University of Minnesota Moment: Veterans Transition Center

Transcription

[Announcer]: I'm Rick Moore with the University of Minnesota Moment. This week, the student group Comfort for Courage, working with the University, opened a first-of-its kind veterans' transition center for Iraq and Afghanistan War vets. Director Andrew Davis explains the center.

[Davis]: This center will serve as a safe haven and a one-stop resource center for veterans who are coming back, sometimes traumatized, but for the most part alienated, by making that jump from combat situation, or even just a military situation, to college life and then having to wade through the veterans affairs for the GI bill that they're entitled to or for physical and mental help that they're entitled to. We want to kind of reduce that bureaucracy, or reduce that pain that they have to go through to get their benefits which many times now is causing them to give up and leave school.

[Moore]: Davis says that vets will be able to come to the Center for assistance in acclimating to a campus setting.

[Davis]: But the Center will eventually, and we've already had some volunteers from the VA, will be manned several days a week by VA employees who can come in and really give insight into what these people need to do. And beyond that we have some programmatic ideas such as a mentor program like the Carlson College of Business has for their business leaders. I'd like to bring in CEOs or lawyers or policemen who are also veterans to come in and kind of take these vets under their wings and show them that they can still go much farther in life even though they're out of the military now.

[Moore]: For the University of Minnesota Moment, I'm Rick Moore.