At NationSwell, our mission is to highlight solutions driving America forward. From rural Appalachia to South Central Los Angeles, we’ve covered the work of dedicated individuals fighting to improve people’s lives. Here are a few updates on how President Trump’s proposed federal budget cuts to social programs could gradually rollback the positive impact made by these initiatives.
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Tag: Helping Veterans
Tapping Immigrants to Become City Leaders, Using Design to Combat Street Pollution and More
Nashville Is Training a New Generation of Leaders from Its Immigrant Communities, Citiscope
In 2009, a Nashville councilman proposed a ballot initiative to prevent bureaucrats from speaking anything but English. Voters defeated the nativist measure, and “Nashville has not looked back,” the former mayor says. Today, the Southern city picks leaders from immigrant communities and introduces them to various government institutions like the courts, schools and water treatment plants, in the hopes that some will one day run for local office.
Street Furniture that Helps Fight Pollution and Save Lives, Co.Design
Living near one of New York City’s ambulance stations could, paradoxically, be detrimental to your health. While parked, the emergency response vehicles leave their engine running nonstop to power their radios and refrigerate medicines, coughing out exhaust for hours. An energy startup has been tapped to place slender, metallic charging pedestals throughout the city, allowing ambulances to run their battery through an automatically retractable plug, while decreasing street pollution at the same time.
F.D.A. Agrees to New Trials for Ecstasy as Relief for PTSD Patients, The New York Times
For an average of 17 years each, a group of South Carolina patients — military veterans, rape survivors and emergency responders — had tried to get over their post-traumatic stress disorder. Neither prescription drugs nor psychotherapy worked. But the recreational drug MDMA, or Ecstasy, did. Now, a clinical trial of at least 230 patients will test whether the illegal party pill should be classified as a medical cure for the symptoms of trauma.
Helping Veterans Help Each Other
In 2006, journalist Bob Woodruff had made the long trip to Taji, an hour north of Baghdad, to report on the Iraq war. Having recently been named co-anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” Woodruff’s life changed in an instant, when a roadside bomb struck his armored vehicle. The newsman was nearly killed, and after a long recovery, he eventually returned to journalism. He also started a foundation to help service members and their families. Overseen by NationSwell Council member Anne Marie Dougherty, the Bob Woodruff Foundation has raised more than $30 million to rehabilitate the injured, provide access to education and employment opportunities, and work to improve overall quality of life for veterans. NationSwell spoke with Dougherty about what veterans are facing as they return home from two Middle East wars.
How did Bob Woodruff’s brain injury shape the mission of his foundation?
After he was hurt in Iraq, he said, “We’re not special. People are suffering the same injuries, if not worse ones.” He was able to see firsthand the struggles of service members who come home injured. But Bob and his family were acutely aware that they had ABC News and [parent company] Disney to really make sure they were taken care of, in a way that’s maybe different from the resources a young enlisted soldier has.
In a weird way, the Woodruffs became this bridge across the military-civilian divide. They walk the walk. When Bob woke up from his coma and recovered, they could have quietly gone back to their lives. But they felt like they could use the extra attention surrounding their tragedy to raise money and awareness — and they don’t want any credit for it. That gives me energy, because it’s such an authentic commitment. It’s their way of expressing gratitude for his recovery.
As I understand it, the foundation’s mission is to help veterans recover from the war, both physically and spiritually. What does that look like to you, in the day-to-day?
We try to understand what’s going on in the active-duty military and veteran communities. We scan the landscape to identify what the policies are at the federal, state and local levels; what budgets are getting cut; what’s on the horizon with the next administration; and how all these pieces affect service members. Our role is to complement the resources the government provides. Once we know what’s needed, we go out and find organizations that have the relevant programs.
Why does this work matter to you personally?
Shortly after Bob was injured, my husband was getting ready to deploy to Iraq as a marine. He didn’t end up going at that time, but we were staring down the barrel. After following the Woodruffs’ story, I had this thought in the back of my mind, “What if this happens to us?” I followed the thread through a marine wives’ network and was connected to the Woodruffs when they were literally running a kitchen-table operation. I was particularly interested in building the brand and its reputation. Instinctively, it seemed like there was an opportunity there.
