Author: graelynbrashear

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Charlottesville’s Facebook page goes viral

Every marketing firm and tourism board in the country is searching for social media’s magic bullet, and the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau might have found it. With a small budget and a young social media coordinator’s instinctive touch, the CACVB’s Facebook page has shot to the top of national user engagement ratings.

John Freeman, 25, has had a front-row seat for the rapid rise of social media, but the Crozet native and UVA grad said he never thought he’d make a career out of Facebooking. Still, when the job with the CACVB opened up in 2010, he went for it. If a revolution was on the way, he said, “I’d rather be on the front end of it.”

When the CACVB started trying to build its social media presence a year ago, the page had 1,000 followers, Freeman said. He’s raised that number to over 41,000.

It turns out people who like our city love to say so. Professional Facebook watchers say the industry average for a page’s engage-
ment-—the number of people liking, commenting on, and sharing posts—ends up being about 5 to 10 percent of total page likes. For the CACVB page, it’s over 100 percent.

Many destination cities pay experts big bucks to get numbers like that. But Freeman developed his formula on his own: Post pretty pictures with a little attitude, and have a good understanding of your key demographic—mostly middle-aged moms.

Other tourism bureaus pour money into contests and giveaways to lure fans, he said. “We’ve just never done that.” The CACVB spent $11,000 on its Facebook campaign in the past year, Freeman said—just a sliver of its budget of over $1 million.

Late last month, a few well-timed posts quoting Jefferson on politics and some beautiful photos of fall foliage seemed to be driving activity on the page higher than usual. Freeman decided to check the major sites that compile data on the universe of 42 million-plus Facebook pages. “I pulled up the rankings for travel, and there we were. It was Disneyworld, Vegas, and us.” The Charlottesville page has now topped the social engagement lists for three weeks running, beating out sites with a million or more fans.

So what’s in a Facebook “like,” anyway? A lot, it turns out. The traditional method of marketing a destination has been to buy print ads and hope readers pause on the right page, Freeman said. “But with Facebook, you’re in their living room three times a day.”

And a recent study of fans of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana Facebook page found that each “like” brought an average of $56 in annual spending to the area, he said. Based on those numbers, CACVB’s social media presence is worth millions.

Freeman said the job satisfies his competitive nature, but he also brings to it the passion of a native son. He loves seeing other people rave about the area online. “‘This is where I grew up,’ ‘This is what I call home,’ ‘When I think of heaven, I think of this’—it gives you a different appreciation for living here,” he said.

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International students share Thanksgiving with local families

International Thanksgiving
Martha Wood (left) has long hosted international students from UVA for Thanksgiving as part of the University’s Meal Match program. This year, she welcomed two students from East Asia, including 21-year-old William Lai (center), a native of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Photo by Graelyn Brashear.

Martha Wood knows what it’s like to be young and far from familiar ground. A military kid, she and her siblings spent part of their youth in post-World War II Japan. The early exposure to a culture vastly different from their native one influenced them deeply. “It was quite an education for all of us,” Wood said. “It gave me a different perspective on being an international.”

Since then, she’s made a habit of opening her home to people from around the world. Such was the case last Thursday, when she welcomed three strangers—UVA students Miao Lu and William Lai and one hungry reporter, all of us turkeyless on Turkey Day—to her Thanksgiving feast.

Lu, a 24-year-old statistics grad student from Hangzhou, China, and Lai, a 21-year-old undergrad from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia—were among dozens of international students from UVA who signed up to spend the holiday at the homes of welcoming strangers in and around Charlottesville. The University’s Lorna Sundberg International Center, a division of the UVA’s International Studies Office, joins with area churches and the Overseas Student Mission, a Charlottesville-based religious outreach group, to match students with families in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. The International Center gets about 40 requests a year from overseas students who decide to stick around Charlottesville for Thanksgiving, representatives said, and helps organize transportation to 15 to 20 host family’s homes.

Lai said he didn’t know who he’d be matched with, and as it turned out, his fellow guest was a stranger, too, but that didn’t bother him. “I thought it would be nice,” he said. “The more random it is, the more exciting it is.”

