Community Highlight: West Michigan Veterans Coalition
Podcast Transcription
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Maddy: Welcome to another episode of PFC's Money Talk Podcast. As always, I'm your host Maddy, and today I have a very special guest with me, Paul Ryan, and I wanted to share a little bit of background on Paul. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame and was commissioned as an Ensign, is it Ensign?
Paul: Ensign.
Maddy: Ensign, you know what? I knew I was going to mess that up. In the United States Navy through Notre Dame's Navy ROTC program in 1975. He served on active duty in the Navy for five years and made one peacetime deployment to the Western Pacific. His subsequent service in the Navy Reserve spanned 25 years, including seven tours as commanding officer of various Navy Reserve units. And he retired from the Navy in 2005 with the rank of Captain. Welcome, Paul. Thank you so much for joining me.
Paul: Thank you for having me.
Maddy: Yes. And thank you for your service. I wanted to say that as well.
Paul: Thank you.
Maddy: That was a lot. You have quite the history in the Navy. And I would just love to hear more. You know, if you have anything in your time that stood out to you, I also love to hear if there's any lessons you've learned or things that you took with you after your time in the Navy. I mean, that's a large portion of your life, right?
Paul: Yeah, it was a big slice. I got my officer's commission two weeks after the Vietnam War ended. So, I'm not a Vietnam vet, almost in that demographic, I'm a Cold War veteran. So, I never served in combat and never came close. One of the things that I've seen and experienced in the variety of volunteer activities that I've been engaged in for the past 25, 26 years, including the West Michigan Veterans Coalition, is that back when I was on active duty, although, as I said, I'm not a Vietnam vet. I know a lot of Vietnam vets, and I hear their stories about the disdain that some segments of our population expressed towards the military at that time during the Vietnam era. I personally experienced a faint echo of that on my active-duty time, for example, we were not encouraged to wear our uniforms when we went off duty in the Navy that term is called Liberty. You're on liberty when you're off duty. That peacetime deployment that I made on the other hand we did a couple of port visits in Australia, and the Aussies absolutely loved us. We were not only encouraged to wear our uniforms ashore there was a program that was called I think it was sort of a slang thing, slang term, called Dial A Sailor, where local families would sign up to pick one of our crew members and take them home for a home cooked meal.
Maddy: Oh my gosh.
Paul: That was a cool thing. And our guys would be walking down the street in Newcastle or Brisbane or Fremantle or Sydney. And if there was a bar that they walked in front of the entrance to, somebody would pull him in and say, Yank, they couldn't buy a drink when we were down there. I had participated in one sort of official meeting with the Lord Mayor of Newcastle. Australia is a British Commonwealth, so they do the same kind of terminology. And the mayor has this pendant of jewels and things around his neck. And it was our officers and our senior enlisted, about 20 people from the crew having this reception. And the mayor was very direct with us and he said in 1942, Japanese submarines were lurking outside the harbor of our city here and it was you Yanks that made sure that they stayed away. They remembered their history and expressed a lot of appreciation for it. That was a different thing from the attitude that some, not all, but some segments of society had expressed in the United States at that time. You know, now 50 years on, or more, it's fashionable, it's cool to say, support the troops, where back then, for some, it was cool to disrespect the troops. And I tell people that, you know, that's an extremely welcome change in the mindset of our society at large. Now with the volunteer stuff that I wind up doing, I would ask, that's great that you support the troops, but what is it that you do to support them? Happy to give some suggestions or you give me some ideas, and we can take them to the house. I ended my active-duty, and it was in San Diego, all five years in San Diego, which was a little unusual. My last couple of years were on shore duty, which was very enjoyable. Now remember I'm from the New York area originally and when I got my orders to San Diego, my family said, oh, you're not going to enjoy it out there at all because it doesn't have any seasons. It doesn't have four seasons, not a chance. I spent Christmas Eve on the beach. I love Christmas lights on palm trees. So, yeah, no problem. And, you know, my wife is a born and raised Michigander, lived here her whole life. And she kind of embraces the snow where I kind of get a little crotchety about it. I've been, I've lived here since 1980, and I'm used to it by now.
