unlike the people in the movies, broken and desperate — have a variety of different voices and talents, despite their physical or mental ailments acquired while serving.
And with that, he and his co-founder created Dog Tag Bakery, a space that utilizes veterans as employees, but also offers classes and the support to start an entrepreneurial venture of their own. I joined as their first employee in 2012.
I would never say I’m at the same level of my father, sister or mom. But I’ve helped establish a program that has a culture of acceptance and offers wraparound services to vets. It’s not about running a bakery — it’s about running the best bakery.
And this isn’t just about doing something good for people. This is about doing good business. We’re seeing an economic impact. Change doesn’t always happen on a national level; it happens on a small level in our communities every day. I think that there’s no greater calling than that.
Tag: service
Bridging the Civilian-Military Divide Through a Service Year
Nathan Moser and Alyssa Menard both grew up in rural areas and spent most of their childhoods outdoors. But until recently, their similarities ended there.
Menard stayed close to home to attend college, where she never quite figured out what she wanted to pursue after graduation. And Moser joined the Marines, serving for a time overseas. Once both were finished — Menard with school and Moser with the armed forces — they found themselves wondering what to do next.
In 2015, Menard began her first service year at Virginia’s Pocahontas State Park after applying to a number of AmeriCorps park programs. She also participated in Service Year Alliance’s career development program, which is designed to give its members the basis for finding employment in their chosen field.
After Moser came back stateside, he began searching for a career path where he could work outdoors and as part of a team. Now he is completing his first service year at Pocahontas, where he’s worked closely with Menard and has come to view her as a mentor.
For Menard’s part, she recognizes the drive and skills Moser brings to the table.
“He is ready to do things,” Menard says. “He isn’t afraid to take the initiative, take the lead. He goes for it. And I like that because it helps get things done.”
Watch the video above to follow along as Menard and Moser complete their training and prepare for jobs in the state park system.
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NationSwell asks you to join our partnership with Service Year Alliance. Watch the video above and learn more about how a service year is truly for everyone. Together, we can lead a national movement to give young Americans the opportunity to help bridge the divides in our country.
The Disaster Response Program That’s Building More Than Homes
Susan Ward had only served five weeks in the military when she was medically discharged after an injury — but that didn’t change the fact that she wanted a life in service.
“From that moment when I got out, I was devastated,” she tells NationSwell. “That was my life goal and plan. I didn’t know what to do. I love helping and serving people, doing what I can for people.”
That feeling isn’t uncommon for thousands of military veterans who have a hard time transitioning to civilian life. Though unemployment among veterans who have served since 2001 has gone down, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 370,000 veterans who were still unemployed this year.
Numerous transition programs exist to help vets bridge that gap, but for Ward, finding a gig — or even volunteer work — that was service-oriented was necessary for her happiness. She eventually became a firefighter in Alaska, but after 10 years a different injury forced Ward to leave yet another job she loved. She fell into a deep depression, she says, and struggled to find another role that allowed her to fulfill her passion for public service.
“I was on Facebook one day and just saw this post about Team Rubicon, and I had this moment of, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to do this,’” she says.
Team Rubicon began as a volunteer mission in 2010 after the earthquake that devastated Haiti. The organization offered disaster relief by utilizing the help of former service workers from the military and civilian sectors.
It has since evolved into an organization fueled by 80,000 volunteers. The majority are veterans who assist with everything from clearing trees and debris in tornado-ravaged towns to gutting homes that have been destroyed by floods. The teams, which are deployed as units, also work alongside other disaster-relief organizations, such as the Red Cross.
Similar to Ward, Tyler Bradley, a Clay Hunt fellow for Team Rubicon who organizes and develops volunteers, battled depression after he had to leave the Army due to a genetic health problem.
“After I found [Team Rubicon], I was out doing lots of volunteer work. My girlfriend noticed and said she would see the old Tyler come back,” Bradley says. “Team Rubicon turned my life around.”