There are roughly 40,000 veterans’ nonprofits out there. What do you look for when deciding which are worthy of funding?
A lot of what we think about is how to get outside the small ring of vets who are very proactive about joining programs. There’s a whole universe of veterans who are not taking advantage of the programs that exist. In a way, it’s like connecting supply with demand. After that, we take our due diligence seriously. When you’re running an organization with living namesakes, there’s a responsibility to create and uphold a certain standard. Getting a grant is a seal of approval. As the leader of the foundation, I have to set that standard every day, which is to be rigorous and consistent, transparent and accountable.
What’s one issue impacting service members that doesn’t get enough attention?
We were at war for the longest time in our nation’s history, but only 1 percent of the eligible population volunteered to serve. Because the wars weren’t being fought on American soil, there’s a huge disconnect, and frankly, people are kind of over it. That, combined with the current political climate, means the country isn’t able to focus attention — and therefore, resources — on what returning vets need. The health of our all-volunteer force depends on how we respond to veterans transitioning back into civilian society. If you can get out front of some of these very predictable issues, the trajectory can totally change. We’ve made huge progress — we are a very generous nation after all — but the risk is that we have compassion fatigue and short attention spans.
Is there a book you’d recommend to people who want to better understand the challenges vets face upon homecoming?
Sebastian Junger’s “Tribe” is an incredible explanation of something we intuitively already know to be true. When veterans come home — whether they’re injured or not — they struggle with a sense of purpose and meaning. In the military, it’s very clear what your role in the hierarchy is; you have your tribe. But eventually you wander back into regular life. You might miss being deployed. We need to understand that’s a human response and a very real sentiment.
How do you repair that feeling of disconnection?
Veterans helping other veterans. They’re drawn to service, and we’re creating opportunities for them to continue to serve. We know that by helping others like them, vets get healthier. They just want that human connection. Banks and other companies will say, “We’re gonna hire veterans; that’s how we’re going to solve veteran unemployment,” which is a very important piece of the puzzle. But there are a lot of people who join the military so that they don’t end up sitting in a cubicle at a big company. So we’ve taken on the challenge of finding opportunities, especially for service members who have been injured, that lets them work outside, doing something with their hands. There’s an organization called the Farmer Veteran Coalition, and it’s so simple: If you help a veteran afford a tractor, they can get a plot going. One of the grants from this group went to supplying a young farmer with mating turkeys. He calls it “dirt therapy,” just to be able to plant things and be alone in the peace and healing of the outdoors. On top of that, they’re growing organic food and participating in a farmers’ market to share this food with other people, and they’re attracting more veterans to come and work there. It’s having a multiplying effect.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Note: Since the publication of this article, Bob Woodruff Foundation has become a NationSwell advertiser.
Giving Poor Kids a Leg Up in Youth Sports, Recruiting Vets to the Ivy League and More
Poor Kids Are Being Priced Out of Youth Sports: Here’s One Solution, Washington Post
Low-income parents often can’t afford to buy their children a $300 baseball bat or $250 hockey skates; they may struggle to scrounge up even the $50 fee to join a youth sports league. In Gaithersburg, Md., an outlying D.C. suburb, officials simplified the fee-waiver process — from an explanation why parents couldn’t afford the entry price to a simple checkbox — and participation shot up by 80 percent in high-poverty schools.
Veterans in the Ivy League: Students Seek to Up Their Ranks, Associated Press
Only three Harvard undergrads served in the military; at Princeton, only one. A new intercollegiate student organization, the Ivy League Veterans Council, is advocating that the elite schools’ administrations should do more to bring former service members into their colleges by recruiting soldiers as if they were athletes, establishing a veterans’ office on campus or accepting transfer credits.
King County Tries Counseling, Self-Reflection Instead of Jail for Teens, The Seattle Times
Which juvenile justice system seems preferable: one where kids leave hardened by disruptive prison sentences or one where teens emerge with a better understanding of themselves and their crimes? In a first attempt at restorative justice, the top juvenile prosecutor in King County, Wash., put one defiant, 15-year-old robber through 108 hours of hearings to see if self-reflection could change his attitude where prison cells had failed.