Maddy: Right. You kind of have to be, right?
Paul: Can't beat them, join them, right?
Maddy: So, you said your wife is a lifelong Michigander. How did you, I'm just curious, how you met her, how you ended up here in Michigan.
Paul: Well, actually, I came here as a result of my first marriage. Laura Lee and I were married in 1990, 1996, and we met at work. I worked for a financial institution that was my civilian career. The way I look at reserve duty, whether it's in any of the reserve components of the National Guard, some people call that a part-time job. I don't. I call it a parallel career. So, you know, when you have individuals, not all of them, but many of them, you know, they stay in for more than one enlistment, or they get to the point where they can retire like I was able to do. You know, have to manage both their military obligations, their military career, and their civilian career. And with those units that deploy, you know, they've got to contend with that too. So, all of a sudden you get orders to the Middle East and you may be gone for over a year because there'll be some months of training before you go over there. You perform your missions and you come back and you have to sort of decompress and get out. And so, you've got a civilian employer and there are federal laws that govern that employment relationship and protect the re-employment rights of deploying guardsmen and reservists. But still, it's a management thing that you have to juggle. And then, by the way, you might have family, you might have faith life, you might have some other community things. So, for a lot of our guardsmen and reservists, there's a lot that goes on with all of that.
Maddy: Yeah, it's a balancing act.
Paul: Yeah. Yeah, very much so.
Maddy: So, you when you retired, what was that transition like to go from military to full civilian life and having, know, you said you worked in a financial institution, was there adjustments that you had to make?
Paul: I, maybe I, you know, I didn't really feel a lot of anxiety or stress over the change. And it was about, I got off active duty in 1980, and I didn't officially affiliate is the term that the military uses, affiliate with an active, actively functioning reserve unit for about 18 months. I was still in the reserve technically, and I could be called up involuntarily, but I didn't wear uniforms, I didn't go to monthly meetings, I didn't have to cut my hair. I actually grew my hair a little bit long and you don't want to see those pictures.
Maddy: I don't know, maybe…
Paul: It was really, really bad. So, when I started out with an insurance company, was an odd occurrence. Lasted there for, I was a captive agent for an insurance company for about 14 months up in Lenington and one of the things you have to do is get known in the community, join the JCs and all that stuff. And long story short, one of my JC fellow members knew about an opportunity with a small community bank up there and thought I would be right for it. So, I applied and got that job as a branch manager for a while. I had some trouble with turning off the alarms when I went in in the morning. There were…the branch that I was in charge of was set back in a strip mall. And to get in, you got in this back door, there were two keys. None of this is electronic. This is all mechanical stuff.
Maddy: Right.
Paul: And there were two keys, one that turned the alarm off and then one that turned the door that opened the door. And you had to make sure you did those keys in the right order. Well, I tended to get that wrong. And you, the county sheriff, you got to take that alarm goes off, you take it seriously. And I had to go up to the front of the branch very sheepishly about this big as the cruiser came up and explained to him, I'm sorry. Didn't mean to get you all set up. And one of the last times that happened, Sheriff rolls up and he just sees me standing there, gets out of the car and says, Oh, no, not you again. So, I actually transitioned into the trust department, and I had been in a trust officer role ever since and I'm a survivor of three mergers. The last one occurred in 2001, and I stayed with that organization until I retired from my civilian job in 2018. So left the Navy, retired from the Navy in 2005 and then retired from civilian work, retired, retired, retired squared in 2018.
Maddy: Nice. And now you're just relaxing?
Paul: Well, no. I've been a volunteer in a number of organizations since 1999. All of them are veteran oriented in some way, veteran centric in some way. At its worst or best, depending on your point of view, I was on the board of seven different organizations in West Michigan or statewide. I've cut that back now to five, but my principal activity now is the West Michigan Veterans Coalition.
