Atlantic Council Trains Veterans in Non-Profit Leadership
A nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors will have it’s thinking done by cowards, and it’s fighting done by fools.—Thucydides
Soldiers love to bitch and moan, from the ever-present complaints about small inconveniences to how a major military or foreign policy decision is flat out stupid. Usually, though, this amounts to little more than an airing of grievances (in keeping with the finest tradition of Festivus) to contemporaries who have no more ability to change things than whoever is doing the whining at the moment.
As an infantryman on the line I was no different. But I’m no longer there and, like the rest of us at Service to School, have realized that we are now able to begin having a say in things. Increasingly, other parts of our society are recognizing the growing role of GWOT veterans in our nation’s domestic and international political discourse. In light of this, the Atlantic Council recently welcomed its inaugural cohort of veteran fellows to their headquarters in Washington, DC for the Veterans Take Point Initiative, providing them with expert training and mentorship on how to become effective leaders in the foreign affairs and national security realms. Fellows were also able to participate in discussion seminars with prominent foreign affairs leaders, meeting with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Cartwright, and Ambassador Jon Huntsman, who can be seen addressing fellows in the photo above. The week concluded with fellows pitching their nonprofit before a panel of judges, with the winner receiving 25,000 in seed funding. Three finalists were selected, including Service to School, Team Rubicon, and the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF), led by Ben Kohlmann, with DEF taking the money. All of us at Service to School would like to extend our congratulations to Ben as well as our admiration for the work DEF is doing, and are honored to have been named as finalists alongside the very impressive DEF and Team Rubicon.
The Atlantic Council also recognizes the entrepreneurial bent of our generation of veterans, and the Take Point Initiative’s mission was to educate the veteran fellows not only on direct government service, with which we already have some experience, but also on how to effectively advance American interests through non-profit enterprises.
As a fellow representing Service to School, I can say that it was a truly incredible experience, from the invaluable information received on running a non-profit enterprise, to intimate meetings with foreign policy leaders, to hanging out with other young veterans doing incredible things, such as Team Rubicon’s Amanda Burke, http://www.teamrubiconusa.org. The week concluded with fellows pitching their nonprofit to a panel of judges, with the winner receiving 25,000 in seed funding. Three finalists were selected, including Service to School, Team Rubicon, and the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF), led by Ben Kohlmann, with DEF taking the money. All of us at Service to School would like to extend our congratulations to Ben as well as our admiration for the work DEF is doing, and are honored to have been named as finalists alongside the very impressive DEF and Team Rubicon.
Perhaps most of all, the fellowship highlighted the fact that GWOT era veterans stand poised as a vanguard of leaders not in the distant, but the very near future. The opportunities are there, and it is up to us to seize them. It’s been a rough decade for this country; few know this better than we do. Current events involving Daesh (aka ISIS, but they don’t like this name), Russia, and China’s rise, to say nothing of our domestic problems, will not be wished away. However, we must still obtain educations commensurate with such responsibilities, and this is where S2S comes in—facilitating the entry of veteran leaders into prestigious university programs.
If anyone can work to take our nation in a better direction tomorrow, we can. To paraphrase General Ulysses S. Grant’s comments to General Sherman during the Battle of Shiloh, we’ve had the devil’s own decade, but we can lick ‘em tomorrow.
Zachary McDonald was born in Chicago and left Illinois immediately after high school, having enlisted in the Army as an infantryman during his senior year. A recipient of the Combat Infantryman’s Badge and Purple Heart, Zach served in the Al Anbar province of Iraq and Khost province of Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division, and subsequently worked on the Army staff. Currently, he is a senior majoring in political science at Yale University and Service to School’s Executive Director of Undergraduate Admissions.
