Read the related story: Colleges Go Off Campus to Bridge Military-Civilian Divide
Syracuse University
Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans With Disabilities, Institute for Veterans and Military Families
J. Michael Haynie, a professor of entrepreneurship at the niversity’s Whitman School of Management, created the boot camp in 2007, to train wounded veterans to run their own businesses. Today seven other universities work with with Syracuse to offer the program on their campuses.
More than 600 veterans have completed the program, and nearly three-quarters now operate their own businesses. The venture has drawn the attention of the federal Small Business Administration, which asked Mr. Haynie to create similar programs for female veterans and members of the Reserve and National Guard.
Last year Syracuse established the Institute for Veterans and Military Families to focus on social, economic, and educational policy issues affecting that population. Believed to be the first academic institute dedicated to veterans, the institute conducts, finances, and disseminates related academic research. It also collaborates with the private sector to support veterans’ employment.
Recently Mr. Haynie has worked with Google to find ways to use the company’s technology to deliver employment training to veterans. Last month the Institute for Veterans and Military Families and Google held a Veterans Start-Up Weekend in San Diego, aimed at encouraging entrepreneurship among veterans.
Purdue University
Military Family Research Institute
In Indiana, Purdue’s Military Family Research Institute, founded in 2000, serves as a bridge between the military community and the general public. Its goal is to strengthen support for veterans and military families through academic research, community work, and advocacy on policy matters. It also guides civilians who want to aid veterans and military families but are unsure how to get started.
Last month the institute coordinated with the city of Lafayette and the Indiana Veterans Home to hold the state’s first Homeless Veterans Summit. In July it set the agenda for Student Veterans of America’s three-day meeting at Google headquarters to help student-veteran campus groups better connect with veterans. The institute’s research has recently focused on such topics as combat trauma, traumatic brain injuries, and suicide prevention.
The university’s work is part of a broader national effort to aid a small but significant segment of the population whose transition to civilian life—successful or not—will have social and economic ramifications for years to come, says Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, the institute’s director and a professor of human development and family studies at Purdue.
“As a society, it’s in our own self-interest to make sure they have the smoothest transition possible back to civilian life,” Ms. Wadsworth says. “It makes good sense that an institution like ours should be thinking about what the citizens of this state are experiencing.”
University of South California
Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans and Military Families
Affiliated with USC’s School of Social Work, the center grew out of administrators’ desire to help social-service providers in the state who were seeing an uptick in veterans but were unfamiliar with military culture and unprepared, in a clinical sense, to deal with them. Through partnerships with public agencies and veterans’ groups, the center is trying to improve the social services that veterans receive in California. It also conducts research on the military population and recently began serving as statewide coordinator for the Los Angeles Veterans Collaborative.
When the center was created, in 2009, says Anthony M. Hassan, its director, the sense was: “This isn’t about the wars. This is about the men and women returning to our communities and families.”
“We need a mental-health work force that’s ready, and right now there isn’t one,” says Mr. Hassan, a social worker and retired Air Force officer.
Meanwhile, USC’s graduate program in social work has rolled out a military-specific curriculum meant to train future practitioners to work with the veteran population. Fourteen students graduated from the program in 2010; this year about 250 are expected to complete it. In all, about one-third of students pursuing the concentration are veterans or relatives of veterans or active-duty service members.
The center wants service members’ and veterans’ experiences to inform the curriculum: Researchers there just finished a yearlong project tracking monthly the 250 or so members of a California National Guard unit who had just returned from a deployment in Iraq. The center is also working with USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies to develop avatars of veterans for students’ training.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Citizen Soldier Support Program
The university’s Odum Institute for Research in Social Science is home to this federally financed program, started in 2005, that is designed to connect service members and veterans—particularly those in rural areas, as well as in the Reserve and National Guard—with existing social services. Using in-person and online trainings, the program has instructed more than 4,000 service providers in all 50 states on how to work with service members, veterans, and their families.
“The resources from a large research university are critical,” says Robert S. Goodale, a former chief executive of the Harris Teeter grocery chain, who has directed the program since 2009. “We can get places we wouldn’t otherwise be able to to get our message across.”
The support program uses mapping tools and statistical analyses to identify populations of reservists and veterans isolated from VA and civilian service providers. About half of all veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan eligible for health care from the Department of Veterans Affairs aren’t registered with the VA, says Mr. Goodale: “That’s why civilian providers who understand the issues are so extremely important.”
State officials criticized the Citizen Soldier Support Program in 2009 for failing to produce concrete results. Today its future is again uncertain: Federal funds will run out this month.