Maddy: Nice. Yeah, I know I saw you, get, you've been recognized several times for your volunteerism and the work that you do and all those organizations, which is amazing. You're making a difference for sure. And found something that sits close to you, right? I mean, you want to make a difference in something that means something to you and help those veterans and service members. So, let's talk about the West Michigan Veterans Coalition. You are board chair, correct?
Paul: Yes.
Maddy: Can you share some history on that organization for those who may might not know?
Paul: Oh, yeah, we started the West Michigan Veterans Coalition started in 2009. We had a different name back then was called the Greater Grand Rapids Veterans Services Forum. So, if you think West Michigan Veterans Coalition is a mouthful, you ain't seen nothing from a competitor that name. And that was a group of, you know, maybe half a dozen people. How that got started goes back to reserve and National Guard deployments to the Middle East. Back then, 2007, 2008, 2009, our active-duty military branches are smaller than they were for the Gulf War and smaller than Vietnam and far smaller than they were in World War II. And with the deployment of forces that the United States decided to make into Iraq and Afghanistan primarily and then other worldwide missions, the active branches couldn't really handle all that. So, at certain points during that timeframe, in Iraq and Afghanistan, one half, one half of our force structure were Guard or Reserve members. At that time, there was a bit of a disparity in civilian employment rates when these guys and girls came back from their military service. I remember hearing a story, I think it's, I'm not sure if it's true, it might be sort of one of these urban legend things. There was an Army National Guard unit, military police out of Pontiac, and they had deployed to the Middle East. When they came back, I had heard that the rate of unemployment and underemployment in that group was 45%. Pretty staggering. That got another volunteer group that I had been involved with interested in. So, what does this unemployment and underemployment look like, not only for the reserve components but the active components when those guys and girls transition out, go full civilian. And it turned out if you looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the time, the rates of unemployment basically compared veterans and non-veterans and then those groups were broken down into age cohorts. As those age cohorts got older, the disparity in unemployment between civilians and veterans tended to narrow. But with the younger component, in the military tends to be a younger demographic population, right, were pretty wide. And because of that, a number of veteran centric volunteer organizations, as well as the Department of Defense, got really interested in finding out what they could do to assist transitioning service members with finding rewarding career oriented employment. At the same time, employers and other private sector organizations were basically coming out of the woodwork to do job fairs for veterans. We had one in Grand Rapids at a National Guard Army in Grand Rapids, had 3,000 people show up at that. Yeah, it was unbelievable. And so, there was so much of this going on that some of these organizations that wanted to arrange these events kind of got, they were stepping on each other and unnecessary duplication. So, this Greater Grand Rapids Veterans Services Forum just started informally to see if they could de-conflict some of these activities. And in the process, identify the various organizations in originally the Greater Grand Rapids area, the services that they could provide to veterans and their family members. Fast forward then to 2013, Rick Snyder was the governor at the time and he established the Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency. And that was intended to bring all of the different state organizations that serve veterans and families in one place and one sort of management structure. But at the same time, it was seen as very desirable to establish some sort of local presence, partnerships throughout the entire state to do the same thing. Michigan is divided into 10 prosperity regions, economic prosperity regions, one in the UP and nine down here. And each one of those prosperity regions was within each one was established what's called a veteran community action team or VCAT for short. And the West Michigan Veterans Coalition began to function as the VCAT for West Michigan, VCAT region four. That was 2013. By 2017, we had established our own 501C3 nonprofit. Established our own governing body, the board, and rebranded as the West Michigan Veterans Coalition in order to better describe our operating area, which is 13 counties in central Michigan.
Maddy: Can you talk about what you guys do provide, the programs, and what veterans can take advantage of?
