VETERANS GREEN JOBS ALLIANCE commencing Phase I
The Colorado Chapter of Veterans Green Jobs Alliance will begin the initial program April 2009.
Two more chapters are planned for Louisiana and Washington state.
WA Veteran Conservation Corps has been coordinating with VGJA and already impacting NW participants.
Learn more about this timely, supportive organization at http://veteransgreenjobs.org/.

Garett Reppenhagen
Program Director
Homelake Colorado
Veterans Green-Jobs
garett@veteransgreenjobs.org
www.veteransgreenjobs.org


(from VGJA web site:)

Intro To Green Job Training Posted on 01. Feb, 2009 by jeff in Veterans Green Jobs Academy Advance Your Skills through Green Jobs Training Programs The Veterans Green Jobs Academy™ provides intensive education, training and career development services for military veterans interested in pursuing careers in green industries. The Veterans Green Jobs Academy provides both classroom-based and on-the-job training opportunities for military veterans in green jobs [internal link to green jobs & careers] sectors. Incorporating college degree programs, intensive residential programs, on-the-job training and Conservation Corps programs, the Veterans Green Jobs Academy curriculum is designed to advance veterans’ skill sets in ways that can be immediately applied to the marketplace, as well as provide accredited programs leading to both 2 and 4-year degrees. The Veterans Green Jobs Academy places individualized mentoring, support and attention at the center of our educational model, with the aim that every single participant realize their maximum potential not just during our programs, but over the long haul. We provide numerous different types of training, from short 2-month intensives to full academic-year programs, both residential and non-residential, in order to create as many gateways to higher ‘green’ education and green career development as possible for veterans. Veterans Green Jobs training programs will be based in Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico and Washington in 2009. We anticipate expanding into at least 8-10 states in 2010, and hope to be in every state within several years. Many of our programs will launch in Summer and Fall of 2009, but the first Home Energy Auditor Training (HEAT) will begin this Spring. Please check back frequently, as we will continue to update course offerings and application processes. Also, please fill out the contact form in the footer to request specific information on Green Jobs Training Programs. *





Veterans Village is the vision of Nadia McCaffrey, Gold Star mother of Patrick Ryan McCaffrey.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q7cTlRjGeU






Farmers, Veterans, Gold Star Mothers and representatives of Farms Not Arms gather to build an alliance in Santa Cruz, CA.

Swords to Plowshares – One Soldier’s Story
by
PVC Matt McCue


























My hoe strikes the ground every time I take a step. A local woman follows behind, tossing seeds in the holes that I dig. The West African sun beats down without mercy but I keep working. The soil is a well-weathered remnant of the jungle that used to dominate the arid land that is now known as the Sahel. I am planting millet, one of the most robust crops known to man. I cannot create or even fully control what will spring up from this seemingly barren field. I can only guide it.

You can cover a soldier with night vision, Kevlar, GPS tracking systems, advanced infantry weapons, put him in a Bradley fighting vehicle, and send him in to battle but without his or her personal force and motivation the equipment reveals itself for what it is: lifeless machinery. If I tell you of my experience in combat surely you will be able to read a story with more bravado, more blood, more adrenaline, and more pain. I can tell you that to kill you have to shut off a piece of your heart, and to see another soldier die will shatter what is left of it. To function you have to become immersed in the machine that is killing you and keeping you alive at the same time. You have to bring life to the machine.

Rather then thinking of Iraq as the place where my heart was broken and my mind was controlled I prefer to think of Iraq as the place where I discovered the key to my freedom. I prefer to remember the trucks full of watermelons and pomegranates that would pass through our checkpoints. I felt strangely human as I waved cars by with pomegranate seeds stuck to my Kevlar vest.
I witnessed many unforgettable things in Iraq but the aspect that changed my life more than any other was the way the farmers kept working and selling their produce through the chaos of a regime change. Farmers have a quiet power that made me realize that I could not accomplish anything good for the world with my M16 in hand. It was in Iraq eating fruit that I realized that I needed to find a new way to think. It was also in Iraq that I learned to hide how I felt.

I returned to Fort Hood, Texas a newly promoted sergeant. I spent the next seven months training kids how to kill. At night I would find myself in my room listening to anti-war music as I prepared for the next day of training. When my time was up and I left, I had no clue what to do. As an accomplished infantryman I could become a cop, private soldier or oilrig worker. I chose to collect unemployment and climb mountains in the Pacific Northwest. Unemployment ran out and through a series of events that included a summer stint in Alaska as a commercial fisherman, I found myself in Pahoa, Hawaii. I came to volunteer on a five-acre permaculture farm owned by a friend of a friend. It was there that I stopped being a soldier. I learned about the concept of sustainability and how to compost. I saw so many beautiful plants and learned so much I was almost overwhelmed. I was secretly still afraid of getting mortared or running over an IED, as we would drive into Hilo. I took up boogie boarding and faced a very real and logical fear of drowning because I am a weak swimmer.

As I look back, my time in Hawaii was priceless. It was there that I applied for the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. Because of my lack of experience and formal education I really had no idea if they would let me into their six-month apprentice program, but in April 2006 I found myself setting up my two-person tent on the edge of one of the fields.
It took about three seconds for me to realize that I had found a very special place. I spent the next six months with the smartest group I have ever worked with and ended up in a heated discussion about every day. My most frequent debate partners were the people I loved the most. Just about everyone knew more about horticulture than me. Everybody taught me something. I would still go to sleep afraid of mortars but the joy of the present and anticipation of the next harvest made the past seem to loosen its grip on my life. I learned more from six months on a college farm in Santa Cruz than four years in the Military.