“There’s one guy who says that just because the uniform comes off doesn’t mean service ends,” says Zachary Brooks-Miller, director of field operations for Team Rubicon. He adds that the narrative around the value of veterans has to change. “We don’t take the approach that our vets are broken; we see vets as a strength within our community.”
In addition to Team Rubicon’s disaster-relief efforts, the organization also helps to empower veterans and ease their transition into the civilian world, according to Christopher Perkins, managing director at Citi and a member of the company’s Citi Salutes Affinity Steering Committee. By collaborating with Citi, Team Rubicon was able to scale up its contributions, allowing service workers to provide widespread relief last year in Houston after Hurricane Harvey. Those efforts were five times larger than anything the organization had previously done and brought even more veterans into the Team Rubicon family.
“Being around my brothers and sisters in arms whom I missed so much, it was so clear to me the impact Team Rubicon would have not only in communities impacted by disaster, but also among veterans,” says Perkins, a former captain in the Marines. “Every single American should know about this organization.”
Although Team Rubicon doesn’t brand itself as a veterans’ organization, it does view former members of the military as the backbone of its efforts. And many veterans see the team-building and camaraderie as a kind of therapy for service-related trauma.
“There are so many people who have [post-traumatic stress disorder] from different things, and when you’re with family you have to pretend that you’re OK,” says Ward, who deals with PTSD from her time as a soldier and firefighter. “But when you’re with your Team Rubicon family, it’s a tribe.”
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This article is paid by and produced in collaboration with Citi. Through Citi Salutes, Citi collaborates with veterans’ service organizations and leading veterans’ champions to support and empower veterans, service members and their families. This is the fourth installment in a series focusing on solutions for veterans and military families in the areas of housing, financial resilience, military transition and employment.
Building the Pipeline From Service Years to Successful Careers
Alisha Beyer was raised with the credo that, “No matter what else you’re doing, a portion of your time should always be dedicated to helping others.” But it wasn’t until she began her year of service as a member of AmeriCorps that she realized the impact she could make.
“I just knew I wanted to help people, and I had to figure out the capacity in which I could do that,” Beyer says.
Today, she does just that through her work as a field claims representative for Farmers Insurance. It’s a career that descends directly from her year of service working to help communities struggling to rebuild after Superstorm Sandy in 2013.
In this episode of NationSwell’s 8-part mini documentary series on service years, learn about Employers of National Service, an initiative that connects AmeriCorps, Peace Corps and other service year alumni with employers from the private, public and nonprofit sectors. More than five hundred employers are now a part of the program, which gives national service alumni additional opportunities to apply their skills in the workplace.
“AmeriCorps gave me a lot of training that’s very transferable,” Beyer says. “This is something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.”
NationSwell asks you to join our partnership with Service Year Alliance. Watch the video above and learn more about how to support alums of national service. Together, we can lead a national movement to give young Americans the opportunity to help bridge the divides in our country.
4 Long Weekends That Have Long-Lasting Impact
You just emptied the sand from your shoes and put the suitcases away in the attic, but you’re already dreaming of your next getaway. Why not take time off to have meaningful impact on others or the planet?
FOR THE ENTIRE FAMILY
Instill the importance of service in your children by taking them on a volunteer vacation. Global Volunteers helps families plan trips to a variety of destinations in the United States and abroad. Service trip participants can travel to Appalachia where they repair homes of elderly and disabled residents, rehabilitate run-down classrooms and work alongside local youth in community gardens. Or volunteers can head to Montana’s Blackfeet Indian Reservation (located next door to Glacier National Park). While there, they can teach teens and adults computer skills or assist with a summer day camp for Native American youth.
FOR TEENS
National Geographic Student Expeditions has several options to entice kids to get off the couch and into service. In Hawaii, for example, kids will put in 35 to 40 hours working alongside environmentalists, digging up invasive species, collecting data on the Kohala watershed and conducting beach cleanups.
FOR OUTDOORS ENTHUSIASTS
Those that want to spend their time off caring for America’s great outdoors can learn how to rehabilitate hiking trails by volunteering with the American Hiking Society. Or sign up with the Sierra Club. You can learn to give backpacking tours of Arizona’s Galiuro Mountains and the giant saguaro cactus forests of the Sonoran Desert.