Paul: Oh yeah, happy to. When we first started, it was really more of the same because we didn't have any money. It was the same but just expanded. Represented us from various organizations throughout that 13 county footprint to get to know and they got to know us. But it was still sort of a here's what I do, here's who I am and what I do. So, who are you and what do you do? That kind of exchange of information and referrals. But we still didn't have any money. Along comes a separate startup group in Grand Rapids, this is Grand Rapids-centric, called the Armed Forces Thanksgiving Organization. And this is a group of people who, business leaders in Grand Rapids that never served in the military, didn't really know anything about it, but they wanted to find ways to give back. So, they established a pretty large-scale lunch event in the month of May. May is Armed Forces Month. And the third Saturday in May is Armed Forces Day. That's different from Veterans Day and it's different from Memorial Day. And it went from zero to 500 people first shot. We have, and I happen to be on that board too, a keynote speaker will come in and we invite veterans who get in for free. The event is paid for by corporate sponsors who sponsor a table. And we also invite high school juniors to attend. This is not a recruiting event, but it's meant to, the seating is very deliberate. Where a mix of business leaders, veterans, and high school kids. The students get in without a cash outlay, but they have to obligate to do some kind of veteran project or activity in their senior year. And the founders of this Armed Forces Thanksgiving lunch never intended it to raise money. That was sort of an accident that they raised money. So where should we put it? What good purpose can we put it to? It turned out that one of their board members, they did attract a couple of veterans on their board. One is a Vietnam, is still on the board, Vietnam veteran, highly decorated combat veteran from Vietnam. And the other was my predecessor as the chair of the West Michigan Veterans Coalition, Air Force officer female that served in Iraq. Kind of an interesting, very short story there. When she was deployed, she had a dual role, one as the protocol officer. The military is big on ritual protocol. You got to do things the right way. And so, they assign people to protocol things. So, she was doing that, the ceremonial stuff at kind of a high level but she was also in charge of mortuary affairs, a sort of study in contrast in job descriptions. Some people in dealing with that latter activity, you can get post-traumatic stress from that. She didn't, although she did contract cancer as a result of toxins that she was exposed to in Iraq. What a woman she is. You'd never know it. She is one of the most optimistic, upbeat people you would like to meet and she's had chemo 95 times. Anyway, she was our chair at that time, the West Michigan Veterans Coalition chair, and she suggested the Armed Forces Thanksgiving Board. Well, I've got this organization that maybe we can do some good with the money that you give us.
Maddy: Yeah.
Paul: So, from that time to now, Armed Forces Thanksgiving has contributed over $600,000 to us. And that they're not our only donor. They're the main one.
Maddy: Yeah.
Paul: And they have enabled us to establish what I call our direct benefit programs that look in general at four areas of well-being, not only for the veterans themselves, actively serving as well in garden reserve, but their families. We were able to establish a scholarship program that basically has three flavors. There's a thousand dollar scholarship that is available to veteran, active duty, guard reserve, whatever. There's a thousand dollar scholarship that's available to their dependents, spouse and dependents. Those scholarships can be repeated throughout their post-secondary education and this is four-year schools, two-year schools, trade schools, whatever. And then we have a third flavor which is a fifteen hundred dollar scholarship. One each per year for the veteran, one for the dependent. The $1,500 scholarship can't get that more than once, but if a high school senior plays their cards right or somebody getting off active duty and didn't have any post-secondary education, they can score $5,500 to defray the cost of their education. That money is paid from our program, it's paid directly to the applicant. And so, they can basically use it for whatever they want doesn't have to go to tuition books, academic fees or anything like that. Rent, food, gas money, what have you. So that's our oldest one. And we've given out something approaching 120 scholarships since we started that program. Probably our most active program though is what we call our Military Family Assistance Fund. That one started in 2020 as a result of COVID. I got a call. This is, you know, spring of 2020 as the lockdowns. Remember all those lockdowns that started throughout the state. I got a call from a Marine Corps