FVC’s target number for veterans attending the career fair was modest – we were hoping for at least 50.

In fact, 136 registered in advance or at the door to seek new jobs or career direction. They represented military generations going back to WWII, with many Viet Nam veterans as well as younger vets with service in the past decade.

We introduced this video at the career fair.

FOOD & FARMING

VETERANS CAREER FAIR

March 5, 2010 * 9 AM – 4 PM

Veterans Memorial Building

1351 Maple Avenue, Santa Rosa

Event Coordinator: Linda Speel  -   linda (at) farmvetco.org

FOR DETAILS, CLICK HERE

Here’s another press account of the great work that Colin and Karen Archipley are doing down in Valley Center, CA. It’s great that they’re getting so much attention because they are a fantastic model for the mission of FVC.

Here are some quotes from the story in the North County Times.

The recycling process Archipley uses to grow bio-hydroponic organic basil may be part of thefuture of farming, especially in Southern California, where water is in increasingly short supply.

But for the men working with Archipley last week, their future is much more personal. The workers are part of a unique program coordinated by the Department of Veterans Affairs t

o offer a second chance, as well as a peaceful environment, to vets.

* * * * *

Archipley, 28, said he never imagined his small farm could help fellow veterans when he started the project in 2006 after returning from three tours in Iraq. Then again, while growing up in Northern California, he never thought he would be farmer.

“I didn’t have any background,” he said about farming. “My wife had an itch to move to Italy a couple of years ago, and I didn’t want to move out of the United States. But a friend said if you like Italy, you should check this place out.”

The rolling, open hills surrounding his farm looked enough like Tuscany for the couple, and Archipley and his wife, Karen, moved onto the property and began selling their avocados and basil at local farmer’s markets.

* * * * *

Archipley said he would like to see the program duplicated around the world, and he sees it having great potential for veterans returning from urban wars.

“Take an Iraq vet or an Afghanistan vet, where every roof was a potential danger,” he said. “What do you do? Come back and work in an urban environment? You can’t just put them in Wal-Mart and expect them to greet customers.”

The first six veterans through the program have been older than the typical Afghanistan and Iraq vets, but the program already has its own success stories. One of the first two men in the program was a homeless Desert Storm veteran, who now is employed by Archipley and living in a mobile home on the farm.

Nadia McCaffery honored her son, who was killed in action, by founding Veterans Village – a second, healing home for veterans returning from the wars. To that end, she has been seeking out land and facilities for these homes. One great potential village has been offered near St. Cloud, Minnesota – the Sauk Center.

An article in the Sauk Herald describes the latest developments in this project.

Veterans project heads in new direction
New leaders focus in on Washington

By Bryan Zollman

The proposed veterans village at Oak Ridge north of Sauk Centre has a new name, new leaders and a new direction.

The project is said to be gaining steam toward Washington, as new leaders have emerged and hope to secure federal funding to not only purchase the $3.6 million property, but make significant improvements to its existing structures.

One of those leaders is Jimmie Coulthard, who was in Sauk Centre March 24, speaking to the local Rotary Club about the proposal.

Coulthard, 64, a Vietnam veteran who has made a name for himself by securing government dollars for veteran housing for the past two decades, is optimistic about turning the Oak Ridge property into “Valley Forge Village,” a 400-unit retreat for veterans and their families where they may stay as long as they wish in a self-sustaining common interest community that offers training and reintegration strategies.

“We could pull it off very quickly,” Coulthard said in a phone interview from his home in River Falls, Wis. “It’s more than shovel ready.”

Coulthard said the facility would be intended as a non-medical facility where veterans can go voluntarily.

“We’re trying to stay away from it being institutional,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a place you are discharged to.”

Coulthard said Sauk Centre is an ideal location because of the vicinity of VA centers in Alexandria and St. Cloud as well as schools such as Alexandria Technical College, which veterans could attend to learn new trades or professions. He said the remodel and construction phase could produce 60 jobs, but he envisions as many as 200 if the project came to fruition.

Funding

While the personnel has changed, one obstacle has remained. Where will the money come from?

“I don’t know where it is going to come from,” Coulthard said. “But for me there is nothing as strong as an idea whose time has come.”

Coulthard has twice visited Washington with colleagues associated with the project. He said he has met with several politicians and is trying to get federal agencies such as Health and Human Services, HUD, the Veterans Administration and the Department of Agriculture (organic farming would be a staple of the village) to work together.