For information on more volunteer vacations, check out Elevate Destinations, International Volunteer Headquarters, Global Vision International and Globe Aware.
MORE: 5 of the Best Ways to Volunteer This Holiday Season
A Better Way to Boost Civic Engagement
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the environmentalist Civilian Conservation Corps, one of America’s first experiments in public service (aside from the traditional routes of joining the military or running for office). Decades later, John F. Kennedy’s global Peace Corps and Lyndon B. Johnson’s domestic anti-poverty program, VISTA, followed. And later, Bill Clinton formed AmeriCorps to instill service as a core ideal. NationSwell Council member MacKenzie Moritz, chief of staff and head of partnerships at Service Year Alliance, believes that civic engagement is about to reach its apex, as more young people sign up for a year of service. NationSwell spoke to him by phone in Washington, D.C., about how 12 months of service could heal the country’s divides.
What is a service year? Who can participate, and what do they do?
A service year is an opportunity to do a year or two of full-time, paid service with a nonprofit, government or university, working to address an unmet societal need. Some of the best-known examples out there are things like the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps programs like Teach for America and City Year, and the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Our focus is really on this idea of how to provide opportunities for people to act on the responsibilities of their citizenship. [With Service Year Alliance,] we primarily focus on recruiting 18-to-28-year-olds — whether after high school, during college or after — to have this opportunity really early in life, because we think it will unlock a next level of civic engagement for the rest of their lives. Of course, they’re certainly not limited to those ages; plenty of people decide to do a service year later in life.
Why is a service year so important now?
After two years in Philadelphia, where I taught ninth-grade world history, I ended up leading Teach for America’s national recruitment strategy and technology team. At that time, we were seeing 60,000 applicants every year for 6,000 positions. There was just a tremendous interest from young people to give back, to leave their mark on society. The vast majority of people that were raising their hand to volunteer were ultimately told they weren’t a good fit. They were being rejected, only to go home and read a newspaper article about how Millennials care only about themselves. With our politics, people aren’t feeling as connected to larger systems as they had historically, leading to declining rates of social trust. We need something new that restores the fabric of our country.
What would you say to the person who thinks service years are well and good for others, but not for them?
The Franklin Project got started at Aspen Ideas Festival a couple years back, when Gen. McChrystal was asked whether he believed in the draft. He said, “I think you’re asking the wrong question. The right question is, ‘Should every young American serve?’ I think the answer to that is yes. But does the military need everyone? I think the answer is no. We need to create a lot more pathways for young people to serve.”
He went on to say that citizenship is a membership. We spend a lot of time talking about its rights, and we spend very little time talking about its responsibilities. About only 1 percent of Americans serve in the military, and frequently those are folks who come from families that have a long history of serving in the military. It’s really dangerous for us, as a country, to get into the mindset of thinking that service is someone else’s job, that it’s not a shared responsibility across all of us. Service years involve exploring your identity as a citizen.
Is there a book you’d recommend for someone who wants to understand your approach to public service?
“Heart of the Nation: Volunteering and America’s Civic Spirit,” by John Bridgeland, chair of the domestic policy council in the Bush administration during 9/11, does a really good job of providing a history of service in America and outlining a future of where we could go.
What do you wish someone had told you when you first took this role?
If I had been holding myself to the expectations I had for myself as a college graduate at 21 years old, I would not be doing any of what I’m doing today. There’s so much out there that I didn’t know existed back then. There are a lot of different levers that exist out there for changing our society. It’s very easy to fall into focusing only on the ones you know. With how fast the world is changing, there’s a lot more that are being created all the time. I hope that, 10 years from now, I’m doing something that doesn’t exist today.
What are you most proud of having accomplished?
When I was a teacher back in Philadelphia, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of amazing young people. My male students, you’d ask them what they want to do, and they’d say [play in] the NBA or the NFL. In a moment of frustration, I ended up taking a trashcan and putting it on a stool. I said, “Alright, everyone get out a piece of paper. Crumple it up. On the count of three, shoot.” Ninety-five percent of them didn’t go in. “Okay,” I said, “We need a backup plan here.”