In Miami, Veterans Are Lawyering Up
When Guillermo Rose, 70, a retired Vietnam veteran, returned from a four-month trip in Panama, he expected to find his car where he’d left it: in a handicapped spot at the Miami International Airport parking garage, where disabled veterans were promised free parking. But the car had been moved elsewhere in the garage — and Rose had been slammed with a $1,600 bill for the space, far more than he could afford on his disability checks. He made the charge on his credit card and drove home, panicked.
Through his contacts at the American Legion and the VA, Rose heard about Mission United Veterans Pro Bono Project, which offers free legal assistance to South Florida vets. Housed within the Legal Aid Service and the charity United Way, a team of two staff lawyers and 380 volunteer attorneys help 1,500 former warriors, pilots, sailors and marines in Broward County annually with any legal questions they may have. Whether it’s fighting evictions, navigating family court, negotiating with creditors, changing discharge status or contesting parking tickets, the volunteer lawyers will take on any case. Within three weeks, Mission United had persuaded the Miami airport to reverse the charge — a small but important victory to a veteran who once felt ignored by American society.
“When I came back from Vietnam in 1971, they didn’t do anything for us: no jobs, no nothing. As soon as you’d tell employers you’re back from Vietnam, they weren’t interested,” says Rose, a disabled vet. “We’re treated better today than when I was a young guy. It makes me feel good that, finally, they’re helping out the veterans.”
Compared to half a century ago, veterans’ transition back into civilian society has been relatively smooth. While far from perfect, more medical options are available, the GI Bill still guarantees free college, housing authorities expedite applications from homeless vets, and job training can follow a tour of duty. Missing from that list, though, is legal help, which can affect everything else, note the attorneys who started Mission United three years ago. An improper discharge, for example, could limit a vet from receiving valuable benefits, or it might be misinterpreted by prospective landlords and employers as being found guilty before a court-martial.
This extra bit of know-how can be essential as veterans try to get their affairs back in order after years at sea or fighting abroad, adds Melissa Malone, a spokeswoman for Mission United. “These young men and women left their homes, their bank accounts, their family and kids. They left their lives here, and oftentimes, they put someone else in charge of it,” she says. “When they come home, it’s been a length of time and things might not be the same as before. Perhaps they have PTSD or some other war zone–induced challenges.” Seeing off-the-charts suicide rates for post-combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, Malone wonders how many took their own lives because they felt mired in a situation where a lawyer could have intervened.
While some critics take issue with the program offering help only to veterans, its volunteers see an underserved population with a unique set of circumstances. Repeated experience working with the Department of Defense or a VA hospital allows the project’s attorneys to develop an expertise, says James Heaton, Mission United’s lead lawyer. The situation often necessitates “some specialty,” and that only comes from “dealing day-to-day with the issues facing veterans,” he adds.
Heaton says the project developed from a long-seated desire to work in public service. After graduating law school and moving back home to Broward County, he contacted several veterans groups to volunteer his time. When Mission United asked him to take a full-time position developing legal assistance for former military, Heaton says he couldn’t refuse. “I went all in, and I haven’t had any regrets since.”
These days, Heaton is working on expanding the model nationally. He presented the idea to other United Way chapters earlier this year at a conference, and he discussed building a national network at a recent summit hosted by the American Bar Association. While nothing is officially on the books, Heaton says he’s already seen a glimmer of what a national network could accomplish when he calls colleagues across the country to ask if similar legal developments are popping up in their communities. “It’s not only a network for veterans, but also a network for professionals.”
That’s good news to Rose’s ears. He never expected to need legal help, but he recognizes that only an expert could have helped him reverse the airport’s steep bill. “I’m just happy Mission United helped me out,” he says. “And I’m glad to let other veterans who might need legal help know where they can find it.”
Heaton emphasizes that former service members helped civilians by honorably serving our country. Mission United’s legal aid, to him, is simply paying back what we owe in return.