“I’m trying to get them to take a look at this on a national level,” he said. “To me, that is where it makes most sense.”

Coulthard said it’s difficult to put a price tag on the project because the campus is so large.

“It’s such a wild guess,” he said. “I personally think $35 to $40 million would give us a top-of-the-line place.”

Who is Coulthard?

Jimmie Coulthard spent six years in the Army in the 1960s and spent 20 months in Vietnam.

“When I came home in 1968, this country was crazier than a tick,” he said.

He worked on riverboats for awhile before becoming a chemical dependency counselor.

“In 1984 my life fell apart so I went to the VA to get help and changed careers,” he said.

He eventually landed a job at the Hazelden Foundation, a nationally recognized treatment center in the Twin Cities. In 1992 he started a homeless veterans program that eventually led to several housing projects for veterans throughout the state, including Minneapolis and St. Cloud.

He hopes the Oak Ridge project will be his latest success story in helping veterans. He, along with Oak Ridge property owner Jim Jauss, and Nadia McCaffrey, the mother of Patrick McCaffrey, who was killed in the Iraq War, are slated for a visit to Washington April 19-21. He hopes to know more about the future of the project in the next couple months.

“People would love to see it saved, used, run responsibly and create some work,” he said. “With veterans you always feel served. They’re still out there serving. This is a worthwhile project to try and pull off. The stars are aligned for that place. It’s just ready.”

Founded 25 years ago to bring vocational training to people, including veterans, in the San Francisco Bay area, Inter-City Services has been ramping up its veteran training programs over the past couple of years. Speaking to a reporter from the Oakland Tribune, Executive Director Mansour Id-Deen revealed that the agency received, last December, $650,000 to train 144 people over the next two years. It has previously been given $500,000 to train 125 veterans.

At its location on 3269 Adeline St., Inter-City Services offers career counseling, office and computer training, computer repair, and GED preparation. If the applicant requires a different area of vocational training, he or she will be referred to another training institution with all fees paid.

All honorably discharged veterans, including those with disabilities, can find a home at Inter-City Services.

Inter-City Services has been receiving state funding for veteran training most years since 1998.

The most recent grant specified that 50 percent of the recipients should be recently separated veterans, that is, those coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq — soldiers like Stercks and Cooper.

“I don’t think we’ll have any trouble at all filling the 144 spots,” Id-Deen said.

On the other hand, Id-Deen observed that, just like Stercks and Cooper, it sometimes takes a while before veterans find the agency. Inter-City Services says its goal is to provide a seamless service from military to civilian employment.

The $787 billion economic stimulus law enacted last month provides a tax credit of $2400 to employers for each unemployed veteran they hire. FVC is having good success matching vets with jobs in agriculture, and this incentive can only help provide more job opportunities.

According to an article on CNN’s Small Business page,

If you hire an unemployed military vet or a high-school dropout, you could get a $2,400 per worker credit on your taxes. The existing Work Opportunity Tax Credit lets businesses claim a tax credit for 40% of the first $6,000 in wages paid to a worker who falls into a qualifying “target group” of traditionally disadvantaged workers. The recovery bill adds two new classes of qualifying workers: veterans who left the military within the past five years and collected unemployment for at least four weeks before being hired, and “disconnected youths.” A worker counts as “disconnected” if they’re between the ages of 16 and 25 and haven’t attended school or had regular employment in the past six months.

The San Francisco-based organization that has championed the transition of many veterans from military to civilian life has just opened an office across the Bay in Oakland that will concentrate on job-training and assistance.

As described in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle,

“We’re finding that larger numbers of these vets are coming back not so much to San Francisco proper,” said Dave Lopez, director of the organization’s jobs program. “I would say the majority are coming back to the East Bay, at least the ones we’re seeing in the employment and training unit.”

The year ending last September saw an average of 23 vets a month seeking job help from the group, up from nine vets a month before that. In the last month, there were 39, Lopez said.

“Most of the ones we’re seeing are also younger aged,” Lopez said. The bulk of them are between 21 and 26, he said, and have limited job skills because they enlisted soon after leaving school.

The new Swords to Plowshares center opened earlier this month at 1433 Webster St. in downtown Oakland. The two staffers, Gulf War vet Ken Crawford and Vietnam War vet Eric Nichols, occupy a space amid a suite of offices housing other nonprofit organizations that can be partners, Lopez said.

Swords to Plowshares gets money from federal and state grants, as well as from private foundations, to pay for training. It also helps arrange for temporary housing and part time employment while the veterans are attending training courses, and helps with resumes and transportation to interviews.