The funny thing is that one of the students ended up playing in the NBA, which makes me look foolish, but I was right for the rest of them. The students I’m most proud of are two of the students I taught as ninth graders, who, after college, did Teach for America back in Philadelphia and now, after completing that, are staying in the classroom. It’s been such a privilege to mentor them over the years, stay in touch with them and see the cycle go all the way around. There’s just so much talent and potential in all of America’s classrooms. I got to play a small role in helping people to realize that, and I’m excited to continue to help with that through all the work that I do.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
Note: Since the publication of this article, Service Year Alliance has become a NationSwell advertiser.
2016: A Year of Impact
This WWII Soldier’s Letter Home Is Hard to Read (But Definitely Worth It)
The Fourth of July has come and gone, but here’s another powerful reminder of why we should always celebrate our country and honor those who fight for it.
A touching handwritten letter from a World War II soldier named Frank Keaton to his mother and father was recently unearthed. The letter was written on February 8, 1944, the day before he and his company, the U.S. Army’s 30th Infantry Division (aka Old Hickory), shipped off for duty.
In the letter, he fully acknowledges that his words may be the last ones he’ll ever write to his family. (Ultimately, he survives the war.) The whole letter is worth the read, but in the excerpt below, he explains why in his mere 31 years on Earth, he has already lived a full life and is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. Although it was written more than 70 years ago, Keaton’s message still rings true today.
ALSO: Life After the Military: Helping Veterans With Their Second Act
What better thing can a man ask for than a chance to fight for what he believes in, fight to give the new generation and the generations not yet born a chance to live a life like my own has been, a chance to play, to go to school and learn about the world, not just one race and one creed; a chance to love and be loved, a chance to see the greatness of the world that God has given us, and a chance to add a name to the long line of great men and women who have made names for themselves in every line of endeavor.
When I think of this my heart swells up and chokes me. Here, early in life, I’m given the opportunity to serve, to make the living of my life not in vain. Some men live a full lifetime and do not achieve this one distinction. This world conflict has given me an easy chance and a big opportunity.
According to Commentary Magazine, Keaton and his company helped secure Omaha Beach for medics before the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day. The publication writes that the brave serviceman was shot while crossing the Rhine river but refused to leave the frontlines. For his efforts, he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, Two Oak Leaf Clusters and the Purple Heart.
Keaton reportedly died at the age of 90 at his home in San Rafael, California.
DON’T MISS: A Bold Idea for Empowering Today’s Generation of Veterans
Big Bets: How Can We Serve Our Veterans? Ask Them to Serve Us
Spencer Kympton, president of the Mission Continues, a nonprofit group dedicated to empowering veterans, wants to change the way we perceive men and women coming home after military service. “The general population believes that this generation of veterans need our thanks, they need our gratitude, they need things from us,” Kympton says. “What they deserve is a new endeavor and a way to serve us.”
The Mission Continues was created with the belief that veterans want to continue to serve their country when they return home, and that helping others will help them in their transition back to civilian life. To accomplish this, the nonprofit places vets in six-month service fellowships across the country in organizations like Habitat for Humanity and Big Brothers Big Sisters. Since it was founded in 2007 — by
Eric Greitens, a Rhodes Scholar and former Navy SEAL — the Mission Continues has had about 1,000 fellows. “We’re seeing it has professional impact, it has improved their relationships and it’s improving their health and well-being,” Kympton says.
Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Spencer Kympton, President of the Mission Continues, has become a NationSwell Council member.
MORE: Meet The Soldiers Turned Roadies Coming to a Stadium Near You
14 Ways To Give Back This Thanksgiving
In this article, Amy Neumann displays 14 ways we can give back this holiday season. While donating money or food baskets are common, Neumann focuses on some other effective methods that are not as popular. Some of these include: volunteering online, preparing an emergency kit for a friend or relative, teaching someone to read, or lending a hand at a local animal shelter.