The Mission United Veterans Pro Bono Project is a recipient of the 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media and technology.
Homepage photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
Upstanders: A Warrior’s Workout
Former pro football player David Vobora gave up a lucrative career in private fitness to work with wounded warriors. His workouts have brought them new strength and inspiration.
Upstanders is a collection of short stories celebrating ordinary people doing extraordinary things to create positive change in their communities produced by Howard Schultz and Rajiv Chandrasekaran. These stories of humanity remind us that we all have the power to make a difference.
The Newspaper That Tells Tales of Homelessness, How to Help the Poor Build Credit and More
On the Streets with a Newspaper Vendor Trying to Sell His Story, CityLab
It can be uncomfortable shelling out change to a beggar living on the street, but would you be willing to pay $2 for a newspaper about homelessness and poverty? Robert Williams, a Marine Corps veteran who writes for Street Sense, a biweekly broadsheet in Washington, D.C., hopes so. For every copy he sells, he keeps 75 percent, his only source of income.
Banking on Justice, YES! Magazine
In the impoverished Mississippi Delta region, most locals can’t borrow from large banks such as Citibank, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase because small loans don’t make enough interest to be worthwhile. Instead, residents are increasingly turning to Community Development Financial Institutions, known as CDFIs, which receive federal assistance in exchange for making capital available in low-income areas.
When Teachers Take A Breath, Students Can Bloom, NPR
Educators have it rough. If keeping up with children’s energy levels for six hours isn’t enough, they also need to help students cope with difficulties outside the classroom and meet the rigors of state testing and federal standards. That can lead to a lot of stress, which is why CARE for Teachers trains educators in meditation techniques proven to reduce anxiety and burnout.
MORE: Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation
Go Inside the Mission That’s Bringing the Federal Government into the Digital Age
Eight years after President Barack Obama promised to change the way Washington does business, there’s not much evidence of a new era of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. His administration, however, has brought an antiquated, disjointed and inflexible bureaucratic system into the tech age. With a team of 153 people working across agencies, the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) retooled and modernized online applications for student loans, veteran’s healthcare and immigration visas. NationSwell spoke with Haley Van Dyck, a San Francisco native who co-founded the initiative, about running the federal government’s in-house startup.
The President asked you personally to change the government’s online systems. Why did you say yes?
Well, the president is a pretty hard guy to say no to! Honestly, why I’m here is because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else right now. Government is, I think, an overlooked platform for creating change in people’s lives. When you take a platform the size and scale of the United States government and you combine it with the transformative power of technology to create change, it can be a force multiplier for good.
What specifically are you integrating into government operations?
Our team is focused on how we can bring in the best technology talent across the country and pair it with the innovators in government to focus more on the underlying systems. There are services that government provides every single day that are utterly life changing for Americans, and whatever we can do to bring what Silicon Valley has learned about providing planetary-scale digital services that work into services that are in desperate need of upgrades is an incredibly appealing mission.
The federal government currently spends $86 billion on IT projects, but nearly all these projects go over budget or miss deadlines. Two out of every five are shut down. What’s getting in the way?
There are a lot of factors that go into it, so there’s no easy answer. Government still builds software the same way it builds battleships: very expensive, long planning cycles. That is simply not the way that Silicon Valley and the tech industry writ large has become one of the most innovative sectors, because it’s found ways to take very, very large projects and break them up into smaller pieces where they’re more approachable and [easier to] deliver results on a much faster, much less risky surface area. I think that is one of the big problems of government — it’s structured to do these large projects, and that’s what it continues to do.
Another problem we run into is just outdated technology. You will still find COBOL [a 1959 computer programming language] alive and well in parts of the United States government, because doing these kinds of technology upgrades are hard and complicated and challenging, and it takes a lot of work. So those two — the mentality as well as the existing technology — combine together make a very, very hard problem to solve. That’s basically what our team is targeting, right?
The rollout of healthcare.gov, by anyone’s assessment, was a logistical disaster and a political nightmare. Did that failure mark a turning point in how the government does its business?