Wood, retired nearly 20 years from teaching history and language arts at Walker Upper Elementary, has opened her door to two or three students for her annual feast for decades. She first got involved with UVA’s international program about 30 years ago through a local Baptist association, mentoring students—mostly from China, Korea, and Japan, but also from Europe and elsewhere—and inviting them over for dinners and longer stays over breaks. She sees it as a way to give back after a life of being made to feel welcome in faraway corners of the world. “I find everywhere I go, there’s always someone who’s willing to help,” she said.

It’s also a chance to offer visitors a look at life here from the inside. “We try to make sure that our international students get into real American homes, so they don’t all think that what they see on television is real,” said Wood. For her and the rest of the company—her sister, daughter, and a close friend—that means folding chairs pulled up to an extended table loaded with turkey, simlins, and green bean casserole. It also means appetizers of conversation, laughter, and shared stories.

Once they’d been introduced and offered up their gifts of local cider, a traditional pork dish, and Chinese good luck charms, Lu and Lai settled into a living room brimming with relics from another time and place (before they left Tokyo the first time, said Wood, “my mother thought to take everything we owned except for the clothes on our backs and trade it for Japanese antiques”). It was, for both of them, their first American Thanksgiving celebration.

Lai said last year—his first in the U.S.—he went to Washington, D.C. with friends for the holiday. “It wasn’t a really good idea,” he laughed. “Everything was closed. And it was cold.”

He opted for a warmer experience this year. He and Lu were both curious about the quintessential American feast, they said. Both of them grew up catching bits and pieces of U.S. holiday culture. “My friends in China always enjoyed Christmas Day, Thanksgiving Day, New Year’s, Valentine’s Day,” said Lu, “not the traditional Chinese festivals. They’re more Westernized, I guess.”

But their exposure didn’t go much beyond the late-November turkey dinner specials advertised by restaurants in their home cities. They’re more familiar with a newer addition to the roster of Thanksgiving weekend activities: shopping.

“I know about—what is it?—Black Friday,” said Lu, drawing loud laughs from his hosts.

That was all the cue Wood needed. “Dinner is served!” she crowed, making a move toward the kitchen and the spread that awaited, then turning to this reporter. “And we have an extra seat at the table for you,” she said.

 Join the international community:

UVA’s Lorna Sundberg International Center offers events year-round that give students from around the world the chance to experience American culture and share their own traditions in return—from cooking demonstrations to lectures from visiting scholars. To find out what’s coming up, download the center’s latest newsletter, and sign up to get involved, visit www.virginia.edu/iso/ic.

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What’s coming up in Charlottesville the week of 11/26

Notes from the news desk

Each week, the news team takes a look at upcoming meetings and events in Charlottesville and Albemarle we think you should know about. Consider it a look into our datebook, and be sure to share newsworthy happenings, too.

  • The Rivanna Solid Waste Authority Board meets from 2-3pm Tuesday at its headquarters at 695 Moores Creek Lane. In addition to staff reports on its landfill and recycling center, the Board will hear an introduction of the county’s request for future solid waste services. A meeting of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority will take place at the same time, also at headquarters, and will address a recent audit report and an update from the Rivanna River Basin Commission. It will be the last RWSA meeting of 2012, as the Authority plans to cancel its December meeting.
  • The Charlottesville Planning Commission will hold its annual retreat from 4-10pm Tuesday in the Neighborhood Development Services Conference Room at City Hall, where Commissioners will discuss land use planning in the city and the development of the Comprehensive Plan.
  • The Local Energy Alliance Program (LEAP) will hold a Commercial Solar and Geothermal Energy Workshop from 11am to 1pm Wednesday at CitySpace on the Downtown Mall. Business owners and landlords can learn about energy-saving technologies and how to apply them, and will offer information about the city’s alternative energy loan fund. E-mail tom@leap-va.org or call 434-227-4666 to RSVP.
  • County planning staff will offer an update on the Comprehensive Plan geared toward those in southern and western Albemarle at 6:30pm Thursday at Monticello High School. The meeting will give residents a chance to weigh in on the draft documents before taking them before the Planning Commission in December. A public hearing on the plans is tentatively scheduled for February 2013.
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For farmers, crop-hungry stink bugs are more than irritating houseguests

Stink bug
Researchers are looking for ways to stop the rapid spread of the brown marmorated stink bug, an Asian invader with a voracious appetite for our fruit and veggie crops. File photo.

