What Wounded Soldiers Need Most After Battle — and How This Org Helped Them Get It

It was every Army wife’s nightmare: Jessica Allen’s husband, Chaz, was injured in an IED explosion that took both of his legs. But knowing the love of her life wouldn’t walk unassisted again wasn’t the hardest part. That came later, while Chaz convalesced at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and Jessica and her children were hundreds of miles away in their home in Tennessee, wondering about his condition and worrying about how to pay for his treatment.
“Wounded soldiers are stuck at whatever military facility you are supposed to be at until the Army tells you to leave,” Jessica says. “I had to drop everything I was doing. I was running a tax business, the girls were in school, I ran five Girl Scout troops at the time he was injured…and I had to drop all of that to go take care of him.”
Jessica was on the verge of tapping into her emergency funds to pay for flights and hotels in order to be close to her husband’s hospital bed. Increasingly anxious, she reached out to the Fisher House Foundation, a group that had supported many of her friends when their loved ones in the service had been injured. The Foundation offered to cover the cost of her plane trips and provide her with housing. Continue reading “What Wounded Soldiers Need Most After Battle — and How This Org Helped Them Get It”

Washington Needs to Be Fixed. These Innovators Aren’t Waiting for Congress to Do It.

Do you remember where you were when the government shut down? Chances are we’d have to be more specific. Lawmakers–who these days are not doing so much of the making–have quibbled so many times over debt ceilings and defaults and health care and taxes that stalemate is officially the new normal.
And that countdown clock you see on cable news, ticking away toward the next shutdown? Let’s just say the producers have it bookmarked in their graphics file.
It’s no wonder that the record levels of toxicity dripping from the halls of Congress has spurred some fresh minds to come up with a way around it. Political groups committed to breaking through the logjam/stalemate/gridlock that is The District have been trying for a few years now to gain ground among the independent minded and those just sick of all the stalling. But thus far, their efforts have yet to move all those alienated voters to action; their names remain barely known outside the Beltway.
Recently Americans like you expressed a huge jump in faith in Congress–all the way up to 19 percent!
But when people say they’re sick of the do-nothing atmosphere, they almost always blame the party they like least, says John Sides, who writes The Monkey Cage, a straight-shooting political science blog now hosted by The Washington Post. No matter which shutdown it is, Democrats blame Republicans, and the other way around.
“Part of the problem is just that independent groups and third parties are naturally disadvantaged by the rules of the American electoral system,” Sides says. “Compared to a system of proportional representation, winner-take-all elections tend to produce two-party systems.”
NationSwell reached out to the would-be compromisers to see what they’ve done and what they’re planning to do.
Continue reading “Washington Needs to Be Fixed. These Innovators Aren’t Waiting for Congress to Do It.”