Reserve officer who was in charge of a Marine Corps Reserve unit in Grand Rapids. The Marine Corps Reserve demographically is the youngest branch of all the military. So, it's lot of 20-something people. This happened to be an infantry unit. And so all of them were guys, like 180 guys. And a lot of them were laid off from their civilian employment because you know why, they're younger you know early to mid-20s and they're the bottom rung of the seniority ladder and they're the first ones to go on a layoff so they get laid off and those who were married chances are they married somebody close to their age who was also new in her job and low in the seniority ladder so she may have gotten laid off too so here's a family that all they've got to live on is the drill pay, the once a month drill pay for a junior enlisted person, which ain't a lot of money. So, this officer comes to me and he says, is there anything you guys can do at the coalition to help us out with this? So, we had a couple of discussions among the board and we're able to adjust some of our budget figures and we purchased, I don't know, 75, 80-ish, $50 cards to, gift cards, to Walmart and Meijer so that these guys could buy groceries. We figured this is going to be a one and done thing, emergency financial assistance on a temporary basis through COVID. Well, that morphed into what is now a permanent part of our direct benefit program, the Military Family Assistance Fund. We've had some really interesting stories about needs that that fund has been able to address. Somebody gets behind in bills because of unforeseen illness or a job loss or a car repair, home repair. We bought a laptop for a veteran who had his stolen. We encountered a situation where it was a service member, husband, who had transitioned out the civilian world, was experiencing post-traumatic stress. And because of his military service, he was eligible for treatment at the VA. Wife wasn't in the military, no veteran status, therefore nothing from the VA for her. So where does she go? We wound up paying for 10 counseling sessions with a psychologist for her to help out. We've had people that come to us to, they're getting a new job, and they need steel-toed boots for the job and it costs $253,000 a pair for that. So, we pick that stuff up. What I tell people is that with all due respect to the VA, which does great work, and a lot of our county veteran service organizations, Grand Rapids, I'm most familiar with Grand Rapids, Ottawa, and Muskegon counties. They do great work. They provide a lot of assistance financially and otherwise to veterans, but because those organizations are funded with tax money, there's a lot of restrictions around that. We don't have that because we're privately funded and the Armed Forces Thanksgiving Board has been very, not only very generous with the money, but very generous with the hands-off approach that they've allowed us to operate with. We can make decisions a lot more quickly, can be a lot more nimble with those decisions, and we focus not only on the veteran and the service member, but the family. We've had family members that have applied directly for that. It's really taken off. Last year we spent over $46,000 serving 157 families with food insecurity, things like that, that went back to our original expenditure. We also have a transportation program. That one though was limited to Kent County and the eastern edge of Ottawa County powered primarily but not exclusively by volunteer drivers. We'd like to expand that program but it's going to be a function of being able to attract volunteer drivers to do that.
Maddy: I love that you don't just focus on the veterans but their families as well because they're affected too, right? It's not just the veteran but it's everyone in their life.
Paul: Our board of directors, they're all volunteer, but we do have one almost full-time employee and she just came on in November, Army veteran herself. Her predecessor in the role was an Army spouse. The predecessor's husband was a career Army Reserve soldier and she was our finger in the back, if you will, to remind us that just don't think about the veteran, it's the family member too, which was a big part of designing our scholarship program. So, you know, a major portion of our scholarships are allocated to dependents, family members and that's the way the Military Family Assistance Fund has evolved too, where we'll often have the veteran approaching us directly, but not always. You sometimes, it's the spouse of that veteran that comes to us with a request.
Maddy: Yeah. So, if someone, if a veteran or a family member wanted to look into these programs, where do they start? Do they apply? Do they go to your website? What should they do?
Paul: Yeah, yes.
Maddy: I guessed all.
Paul: Yeah. we, do have an application function on our website, westmichiganveterans.org.
Maddy: Okay. Perfect. What about on the other side, if someone wants to volunteer or donate or, or anything like that?