To most of us, they’re just a nuisance: smelly, persistent pests that creep and buzz their way into our homes and go crunch in the night.

But for farmers in Virginia and a growing number of states, the brown marmorated stink bug is a thing to fear.

An invasive species from East Asia that first arrived in Pennsylvania via shipping crate in the late 1990s, the bug that drives people to distraction each fall when it swarms indoors seeking shelter from the cold has proven to be a formidable agricultural pest. It loves to feed on the buds, seeds, and fruit of a vast number of crops, often destroying them or rendering them unmarketable in the process. And because stink bugs are so new to the scene, researchers—including a number of Virginia Tech entomologists—face challenges trying to control them.

The first brown marmorated was spotted in the Commonwealth in 2004, and has since spread to 44 Virginia counties. “They call it the interstate bug,” said Tech’s Ames Herbert, who is studying the stink bugs’ effect on soybeans in the Tidewater. “They love to travel, love to hang onto equipment and containers.”

And they love to eat. As generalists, they will happily feast on more than 300 types of plants, poking their sharp mouthparts into fruits, veggies, and even cotton bolls to suck out juices. Doug Pfeiffer, another Tech entomologist and Virginia Agricultural Extension agent who works in the Charlottesville area, said the apple orchards and vineyards of the Piedmont have been hit especially hard, in part because the bugs are attracted to farms in forested areas, where they can retreat to trees at night.

The problem for grape growers is two-fold, he said. “When the stink bugs are in the clusters when they’re harvested, they’re crushed along with the clusters, and there’s a bad odor and taste to the juice,” he said. “There were some wineries that were so bad in 2010, they just dumped all their juice, and the whole crop was ruined.”

And then, of course, there’s direct damage from the hungry insects: Where they bite, necrotic spots develop, and can lead to fungal infection.

There are a few pesticides that seem to work on the invaders, but many farmers are finding that stink bugs will come back after a spraying, making it even more expensive to fend them off. “Organic growers have a tougher chore ahead of them,” said Pfeiffer. “There aren’t too many organic pesticide alternatives, especially with the long residual control that you need.” The method many have to resort to? Hand removal.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Scientists up and down the East Coast are putting their heads together to share knowledge of the still-new pest and find fixes. Current research is focused on understanding the stink bugs’ life cycle, behavior, and spread. Meanwhile, said Pfeiffer and Herbert’s graduate student colleague John Aigner, U.S. entomologists are turning to translators to help them access existing studies, which are almost exclusively in Chinese and Japanese.

A Delaware lab is currently evaluating a very specific kind of biological weapon that could be unleashed within a year: A Chinese wasp that lays its eggs inside stink bug eggs, killing the hosts before they can hatch. But introducing another new species to wipe out an existing invasive is a tactic with a long history of failure.

They may not have to resort to such drastic measures. Aigner said Maryland researchers discovered similar parasitic wasps native to the U.S. are learning to attack brown marmorated eggs, so there’s hope the system may right itself on its own.

“It is amazing how you can sit back and watch nature do what nature does,” he said.

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Criticism of TJPDC over $500,000 grant mix-up continues

Steve Williams
TJPDC director Steve Williams has come under fire for the organization's mishandling of a federal grant. Photo courtesy of Charlottesville Tomorrow.

The Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission executive staff has come under fire after a scathing internal report by a committee of its own board members revealed a $500,000 budgeting error on a project funded by a Department of Housing and Urban Development grant, and county and city officials are now calling for more oversight of the organization, which administers federal transportation and development funds on behalf of five counties and the City of Charlottesville.

The grant in question supports the development of Charlottesville and Albemarle’s joint comprehensive plan, but money ran out early and temporary staff will have to be let go in December, apparently because those in charge assumed hundreds of thousands in matching funds were part of the grant.