The new Swords to Plowshares employment and training office can be reached at (510) 891-8773. The organization’s main office in San Francisco can be reached at (415) 252-4788.

For more info: swords-to-plowshares.org

Swords to Plowshares announced this week its plans to open an Oakland-based facility that “will include one-on-one employment counseling, interview coaching and assistance with job search and costs.” See the local ABC-TV video story here.

A San Francisco-based group has announced plans to open an employment and training office for Bay Area veterans. “We are opening this new satellite office in Oakland to make it easier for veterans to access veteran-specific employment and training services in their community,” explained Amy N. Fairweather, director of the Iraq Veteran Project for the “Swords to Plowshares” veteran support organization.

“We see a growing number of veterans in the East Bay, and we want to make employment and training services as convenient and accessible as possible,” she said.

The services offered at the Oakland office will include one-on-one employment counseling, interview coaching and assistance with job search and costs. The new office also will reach out to employers in the community and secure interviews for clients.

“We also hope to have our other service departments visit that office periodically to provide help with GI Bill and [Veterans Affairs Department] benefits,” Fairweather said.

Swords to Plowshares helps veterans with health and social services, transitional and permanent housing, employment and training and through its Iraq Veteran Project.

“We launched the Iraq Veteran Project in 2005 to better meet the needs of a new and unique population of post-9/11 veterans,” Fairweather said. The Iraq Veteran Project staff provides resources and referrals to veterans of operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom and their families, including help with navigating educational benefits, accessing VA care and finding veterans services where they live, she added.

Michael Ergo, a former Marine sergeant, recently used the group’s employment training program to complete a paralegal certificate course at San Francisco State University.

“When I went in to see them, I asked if they had any legal training programs to put me in,” Ergo said. “They found the paralegal program within an hour. I was enrolled within a week. Swords to Plowshares definitely care about their clients. I got the impression that they were eager to help me and did not consider it a burden to serve me.”

A handful of Vietnam veterans established Swords to Plowshares in 1974. Today, a staff of 85 helps veterans with transitional and supportive housing, mental health care, employment and training, legal services and case management.

In additional to its local services, Swords to Plowshares now provides legal representation for VA claims and discharge review services to post-9/11 veterans regardless of where they live. The group also has developed military and veteran cultural competency training for clinicians and first responders to give them a basic understanding of resources and issues.

“Of course, we continue to provide our local services to veterans of all eras, but hope that by intervening as soon as possible, we will prevent this new generation of combat veterans from some of the suffering their chronically homeless predecessors continue to endure,” Fairweather said.

A survey by CareerBuilder.com found that almost one in five returning veterans took at least 6 months to find a job. Nearly one in ten took longer than a year.

One-in-five veterans believe that the biggest challenge to getting hired for a civilian position is employers’ inability to understand how military skills can fulfill qualifications for civilian positions. Veterans also point to a lack of a college degree, a low number of jobs in their area and an inexperience with civilian job interviewing as other reasons they feel they aren’t finding

employment.

CareerBuilder does not currently carry much in the way of agricultural job possibilities for vets. That’s where FVC is beginning to build its capacity. As Michael O’Gorman said, in an article describing our recent benefit in Davenport, CA,

We’re helping veterans link up with a healing and productive place after their service. What we see here is a perfectly symbiotic relationship. The farming community needs these young workers and the economy is teaching us that a career in re-strengthening our agricultural production is the safest job.

An article in the Kansas City Star, republished on the Truthout site, describes the additional hardship being experienced by veterans already struggling with disabilities and difficulties holding on to jobs in a downward spiralling economy.

Although solid numbers on veteran foreclosures are not available, RealtyTrac, a Web site that follows foreclosures nationwide, reported earlier this year that areas with large numbers of military personnel have foreclosures at a rate four times the national average.

For some of the veterans, like Wilson, disability is a major factor. But even veterans without disabilities are having trouble for a variety of reasons: unemployment and repeated calls to duty, frequent relocations that limit the chance to build equity, and low pay for active service members.

Additionally, many military families were targeted by subprime mortgage sellers that opened offices near bases, leaving the families paying higher interest rates and more loan fees.

“They either can’t make a rent payment or mortgage payment, or they’re losing their car, or at least the threat is there,” said Shari Grewe, a transition patient advocate at the Kansas City Veterans Affairs Medical Center for veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. She deals with about 35 veterans a day who are having trouble making payments, among other problems.