There was obviously a ton of work underway long before healthcare.gov happened to solve this problem. But absolutely, I do think healthcare.gov was an incredibly critical turning point in two big ways. The first and most important one is that the rescue effort of healthcare.gov was one of the first times that many people with technology and engineering backgrounds were able to see how their skill-sets could truly help benefit a large number of their fellow Americans. It really shone a light onto the pathway for public service. The second way in which it was a defining moment was internally across government (for everyone from the White House down) it showed that the status quo right now is the riskiest option. The way the government goes about building software today is not successful and needed to change. That was a critical piece of energy and momentum that we needed to break the inertia and look at the problem from a different perspective.
Tell us a little bit about your first project with “boots on the ground,” where a team streamlined the transfer of health records from the Department of Defense to the Veterans Administration. Why start with such a huge bureaucracy?
If we were filtering for where the easy problems were, we wouldn’t have a ton of business. We ended up very excited and eager to work with the VA because we believe that veterans deserve a world-class experience when applying for the benefits after all they’ve done in service of their country. So it was an incredibly motivating mission.
Where does that project stand now?
We’re really excited because the team is making a ton of traction even in one of the largest, most entrenched bureaucracies in government. We’ve found incredible partners and supporters inside the VA who are really doing the heavy lifting and the hard work of creating culture change inside the agency, as they’re looking at how to improve services for veterans from all angles. The team is focused on two areas. First, how do we improve the experience for the veterans? Right now there are hundreds of websites, all intending to help veterans get access to their benefits. The work being done is streamlining all those service offerings and websites into a single place, where veterans can get better information and access to the benefits. Vets.gov is the new website that we’re building. It’s in beta and it’s launched for education and health benefits, and we continue to add services to it regularly.
The second big areas we spend a lot of time working is on the tools for the dedicated civil servants inside the VA to make it as easy as possible for them to complete their job of providing services to the vets. We just launched a product we’re excited about called Caseflow, which was designed with adjudicators inside the VA. It’s focused on streamlining and improving application processing. We realize that by helping upgrade the outdated systems that a lot of employees were using, we’re able to help the vets themselves.
In what ways is USDS similar to your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley tech startup? And in what ways would you notice a difference?
We’re in incredible scrappy, bootstrap office spaces, with people running around in jeans, Post-It notes everywhere, tons of white boards and big discussions happening left and right. In many ways it looks and feels very, very similar to many of the startups you see across the country. But a couple of ways that it’s different, we’re actually quite proud of. For example, we have a very diverse team and are over 50 percent women, which I think makes different from a lot of companies in the Valley.
You’ve mentioned that USDS is easing arduous applications and centralizing contact information in one website. How does that work actually benefit the most vulnerable Americans?
I don’t want to pontificate too much on the status of our tech industry, but as you see various tech companies create change across the industry, they’re simplifying and improving the lives of Americans and really taking out a lot of the biggest inconveniences that we have. It is absolutely imperative that our government makes that same jump to providing services the same way that the rest of the industry does. The internet is obviously a huge conduit for that. In order to make sure that divide doesn’t become larger, between the people who are benefiting from the tech revolution and those who aren’t, government should make sure that we are also modernizing our services for the primary platform where people are looking to do business and communicate.
Now, that doesn’t mean it’s the only channel. We, as the government, do not have the luxury of segmenting our audiences the way that most companies do. We can’t just care about people on the internet. We have to care about those who don’t have access. But by the work we’re doing through actual user-centered design and modern technology stacks, we are able to do things like design for mobile, which is also addressing a huge percentage of Americans who now have access to internet only through smartphones and not through broadband. So I think that it’s an incredibly important part of the conversation, but it’s also not the entire conversation.
MORE: This Is a Smart, Nonpartisan Way to Improve Local Government
For Veterans Facing Employment Difficulties, This Boot Camp Boosts Their Tech Skills
“Thank you for your service, but we can’t accept you for this position.” That’s what Jerome Hardaway, an Air Force veteran, heard from several potential employers after he returned stateside from three tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Coming home amidst the second worst economic slowdown this country had ever seen didn’t help, but Hardaway suspects being fresh out of the armed services was a big problem to those looking over his résumé. “Inheriting the stigma of the Vietnam veteran, some people considered us unskilled or untrained,” he says. Today, with the economy largely back on track, Hardaway still hears about comrades struggling to find jobs. The overall veteran unemployment rate recently fell below the civilian unemployment rate, hitting a seven-year low of 3.9 percent in October 2015, but that still means about 422,000 veterans are out of work.
