This Veteran Refuses To Leave His Unemployed and Debt-Ridden Comrades Behind

When Eli Williamson returned from two deployments to the Middle East, his hometown of Chicago felt at times like a foreign battleground, the memory of desert roads more familiar than Windy City central thoroughfares. As he relearned the city, Williamson noticed a strange similarity between veterans like himself and the young people growing up in tough parts of Chicago. Too many had witnessed violence, and they had little support to cope with the trauma.
Applying the timeworn principle of leaving no soldier, sailor, airman or marine behind, Williamson co-founded Leave No Veteran Behind (LNVB), a national nonprofit focused on securing education and employment for our warriors. Williamson formed the organization based on “just real stupid” and “crazy” idealism: “You know what?” he says. “I can make a difference.” Since work began in 2008, with a measly operating budget of $4,674 to help pay off student loans, LNVB has eliminated around $150,000 of school debt and provided 750 transitional jobs, Williamson says.
“Coming out of the military, every individual is going to have his or her challenges,” says Williamson, who served as a psychological operations specialist and an Arabic linguist in Iraq in 2004 and in Afghanistan in 2007. “We’ve seen veterans with substance abuse issues, homelessness issues.” Additionally, at least one in five veterans suffer from PTSD, and almost 50,000 are homeless and 573,000 are unemployed.
Williamson started the group with his childhood friend Roy Sartin. They first met in high school, when they joined choir and band together. “I think we’ve been arguing like old women every since,” Williamson says. Both joined the U.S. Army Reserves while at Iowa’s Luther College and were mobilized to active duty during their senior year after the Twin Towers fell. Williamson finished his education at the Special Warfare Training Center at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, while Sartin put his learning on hold.
Upon return, both struggled with crippling interest rates on their student loans. Sartin received a call from the loan company saying that he needed to make a $20,000 payment. “Although I had the funds, it was just enough to get myself back together. So, for me, the transition wasn’t as tough, but I was one of the lucky ones.” Williamson got a bill for $2,200 only 22 days before the balance was due. Desperate, he took to the streets playing music to cover the costs.
After talking with other vets, the two realized that many didn’t qualify for the military’s debt repayment programs. That’s when they started going out to financial sources for “retroactive scholarships” for our country’s defenders. And they sought employment opportunities for former military members to help cover the rest.
Jobs and debt relief for our nation’s warriors are the main focus of LNVB, but the group oversees several initiatives, including S.T.E.A.M. Corps, which pairs vets with science, technology, engineering, arts, and math experience with at-risk youth. More than 200 students have graduated from S.T.E.A.M., but Williamson, director of veteran affairs at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, points to a more intangible benefit of his non-profit’s work: the ability for veterans “to articulate a larger vision of themselves … is our advocacy mission,” he says.
“Veterans can paint a vision for where our country needs to be, and the only reason we can do that is because you realize that you are part of something larger than yourself,” Williamson adds. “That’s a fundamental value that veterans can share, as they leave military, with the communities that they come back to.” For those who’ve just returned home from Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, in other words, service is just beginning.

Meet the Hard-Working Veterans Offering a Safe Passage to Chicago Youth

“Veterans come from an environment,” says Eli Williamson, president of Leave No Veteran Behind (LNVB), “in which everyday they understand what their purpose is.” He continues: “When they come out of the military there’s this moment in which they say well, ‘what’s my new purpose?’”
Williamson asked himself this very question shortly after returning from a deployment to Iraq in 2004. His homecoming was met with the news that his student loans — which he used to pay for his college education before he went overseas — had come out of deferment. His friend and LNVB co-founder, Roy Sartin, was in the same situation. So the two army buddies from Chicago decided to write Oprah, in the hopes that the same charity that inspired her to give away cars might finance their student debt. When sharing their plans with other veterans, they discovered that student debt is a widespread burden for many returning servicemen and women.
Eventually they settled on a simple plan. “What if we were to raise dollars,” says Williamson, “apply those dollars directly to the veteran’s student loan account, and then require that veteran to give back 100 to 400 hours of community service once that debt has been paid?” From this idea, the nonprofit was formed.
Hakki Gurkan, a Chicago police officer and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, accessed it for student loan assistance in 2011. His mother’s cancer had recently come out of remission, his father had been through hip replacement surgery, and Gurkan struggled to financially provide for both of them. After his loans were paid, Gurkan’s service project created LNVB’s most visible program: Safe Passage.
In response to the widespread violence among youth in parts of Chicago, LNVB approached the Chicago school system to see if veterans could help. Tipped off about repeated violent incidents on the corner of 35th and Martin Luther King Drive, LNVB deployed 20 veterans to the location to stand guard, positively engage with youth and maintain the peace. Several weeks of calm led to expansion, and now, more than 400 veterans have participated in the Safe Passage program, positioned at several hot spots for crime in tough Chicago neighborhoods. On any given school day, about 130 veterans patrol the streets. As a result, the Chicago police has seen a significant decline in violence in the communities served.
Coming from all walks of life, the service members are paid $10 an hour and work during the times that students are traveling to and from school. That important off-time between shifts gives veterans the hours they need to search for jobs and to attend interviews. LNVB also provides its workers resume assistance.
Williamson and Sartin see the skills of returning veterans as a largely untapped resource. And part of that skill set is a sense of mission, whether applied to an operation overseas or a local effort to keep America’s youth safe.
Says Williamson, “Our ability to come back as veterans and be useful to people other than ourselves is critical.”

Service Taught This Veteran What Is, And Isn’t, a Threat

On a street corner in Chicago, an older woman stood and watched as three buses passed her by. She kept letting kids board the bus ahead of her — saying they caused nothing but trouble — so she continued to wait.
This is the scene that Eli Williamson, who founded Leave No Veteran Behind after his service in Iraq and Afghanistan, describes in his Got Your 6 Storytellers talk. In it, he has the audience reflect on what it is like for members of the military to return from war and see how so many of us avoid members of our own community.
“The military is designed to engage our nation’s existential threats. And we build teams around these existential threats. We take perfectly good strangers and make them close if not closer than family,” he says.
Williamson returned to civilian life worried that he would not be able to build those kinds of relationships back home. But five years into his work with Leave No Veteran Behind, which uses employment training, transitional jobs and educational debt relief to empower veterans to strengthen their own communities, it is mission accomplished.
One such transitional job had to do with addressing youth violence in the same city where Williamson grew up. Leave No Veteran Behind challenged the idea that metal detectors and armed personnel can keep our kids safe with communal resilience strategies that emphasize safety as opposed to security.
“We did this by leveraging some of our skills that we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan and we would go out into a very specific neighborhood and provide presence patrols, without the guns,” he says.
These patrols, conducted around Chicago Public Schools, facilitated safe passage for kids before and after school, leading to a significant decrease in violence.
After meeting the older woman waiting for the bus, Williamson told his team to treat the kids who had plowed right past her as they would treat any officer, saying “hello sir” and “hello ma’am.”
“Many of these kids would just look at us in a very quizzical way. Because many of them had never been called sir or ma’am a day in their life,” he recalls. “But over that course of a year, something really strange began to happen.”
Watch the video to learn how veterans, who have been trained to know what is and is not a threat, have a unique ability to draw members of their community closer together rather than further apart.