Albemarle County Supervisor Ann Mallek and Charlottesville City Councilor Kathy Galvin, both TJPDC board members who sat on the committee convened in September to investigate, said they found the funding error was symptomatic of deeper issues.

Most troubling was the lack of communication among staffers and with outside agencies, they said, which the committee felt was the reason the math error went unreported until the project was five months old.

“To my great disgust, it wasn’t discovered for months,” Mallek said. “That’s just not acceptable, and it certainly won’t be tolerated.”

But TJPDC Executive Director Steve Williams said committee members are overstating the problem. He said staff did inadvertently draw up the project budget based on a higher grant figure, but to him, what mattered was delivering what was promised, “and we never felt there was going to be a problem getting the project done,” he said. “That’s ultimately what we were being paid to do. So I guess you could say we weren’t as concerned about the members of the committee.”

Mallek said they should be. “It took us a while to impress that upon the staff,” she said.

The committee report reflects that frustration, saying upper-level management “failed to appreciate the seriousness” of the error, and expressed “inappropriate and misplaced” indignation at the probe. And there’s evidence that attitude has damaged relations between TJPDC and the municipalities it serves. The report cites “serious reservations” on the part of city and county staff when it came to working with TJPDC.

But the report found no intentional wrongdoing, “and now we’re focused on how we’re going to right the ship, so to speak,” Galvin said. New policy on organizational structure and communication will come eventually. Two board members, including Fluvanna businessman Keith Smith, who chaired the committee, are examining how to implement changes. But the task at hand is finishing the HUD-funded project, said Galvin.

Mallek said the TJPDC has done good work in the past, and she’s confident it will again, but the organization will face greater oversight now. “We all need answers, and we need to clean it up immediately so we don’t lose our credibility,” Mallek said. “That’s why we took it so seriously.”

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Green happenings: Charlottesville environmental news and events

Keswick's Castle Hill. Photo: Nick Strocchia

Each week, C-VILLE’s Green Scene page takes a look at local environmental news. The section’s bulletin board has information on local green events and keeps you up to date on statewide happenings. Got an event or a tip you’d like to see here and in the paper? Write us at news@c-ville.com.

  • Cider celebration: The first-annual Virginia Cider Week wraps up this weekend with one final party to celebrate an emerging industry in the Commonwealth. Come to Keswick’s Castle Hill Cider to chat with some of the area’s best cidermakers, taste their wares, and enjoy food and music. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased here.
  • Shady city: Charlottesville is one of 51 Commonwealth municipalities to earn the Virginia Department of Forestry’s “Tree City USA” designation in 2012, marking its commitment to community forestry. To get the nod, cities and towns must have a Tree Board or Department, a tree care ordinance, a forestry program with an annual budget of at least $2 per resident, and an Arbor Day observance and proclamation.
  • Farm guide: Trying to track down a free-range turkey or a responsibly farmed Christmas tree for the holidays? Look over the Piedmont Environmental Council’s 2012 holiday Buy Fresh, Buy Local guide, which lists farms and markets within a short drive from Charlottesville. The guide includes lists of where to buy Christmas trees and decorations, orchards, produce, meant and eggs, and specialty foods, with live links to websites for the producers.

 

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Contemporary cideries are key to keeping heirloom apple varieties alive

Albemarle Ciderworks
The Shelton family farm in North Garden is home to approximately 250 varieties of apples, many of them Virginia heirlooms from past centuries. The farm orchard is one of 13 host farms for this year's Meet Yer Eats Farm Tour. Photo by Andrea Hubbell.

Appalachia is home to more apple varieties than the rest of the country combined, legacy of a bygone era when mountain settlers experimented with fruit trees in relative isolation. According to Gary Nabhan, an Arizona-based conservation biologist, sustainable agriculture activist, and “scholar in residence” during Virginia’s first annual Cider Week, the American apple is inextricably linked to the area. “It’s not only a place where they came in early in American history, but there’s been more diversification just to the west of Charlottesville than in any other place in the nation.”