“For a lot of these [employers], the last person that served in their family was in World War II. We’ve gotten so far from there. If you served your country then, you knew you were not going to go homeless, that you’d get a job,” Hardaway says. “We’ve gone from joining the military being the best decision of your life to now, it could possibly put you in a worse position.”
To change that, Hardaway started looking for work in a rapidly growing sector: the tech world. The barriers to entry, like knowing how to code and compute, were higher there, but so was the possibility of finding a high-paying job. Hardaway had some experience — he started fiddling with computers in 2007, while stationed in Iraq, mostly “as a way to keep my sanity,” — but it was General Assembly’s 12-week boot camp in 2014 and a full-ride scholarship from the group’s Opportunity Fund that helped him transition to a full-time career in coding. Now, Hardaway is paying it forward by setting a goal of helping 1,000 fellow veterans follow him into software development.
When Hardaway enlisted, the wars in the Middle East were still new. Soldiers hadn’t started coming home, and the recruiters were persuasive, appealing to his patriotism and the sense of duty he felt coming from a military family. Hardaway, to be sure, doesn’t regret his service — “I’m happy I did it because I wouldn’t be where I am now,” he says, but finding financial stability as an African-American male and combat veteran in Tennessee was tough. Hardaway occasionally found freelance web design gigs, but on the whole, Memphis felt more “old-folksy” than “tech-savvy,” he says. “They call themselves a city,” he jokes. “They have tall buildings, but it’s really a town.” Its social structure operates on who you know, and Hardaway missed six and a half years of making connections while deployed.
He considered enrolling in a degree program, but he couldn’t find a school that offered what veterans needed as “24-year-olds reintegrating into civilian society.” A class might teach him HTML or CSS, but he wanted a foundation of strong logical reasoning to solve problems that would come up on the job. By chance, he saw a post about General Assembly’s Opportunity Fund on Facebook and applied. The first year, his application was rejected. Determined, he reapplied the following year. Within a week of losing his job, he was accepted for a boot camp in Manhattan.
He says practicing, “just making us solve problems every day,” was the most helpful part of his experience. “It’s like boxing,” he tells other veterans. “I can teach you how to throw all the punches, but you’re not going to be able to know if your first punch should be the right cross or an uppercut.” Now, he knows which tools to use and when. He says he’s started to think like a programmer, rather than a guy who liked messing around with computers.
“I tell people I’ve gone from no job to having one. I can’t understate the importance of General Assembly,” he says. “But I don’t feel like I’m special. I was willing to do the work. I went from being fired to being hired and getting invited to the White House.”
Dressed in sharp suits, a fan of shaken martinis and hot bowls of ramen, Hardaway today might not appear like the stereotype of a veteran. But his military training quickly comes out in conversation. “Roger that,” he wrote in an email about setting up an interview. His yes and no are “negative” and “affirmative,” and they’re often followed by a “Sir.” Above all, Hardaway strives to live up to the Air Force’s core value of excellence in all you do. That’s the principle that guides his nonprofit, Vets Who Code, in closing “the digital talent gap” for veterans. (A celebration of the group is why Hardaway went to the White House.)
Hardaway says veterans are particularly attuned to tech, because from the minute they enter basic training, they’re constantly working on solving problems in high-stress situations. While some employers may doubt those skills can translate from the battlefield to an office, Hardaway is blazing a path for other warriors to follow by sitting down at the keyboard.
Watch the video above to see how General Assembly helped Hardaway achieve a career in the tech sector.