I escaped the army without a scratch -- but before learning to care for life I was caught in a slow death with nothing to watch but my own mortality and the horrifying news. I feel like the luckiest person alive because as I work in my field in West Africa my body becomes stronger and I am no longer an observer of the quiet beauty, I am a caretaker. Having been very effectively conditioned to kill and accept death, taking care of plants has had a kind of opposite effect on my mind, heart, and soul. Sometimes I feel that the torment that has plagued me during and after my time in Iraq was just the plowing of the field of my heart before the deep-rooted seed of peace and sustainability could grow within my soul. The quiet power of farming has overtaken me and I no longer live in fear.

PVC Matthew Mccueis an Iraq War vet turned farmer and member of Farm Not Arms. He is now teaching Agriculture for the Peace Corps in Niger, Africa.
He can be reached by email: mattmccue@hotmail.com


Farms Not Arms is made up of farmers seeking a more peaceful world. Our Swords to Plowshares project makes our farms available to Iraq and Afghan War vets looking for employment, job training and places to heal.

In California we are forming a non-political Farmer-Veteran Coalition, bringing together the farming community with veterans, their advocates and their survivors so we can help care for the disproportionately large number of veterans that are returning to rural America, and bring new energy to our farms. Farms Not Arms and the Farmer-Veteran Coalition will offer scholarship assistance to any returning veterans that wish to attend the Agroecology apprentice program that Matthew did at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Contact- Linda Speel
(707) 765-0196
Linda@farmsnotarms.org

www.farmsnotarms.org



Michael O'Gorman (behind the table, on the left) with Farms Not Arms members.
O'Gorman"s efforts and organization have been the catalyst for the Farmer-Veteran Coalition.

AP Article : Farmer-Veteran Coalition meeting prior to Farm Aid Concert (Sept.8, 2007)

NEW YORK, Sept 7 (Reuters) - Matt McCue had a moment of enlightenment in Iraq while guarding the back door of a house where his fellow soldiers were hunting Saddam Hussein -- he bit into a sweet lime and discovered an interest in horticulture. Now he's part of a movement seeking to help returning U.S. veterans find peace in civilian life by tilling the land.

"You take someone who has been walking around the street looking for insurgents, who's basically trained to capture people, to kill them ... you can't put them in some ordinary job and expect them to grasp on to it," McCue said. "To go from that to watching things grow, to taking care of life, has been a very important step for me," he said by telephone from Niger in West Africa, where he is a Peace Corps volunteer teaching agriculture. "It's beautiful to go to that nurture mode," he said, recalling how his curiosity was sparked by the produce in farmers' markets in Iraq. "I had no idea there was a variety of lime that tasted like that."

McCue will be in New York this weekend for a forum on the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on rural communities. Organized by a group called Farms Not Arms, the forum is part of the buildup to Sunday's Farm Aid concert, a benefit for family farmers that was first launched in 1985. McCue, who grew up in the suburbs of Albuquerque, New Mexico, said it was hard to leave his field of millet, sesame and beans in the village of Garbey Kourou, even for a short trip. He is hoping his story may be an example to others.

William O'Hare, senior fellow at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, analyzed U.S. military casualties in a report last year and found the number of war deaths of soldiers from rural areas was disproportionately high. "About 19 percent of the soldier-age population live in rural America but they account for 27 percent of the deaths," O'Hare told Reuters. He linked that to a scarcity of jobs in poor rural areas where people were less likely to go to college or work full-time jobs, making a military career more appealing.

POLITICS OF WAR One of the biggest names associated with Farm Aid, musician Willie Nelson, has long been an anti-war campaigner and Farms Not Arms says it opposes the war in Iraq. But McCue and others involved in Saturday's forum said they were politically neutral and focused on how farmers can work with veterans to their mutual advantage.

"Our farmers are in trouble right now and so are our soldiers," said Nadia McCaffrey, whose son Patrick was killed in Iraq in 2004 -- one of at least 3,750 U.S. military deaths there since the March 2003 invasion. She founded a group called Veterans Village to help soldiers returning with post traumatic stress disorder and other problems. The group plans to set up a self-sustaining organic farm in North Carolina for veterans.

"The farm is going to be a safe place for them to be," said McCaffrey. "Many of them thought they were going to go back to life and put the war behind them but it didn't quite work this way." Saturday's event will mark the launch of a politically neutral group called the Farmer-Veteran Coalition to provide farm jobs, training and land for veterans, organizers said.

Steve Ledwell, a U.S. Navy veteran and recovering alcoholic and drug addict, runs a shelter in New Hampshire called the Veterans Victory Farm which houses up to 19 veterans. "Getting back to the basics of farm life is very therapeutic," Ledwell said. A similar facility for as many as 200 veterans is planned for Long Island, New York. When McCue looks back on his time in Iraq, he likes to recall farmers passing through checkpoints to take their crops of watermelons or pomegranates to markets that continued to function despite the violence and chaos. "I realized there was a power in that," he said. "There are more soldiers in the United States than farmers at this point. Five years down the line maybe it won't be rare for vets to take this path."