The early explosion of the apple in Virginia can be traced to the 19th-century demand for hard cider, and cider’s resurgence is helping preserve heirloom apple varieties today. Charlotte Shelton and her family were among the pioneers of Virginia’s dry hard cider movement. She and her brother Chuck Shelton and their family bought their North Garden apple farm in 1986, and with the help of local expert Tom Burford—dubbed “Professor Apple” for his extensive knowledge of vintage varieties—they built their orchard into something of an antique apple library. About 250 varieties are grown there, many recently rescued from obscurity and near-extinction.

“We started collecting apples because we really enjoyed the richness and variety of flavors that are available, but seldom available commercially,” Charlotte Shelton said. “But when we got up to a couple hundred varieties of apples, we said ‘What do we do with that?’”

As others had begun to discover, cider was the answer. Many of the heirloom varieties the Sheltons had developed a passion for were well-suited for hard cider in ways most popular grocery store apples aren’t. To make a good dry cider, “you need tannins, some bitterness, and acidity,” Shelton said. “You need that structure as well as the sweetness.”

Appalachia—especially Virginia’s Blue Ridge and areas westward—have an unusually high concentration of apple varieties with just those qualities, said Nabhan. To understand why, he said, take a look at the topography. Before highways and cars, traveling just a few miles in the mountains was arduous and took hours. As a result, farmers experimented with fruit tree varieties continuously and in isolation. “Each little mountaintop or valley back in the hills was like an island where the equivalent of Darwin’s finches happened among apples,” Nabhan said.

Back then, cider was one of the most important products that came out of apple orchards, Shelton explained. The simple fermented beverage was the table drink of choice at the time, and the search for fruit with the perfect cider profile drove much of the experimentation.

For decades, Nabhan and others have been trying to keep many of the varieties of that era from going extinct. The resurgence of their usefulness as cider apples has been the key to their preservation. “Until the cideries started to emerge, we just didn’t have the economic incentive,” he said. “And bingo. Now we have it.”

And by we, he means us. When it comes to the careful craft of cider from heirloom fruit, Virginia is at the epicenter. From Diane and Chuck Flynt of Foggy Ridge Cider in Carroll County, who were the first to market traditional dry hard cider here, to the Shelton family and a handful of others showcasing their products this week, “you all have the national leaders,” Nabhan said.

For Shelton and other growers leading the cider Renaissance in Virginia, it’s about more than selling cider. “There’s always a hope that by retaining biological diversity, something good can come of it,” she said.

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Charlottesville pitches in, donates to Sandy relief

For locals with ties to New York and New Jersey, the last two weeks in the wake of Hurricane Sandy have been hard.

Seeing destruction and suffering in a place you’ve called home—a place where you still have loved ones and cherished memories—is a difficult thing, and the Web has made it easy for us to watch the unfolding tragedy of Sandy from afar, delivering a constant stream of photos and fresh pain. It’s been hard for me to do anything but stare at pictures of the wreckage that was my community on the Jersey Shore, and I’ve heard the same from others who have moved from the hard-hit areas, and plenty of others who have no connections there at all—we just can’t look away.

We can, however, do something to help, and some are rallying others—friends, neighbors, customers—to the cause.

Drew Hart, owner of the Downtown Mediterranean restaurant Camino, is a Westchester, New York, native. As the news of the wrecked region and friends’ struggles flowed in, he decided to do what he could to steer some relief north. Through the end of the week, Camino will donate a portion of each table’s check and donate it to a disaster relief charity.

Hart is trying to multiply the effort by rallying other restaurateurs to the cause. Charlottesville eatery owners are a compassionate bunch, he’s found. “Many of them already have their own game plan,” he said. Hamilton’s on Main ran their own fundraiser last week, and others are preparing to do the same.

The news coverage of the storm might have died down, but the needs in New York and New Jersey are still great. Tens of thousands are still without power. Many are still displaced and may not have homes to return to. And as Charlottesville keeps digging into its pockets, we’ll post about it. We’ll be keeping track of the relief efforts we hear about here—whether it’s a restaurant’s gift of a cut of the week’s income or an elementary school clothing drive.