Paul: Yeah, we love donations. Armed Forces Thanksgiving probably provides 70% of our operating revenue operating budget for the year but the other 30% has to come from someplace. We would… and, and that's that can be individual donations, corporate, we're looking at some grants now. We actually received a grant a couple years back from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan Foundation, we're looking at some more of that. There is a donate function on the website westmichiganveterans.org. No donation is too small and no donation is too big either. So, we're happy to take that. We would like to expand our scholarship program as a result of additional funding for that. Our Military Family Assistance Fund is always looking for dollars. We track not only the number of requests that we receive, the dollar amount of requests that we receive, and compare that to what we're actually able to pay out. And I will tell you, Maddy, that probably the last two or three years, the amount requested, the dollar amount of requests coming in have exceeded our ability to meet them by a factor of more than two to one. That's been a persistent problem and a lot of it could be attributed, in my opinion, to the rate of inflation that has remained stubbornly high for so many families, while the rates of inflation growth, as we know, has come down a bit, quite a bit, from say what 2022, but fact remains that prices are still very much higher than they were in 2020. And look at what's going on in the world today with a straight of warm moves being closed. And I just read before I came over here that gas on average in the United States was $2.98 and, some, and especially in some of the rural areas of our operating area, our 13 counties that commute can be a while and that means a lot of gas money needs to get spent. So, we would love to double that $46,000, $47,000 that we spent in 2025. Could we pay out $100,000 to West Michigan veterans and their family members? We could if we had the money, because I'm sure the requests would be there.
Maddy: Right. Yeah, the need is definitely there. And it's just interesting the things that you talked about that you guys have covered, like the steel-toed boots and the laptop. It's not just groceries or rent or bills. It's all these little things that they need to survive and to live and support their families I think that's yeah…
Paul: I mean the steel-toed boots to somebody might seem to be kind of a small trivial thing.
Maddy: Yeah.
Paul: What if that applicant? What if we turned him down or never heard from him in the first place, right? Where would he turn to get this? Maybe nowhere and would that mean that a job opportunity was lost and you know, then what happens? So yeah, we never know what kind of requests are going to come in and we never know where they're necessarily going to lead.
Maddy: Yeah, I love listening to you. Do you have anything else you'd like to share?
Paul: Well, first of all, I really appreciate the opportunity to be on the podcast and to talk about the West Michigan Veterans Coalition. I don't like talking about myself that much. I think that's sort of a characteristic of military folks. They tend not to do that. It's more of a team effort than they're not. And I would emphasize that that it is a team effort. We're always in the on the lookout for new applicants, new people to help, new donations, and volunteers. I haven't answered that part of your question yet. Volunteer drivers for our transportation program. We are involved in quite a few events in the West Michigan area throughout the year, something like 30 or 40 events that we have been a part of. And there's so many that our board just increased from seven members to nine. We can't cover all of those all the time so, we have a small core of volunteers who are educated about what we do. They know who we are, what we do and when the need arises, we'll ask one of them, hey can you stand in for us and represent the coalition at XYZ? And so, we're looking for that too. And for our, we have a series of meetings throughout the year. One is we call our community partners meeting held every other month on the even numbered months, in-person and virtual options. If somebody wants to hear about what's going on, we typically have maybe two or three presenters, other organizations that are our community partners and we'll talk about what they do. The public is welcome to attend that. They just have to get a hold of us through that application process on the website. And then the other series of meetings that we have every other month is called our Quality of Life Committee Meeting. Those are on the odd numbered months. It's the one that some of your staff members have faithfully attended in the past. And the same thing, except that we typically only have one presenter and they tend to go in a little bit more in-depth about what they do. Both of these meeting series are free and open to the public. And I would encourage anybody who is interested in learning more about the coalition, not just through the website, through the flat two-dimensional screen, but if they want to kick the tires and talk to some real people, welcome to join us virtually or in-person.
Maddy: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for the information.
Paul: Pleasure, Maddy. Thank you.
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