PublicSource | News for a better Pittsburgh (https://www.publicsource.org/series/coming-home-pa/)
Coming Home PA is a project about veterans’ return to civilian life spearheaded by PublicSource and reported in cooperation with its local media partners, who include WESA (90.5), The Allegheny Front, The New Pittsburgh Courier, The Pittsburgh City Paper, Pop City and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Dan Blevins, 29, of Carnegie is one of more than 10,000 veterans in Pennsylvania who has been waiting more than a year for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to rule on disability claims.
For more than two years, former Marine gunnery sergeant Matt Hannan has waited for a ruling on whether he is entitled to disability payments for PTSD.
Major Brian Hampton, President of the Circle of Friends for American Veterans, is demanding that the government do more to help an estimated 150,000 homeless veterans. “They come back, try to get into society and they experience a lot of psychological challenges, financial challenges, physical challenges, and as a result we have about 150,000 who have served in American uniform and are on our streets tonight,” Hampton said. He joins us to discuss the issue.
An estimated 150,000 American veterans are homeless or become homeless upon returning from overseas, and an advocacy group said the government is not doing enough to alleviate the issue. The Circle of Friends for American Veterans (COFAV) reported 150,000 are without shelter with only 1/10 of 1% of the Department of Veteran Affairs’ (VA) $130 billion budget supporting homeless veterans.
In the next few months, VA Pittsburgh Healthcare system will be hiring approximately 42 new mental healthcare workers.
Usually it’s customers who tip their servers, but when the waitress at the Wood St. McCormick & Schmick’s overheard JulieHera DeStefano talking to her bankers about needing to raise money for a project that will document the homecomings of female soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, the server slipped her a $5 bill. A few weeks ago, when DeStefano shared a version of the same story at Chatham University’s Women Business Leaders Breakfast Series , the full house of mostly women gave her a standing ovation.
We were an odd trio, sitting in a hipster lounge in Dupont Circle, last November, smoking flavored tobacco, sharing war stories, oblivious to the people around us.
Essential Pittsburgh presents this special live broadcast of their public forum recorded Wednesday night focusing on the issues veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq face when returning home. Their panelists, Sean Parnell, U.S. Army Ranger and author of Outlaw Platoon, John Bittner, from Veterans' Employment at PA Career Link and Linda Klootwyk, from Health Services at Veterans' Affairs offer suggestions for dealing with the challenges.
On his first day as a freshman at Shippensburg University in January 2009, Joshua Lang rose at 5:30 a.m., worked out, dressed in slacks and a button-up shirt and headed off to his psychology class.
A segment of the controversial Michael Moore documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” shed light on military recruiting practices in low-income inner-city neighborhoods. Moore’s depiction showed military recruiters in the destitute looking town of Flint, Mich., enticing African-American youth from struggling families to enlist with the promise of a brighter future.