Know of something that’s going on? Comment below, and send an e-mail with details and contact info news@c-ville.com.

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PAC founded by young local Democrats helped tip scales in swing states

PCCC
Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, works with staff on a nationwide Election Day get-out-the-vote operation from her PAC’s temporary headquarters in Charlottesville. Photo by Graelyn Brashear

On Election Day in a spare, bright room in Charlottesville’s Glass Building, dozens of young Democrats worked phones in a last-minute push to coax voters to the polls. But the young volunteers and staffers of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a PAC founded by two UVA alums, weren’t calling Charlottesville residents. Their calls were going out to Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Ohio, and a handful of other areas where hard-fought House and Senate races were coming to a close.

Created in 2009, PCCC supports unabashedly left-wing candidates with dollars and operations help—a busy, if quiet, liberal answer to the Tea Party movement. But while the collective Tea Party shriek seemed to blow itself out around the time of the Republican primaries and lost ground in last week’s elections, PCCC’s star is rising. Since Charlottesville native Stephanie Taylor and UVA Law grad Adam Green founded the PAC three years ago, it has raised more than $11 million from a membership base that’s now near 1 million.

Taylor, 33, grew up immersed in the language of progressive politics. Her mom, a medical secretary at UVA hospital, spearheaded an effort to unionize colleagues while Taylor was still a student. She tagged along to rallies and meetings. “It let me see firsthand the importance of being able to negotiate for better wages,” she said.

After graduating from college in three years, she left her MFA program at Columbia early, troubled by what was happening in government after George W. Bush’s election in 2000. “I couldn’t stay at Columbia writing when there were things that needed to happen in the world,” she said.

She moved to Columbus, Ohio to become a labor organizer, but she felt like her victories getting workers to unionize were being undone many times over by high-level government decisions. So she went to Washington.

“I started thinking about Congress the way I’d think about any workplace,” she said. “Congress can be organized like any other group of people, and they can work with other members to push forward.” In 2008, she worked as an advisor to Tom Perriello, an old friend who was making an unlikely bid for a House seat in her home district. Taylor and Green, the former communications director for MoveOn.org, had been tossing around the idea of forming a political action committee, and helping guide Perriello to victory crystallized things for Taylor—and for others who worked with her on the campaign, like Charlottesville native Michael Snook, now 27.

“One day we were in the boiler room”—command central in the final days of a campaign—“talking about things that were more difficult than they should have been,” Snook said. “And Stephanie kind of said, ‘Hold that thought until after the election.’”

Their win behind them, they recruited a staff of other 20- and 30-somethings and started filing paperwork. Their goal: build up the power of the Progressive Caucus by seeking out and advising candidates, and supporting them with donations from a vast membership also active in advocacy campaigns.

The amount of money they’ve brought in has turned heads, especially considering the millions have been raised mostly in $3 donations through ActBlue, a web-based service that makes it easy to trace and report funding. But they also offer manpower.

Running for office is hard and unfamiliar work, said Taylor. “It’s the equivalent of opening up and running and then shutting down a small business over the course of 18 months,” she said. PCCC started stepping in early, helping their picks hire staff and strategize.

At the same time, they stirred up their liberal membership with campaigns that kept a foot on the throats of lawmakers, and even the Obama administration. When White House officials hinted they might abandon the public option in the health care debate in 2010, PCCC organized a petition and protest, prompting then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to rant about “f—ing retarded” liberal groups. The PAC started getting profiled in major media outlets, and Taylor and her cohorts were pleased to be on the receiving end of some Democrats’ wrath.

“We used to joke to each other and say, ‘I guess we’re not being invited to the White House Christmas party,’” she said.

As Election Day approached this year, PCCC shifted its operations center to Charlottesville and hunkered down for a last-minute push. Many of the core staff of 20 have connections to the area, Taylor said, “and it’s nice to be able to get out of D.C. and be doing the intense organizing in a battleground state.” They hired 70 temporary workers and hit the phones, placing more than 2 million calls to potential voters with the help of their members.

