Donors eager to offer charitable assistance to veterans asked The Philanthropy Roundtable in 2012 to establish one of the country’s very earliest advisory programs on this subject. The first product was a practical guidebook, called Serving Those Who Served, which profiled nonprofits (many of them brand new) showing promise in this field.
Five years later, here is a valuable successor volume. It looks at assistance for veterans from the other side of the table—chronicling the most successful funders in this area, and what they’ve learned, though real-life experience, about the best ways to boost men and women entering civilian life after military service.
In these pages, you’ll hear the stories of a dozen and a half of the country’s savviest donors in this area—a mix of individuals, foundations, and corporate benefactors. Some of these givers focus their charitable work entirely on vets. Others added this worthy population to other philanthropic priorities. All are paragons of smart, efficient, effective giving.
This guidebook is built on years of advisory work, scores of first-hand interviews, and careful research and analysis. It includes a statistical appendix offering a range of indicators on the status of veterans (some of them pointing in surprisingly different directions from conventional news portrayals), an up-to-the-minute review of services provided by government, and many details for donors anxious to be as helpful as possible to those who have worn our nation’s uniform.