by Nishat Kurwa
Photo Credit: Robert Romano
Anthony Meade , Air Force veteran and City College student poses in dress uniform.
The Veterans Alliance at the City College of San Francisco is bustling most days of the week soon after it opens around 11 a.m. One morning this week, more than a dozen student vets gathered around small tables, chatting over coffee, or hunched over one of the 10 computers lining the walls. A flat screen TV on the wall droned in the background. Many colleges around the country have similar spaces for vets to socialize in. But City College is the only one that has an on-campus veterans affairs center adjacent to its informal clubhouse.
Despite their essential role in "out-processing" vets and matching them with resources from tuition to mental health counseling, VA offices can often be foreboding or confusing.?"You're kind of told that the VA is basically your lifeline for everything," said Jack Jacoby, president of the CCSF Veterans Alliance. But Jacoby said that lifeline can often be an elusive one. "The way we often describe the VA is, if you don't catch the correct person, on the correct day, on the correct time of day...you will be out of luck," he said. "Or you get that person who would typically be working the front desk at the DMV or the post office, that's just working a job. They don't have a love for what they do. They are just filling that space to have an income."
Jacoby acknowledged this sentiment might sound harsh. But he said that as a veterans advocate, he's frustrated with the lack of outreach from the VA to help vets who are already unlikely to seek out help, be it out of pride or inertia.
The VA office here at City College is only a year old. After the post-9/11 GI bill was rolled out in 2009, Jacoby said the population of vets on City College campuses doubled, and then tripled, growing from 310 to 1100 just a few semesters later. Most are between 23 and 27 years old when they enroll, or re-enroll, in school, and Jacoby said the Veteran's Alliance lounge at the Phelan Avenue campus has been an important site for vets to experience the erstwhile camaraderie of active duty. "A lot of the people who are here are medically separated individuals...either they got hit with an IED, and they are just incapable of being in the service any more, medically discharged for whatever reason," he said. "They were kinda like, 'What am I gonna do with my life now? I better go to school, and work so that I can get a desk job, because my plan of being in the military for 20 years and retiring is pretty much shot at this point.'"
He said that's why the on-campus veterans' center is so crucial: many of these young veterans have little guidance when it comes to planning beyond their community college enrollment.
In the small, quiet office adjacent to the lounge here, three counselors are available to work with student veterans. Jacoby said the center was initiated by a VA social worker who was formerly the president of the Student Veterans of America. It's supported by a range of public and private funders, including Craigslist's Craig Newmark.
Fifteen more centers like this one are being planned for colleges around the country, with San Francisco as the prototype.
Originally published on Turnstylenews.com, a digital information service surfacing emerging stories in news, entertainment, art and culture; powered by award-winning journalists.
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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/turnstyle/san-francisco-city-colleg_b_1089375.html
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