And then, exhausted, they watched the results come in. Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. Sherrod Brown in Ohio. One after another, 30 Senate and House candidates PCCC had put its weight behind became victors.

Far from resting on its laurels, Taylor said PCCC is readying for a fight against expected attempts to cut Medicare funding during the coming lame duck session of Congress, and they’re scouting for a new crop of progressive candidates.

But the wins are sweet, and Snook said there’s a fundamental difference between working for a single successful campaign and striving to pull off elections nationwide.

“We’re here to win elections, but we also know we’re building an activist base that will carry on into the future,” he said. Campaign volunteers work incredibly hard, but after Election Day, their cause gets yanked out from under them. With PCCC’s work, he said, “win or lose, you know you’re building something better.”

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Help for veterans: A C-VILLE reader speaks up

Notes from the news desk

Last week, ahead of Veterans Day, we ran a story about local vets and their struggles—and successes—coming home to the civilian workforce. It was a profile-oriented piece, but one reader, an Iraq veteran from Earlysville, pointed out that there weren’t a lot of specifics in the article about the resources out there for returning military. Fortunately, the letter he sent us did, and it also outlined the problem of unemployment among veterans in ways our story didn’t. Read on, and let his words help serve as reminder that while we officially remember our vets once a year, many of them face difficulties every day.

Here’s his letter, which you’ll also find in our Mailbag section in Tuesday’s issue:

I wanted to personally thank you, as a veteran, for publishing the story on the challenges veterans face finding employment “For veterans, the job hunt comes with extra challenges” in this week’s C-Ville. I’m a loyal reader for the past four years, even during my recent six month deployment to Afghanistan (as a civilian this time), and always keep up with you on Twitter.

I wanted to add some feedback though on some facts I wish you would have included. Unemployment rates for veterans aged 18 to 24 averaged 29 percent in 2011…more than 10 percent higher than the rest of the population in America. And according to the September jobs report, post 9/11 veteran unemployment was at 9.7 percent with female veteran unemployment at a staggering 19.9 percent. This topic was even addressed recently on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart,  which highlighted additional challenges veterans face such as poor translation of work experience to civilian credentials.

I wish you would have mentioned ways that struggling veterans can get help. I’m a member of multiple veterans organizations: the American Legion (Post 128 in Stanardsville), the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (iava.org). All three of these great organizations are making both legislative and direct progress in mentoring and trying to help veterans find work. This is in addition to the amazing work being done to help veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) counseling and GI Bill benefits. I’m very happy you addressed PTSD, but I wish you would have helped lead the many struggling veterans in the area to the where they can find help.. either through the organizations listed above or directly through the Department of Veterans Affairs. The main regional VA hospital is in Richmond and they have an Iraq and Afghanistan transition office (Lynn P. Anderson, OEF/OIF Program Manager, Phone 804-675-6494 or Jose Illa, 804-675-6266 or Kimberly Hinson, cell phone, 804-387-4108), but there is also a VA outpatient clinic right here in Charlottesville that can be reached at 434-293-3890 — they can facilitate the registration process for area vets.

You mentioned Piedmont Virginia Community College’s role in educating young vets, but are you aware of the difficulties we face in getting the GI Bill benefits we have earned? I’d love to know how PVCC and/or the University of Virginia is facilitating the use of the GI Bill for veterans and who/where veterans can go for GI Bill assistance locally. Both the VA (at http://gibill.va.gov) and IAVA (at http://newgibill.org) have great information for veterans hoping to use either the Montgomery or the Post 9/11 GI Bill. But according to the Stars and Stripes, the VA backlog on paying Post 9/11 GI Bill benefits are worse than ever with pending claims over 300,000 last September.

I love that you addressed this concern, I just wish you would have helped to lead veterans to help and hoped you might have encouraged local business to hire veterans based on our unique job experiences, ability to take on huge responsibilities at a young age, and experience with accepting orders, working hard, and performing duties with integrity!

Sincerely,
L. Nelson
US Army (2001 – 2008), medically retired, two-time Iraq vet
Earlysville, VA