From Military Officer to Entrepreneur: How One Veteran is Focusing on Renewing America

The Got Your 6 campaign is celebrating the accomplishments of veterans through Storytellers, a series of videos that media partners — including NationSwell — are promoting to raise awareness of all that our veterans have to offer the country.
In the weeks ahead, we’ll share the stories of a U.S. Army Combat veteran who uses comedy to heal war wounds, a punk rocker who found his sense of purpose through service, a West Point graduate who says the military taught her how to unf*** things and more.
The first video features Greg Behrman, the founder and CEO of NationSwell. His talk centers on three projects that he’s focused on since returning from deployment: NationSwell, the Connecticut Heroes Project, and his favorite project, which you’ll have to watch to discover!
Behrman opens his talk standing before a picture of his 10-week-old self, squeezed between his mom and his dad — who, as a boy growing up in South Africa, dreamt of moving to America one day. Behrman says that his perception of the United States has always been linked to the sacrifice his parents made and the opportunities that afforded him.
One such opportunity was at the Harvard Kennedy School, where Behrman was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. While there, he spent a lot of his time reading the stories of service members, coming to the realization that he wanted to be a part of the Armed Forces. He commissioned in the U.S. Navy (much to his mom’s surprise, given his tendency toward seasickness), then did two years of reserve duty before deploying to Afghanistan and returning with the desire to build something new.
Behrman also speaks about his motivation for building a media company devoted to elevating solutions to national challenges, before going on to discuss his work to address veteran homelessness in Connecticut, his home state, and concluding with his favorite project, who looks very much like his 10-week-old self.
“My hope for her is the same one, I think, that compelled my parents to move halfway across the world all those years ago,” he says. “It’s that she has the opportunity to pursue her dreams and the chance to realize her full potential.”

How Is Your State Preparing for Climate Change?

Can your state handle a Hurricane Sandy? A raging wildfire? A severe heat wave?
Climate change has been linked to a number of natural phenomena, and we must take the necessary steps to protect ourselves and our home. However, some states are more prepared than others.
A new online tool from Georgetown Climate Center (a D.C.-based policy research group) is tracking what each state is doing.
The interactive tool, called the State Adaptation Progress Tracker, allows anyone to check if their state is preparing or making progress in combating climate change impacts such as storms and rising seas, says Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center.
MORE: Would Your State Survive a Climate Change Catastrophe?
The research group found that only 14 states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington) have adaptation plans and specific goals to protect itself  — such as cutting emissions, increasing the resiliency of infrastructure, preparing for a rise in sea level, or improving conservation efforts.
Eight other states (Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin) and Washington, D.C. have some level of planning underway.
“This research shows that a number of states have started implementing changes that will actually make their communities more resilient. That’s good news. Nearly half of all U.S. states also have at least some planning underway to prepare for climate change,” Arroyo adds. “Unfortunately, the research also shows that many states are still not treating this issue with the urgency that is called for.”
According to the data, it seems like the country as a whole could be doing a lot more work to safeguard itself from climate change. However, as Mother Jones reports, the idea behind the State Adaptation Progress is to foster healthy interstate competition, as well as help lawmakers from unprepared states learn from states that are leading the way.
“We hope that transparency will inspire more progress,” Arroyo​ says. “[States] are right there on the front lines. So it’s their policies that will be making the difference.”
DON’T MISS: 5 Very Simple, Practical Things You Can Do to Curb Climate Change

Even as the Drought Continues, Californians Can Drink From a Firehose of Solutions

Anyone who follows the news may hold their water bottles a little bit closer as they see how the country is running out of the liquid so central to our lives. After all, there are severe drought conditions — think: farms going thirsty and forests catching fire — in seven states. California, in particular, dominates headlines as it faces its third dry year in a row, with more than 60 percent of the state suffering from exceptional drought.
The list of consequences of this extreme weather will turn your mouth dry — from the billions that could be lost in farm revenue to the possibility of earthquakes brought on by groundwater withdrawal.
While the drought is nothing short of devastating (with some calling the situation in California a modern day Dust Bowl), the responses to the water shortage represent amazing examples of how crisis can yield creativity. Here are a few of our favorites.
California has put water conservation regulations into place, and the Los Angeles Times reports that those who continue to hose down their driveways or install wasteful water decorations can be fined up to $500 a day. Skeptical? Even if the state does not catch H2O wasters, unofficial “water cops” with mobile phones fill the void with their #DroughtShaming hashtag, posting pictures on virtual neighborhood watch programs.
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While these emergency restrictions and responses are temporary for now, they have the potential to raise awareness and change habits forever. Food editor and writer Elaine Corn put it perfectly in her post for the Sacramento Bee: “To protect ourselves from food shortages and to buffer California’s agricultural economy, we all should regard any adjustments that allow us to grow food with less water as permanent.”
Disasters like these demonstrate the connection between crisis and collaboration — both on a local and a global scale. For example, perhaps as we develop a fear about where our food will come from (or at least get scared away by high prices at produce stands), we will start to build our own community-supported agriculture systems. If we team up to give more to the land than we take from it, not only could we collaborate on fresh summer salads to bring to block parties, but we also could enrich our soil to soak up what little rain might fall in the years ahead.
MORE: One in Five Baltimore Residents Live in a Food Desert. These Neighbors are Growing their Own Produce.
In an example of collaboration across borders, researchers from the United States and Chile are working together to harvest fog — turning those tiny droplets you wipe off your windshields into drinking water. These kinds of partnerships will only gain more interest and momentum as the water supply shrinks and the need for new ideas grows. So perhaps as Texas looks to the Gulf of Mexico as a source for fresh water, it might also look a bit further to the Arabian Gulf and countries like Qatar, which already rely on desalinated water for the vast majority of their fresh water needs.
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As other sources of fresh water become scarcer, California is working on harnessing the power of the sun (instead of drawing on oil and gas) as a more sustainable way to power the water desalination process and turn brackish water into something drinkable. And there are other solutions, according to National Geographic, such as a smaller community working to merge its water system with a bigger neighbor, and the Kern County Water Agency is considering pumping nearly 50 miles of the California Aqueduct in reverse.
Of course, sometimes the best solutions come from rethinking how we use the tools already at our disposal, as reflected in a recent report from the Pacific Institute and the National Resources Defense Council, which looks at the massive amounts of water that could be saved by improving water use efficiency, increasing the capture of rainwater and stormwater and recycling and reusing water. See for yourself:
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And with Senate Democrats and House Republicans offering dueling solutions on how to aid California farmers, the state is seeking solutions from beyond the beltway, looking to startups like WellIntel, Tal-Ya, and WatrHub.
Ultimately, the solutions that help California get through the dry days should matter to everyone in America. And it’s not only because we may soon find ourselves dipping our bread and dressing our salad with a bottle of olive oil from the Golden State. It’s also because we can all learn a lot from the way the largest agricultural producer in the nation weathers this storm.