MORE: The School That’s Making a Career in Tech Possible for Everyone
This Is Why Hollywood’s Depiction of Veterans Must Change
When it comes to seeing veterans on the big screen, Tom Cruise leading a protest from his wheelchair in “Born on the Fourth of July” or Christopher Walken and Robert DeNiro playing a final game of Russian roulette in “The Deer Hunter” probably come to mind. But Hollywood’s usual portrayal of service members being physically and psychologically wounded is too narrow, says Charlie Ebersol, a Los Angeles-based TV and film producer. “It’s so staid and boring.”
Having on-screen veterans look like ordinary Americans, however, causes our views and politics will change, Ebersol believes. So along with Got Your 6 and support from the White House, he developed a certification system for films and television shows that “contain a representative and balanced depiction of veterans.” (Think: Chris Pratt playing a Navy veteran in the blockbuster Jurassic World, or the latest season of Dancing with the Stars, which featured an Army vet and double amputee doing the Tango.)
NationSwell recently spoke to Ebersol by phone from Southern California about the role Hollywood should be playing in bridging the civilian-military divide.
What misconceptions does traditional media perpetuate about veterans?
That they’re either heroes or they’re victims; they either need our help or they don’t need any help at all. It’s not binary, and the real story is so much more complex and interesting, in that, you have great opportunity in all these veterans coming home, but we don’t take advantage of it because we think they all have PTSD or hero syndrome.
How are you personally changing that narrative?
In keeping with Hollywood tradition, I operate from a philosophy that if you offer some sort of shiny prize or award to producers, they will do what they need to do to get said prize. So we’ve been certifying movies and television shows that do a good job telling veterans’ stories. Lo and behold, people started telling better veterans’ stories when they got a gold star at the end of their show or movie.
Should filmmakers be meeting with veterans to turn their stories into films?
It’s literally that simple. The problem is that, for so long, we were trying to drum up support for the veterans coming home. To do that, people have always [done something similar] to those ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) commercials where the dogs look really pathetic and what’s her name — [Sarah] McLachlan — is playing her sad song. You may donate money, but what they found was the best way to get people to actually adopt dogs was to show how much fun and how fabulous these dogs were.
After Word War II, veterans came back and people wanted to hire them because they were highly trained. They knew they did well under pressure, and some people started really reaching out. We don’t do that [today]. So when you look for a story, all you really have to do is talk to a veteran, say, “Thank you for your service. Can you tell me about interesting people that are in your lives or unique stories?” And the majority of the stories you’re going to hear are not going to be stories of, “oh, my buddy who’s got a massive drinking problem and is living on the street,” because that’s such a fraction of the population. A lot of the stories are going to be about guys who served two or three tours and now they run a hardware shop or now they’re working in a corporation or are in the tech business. Those stories make for interesting characters.
In telling these stories, what have you learned about what defines an American soldier?
Loyalty, duty and commitment. As an employer, when I’m interviewing somebody, if I could know inherently those were a person’s three strongest traits, that would be the ultimate cheat sheet. That’s the beauty of hiring a veteran. You know going in that that person is loyal, feels a sense of duty and is all about commitment because the guy or girl put themselves in harm’s way for their country and for their fellow soldier or sailor or airman. That’s what you’re looking for in a company, in a family, in a friend. You want people that you know are going to show up, and nobody shows up like the military.
What can the rest of us do to support veterans?
The platitude needs to stop being, “Thank you for your service,” and actualize that into something meaningful. The yellow ribbon and the stickers, that’s all well and good, but that’s not actually translating into anything. We have to look past that and ask, “How are we creating job opportunities? How are we creating community support where we’re embracing these people?” A lot of people want to do it under the guise of “They served our country, so we owe them.” That’s not what I’m saying. Don’t get me wrong: You do have to take into account that we enjoy our freedoms because of them. But I think the other side of it is significantly more important; they have show their true character and their true colors, and in showing us that and in being trained, at the absolute worst, they are certainly the best qualified people for almost any job.
It’s rare that the person I hire into my company is the most suited because they went to the right types of schools; it’s always about how they act under pressure and how they understand teamwork and the mission being bigger than the man or woman. Veterans are always significantly better at that than anyone else.
MORE: Why Is It So Hard to Understand What It’s Like to Be a Veteran?