The Veterans Employment Alliance Center (VEA Center; 4222 W. Capitol Drive) is a unique nationwide workforce readiness organization headquartered in Milwaukee that offers two programs: “28 Days to Employment” available to everyone, and “From Deployment to Employment, Transition Military Training to a Civilian Career in 28 Days,” available free to veterans. The VEA Center focuses on helping veterans develop key skills and action plans needed for career success and matches them with hiring managers from some of the largest corporations around the world. Off the Cuff sat down with the VEA Center Founder C.J. Brown III to learn more.
Can you give me a little background about the VEA Center?
I headed up a corporation for 22 years based out of San Antonio, Texas. I came up here in 1991 on a consulting contract and while here, I met some people and decided to sell the company, retire and move up here in 1992. To keep the story short, I made a mistake in trusting the wrong people with my financial affairs and ended up stone broke and homeless on the streets of Milwaukee living under a bridge eating out of dumpsters for three years. During that time, I am trying to find help to get employment. I’m not finding it. What do I do, besides jump off the Hoan Bridge, which I sat up there six months of the year, debating. So I started interviewing other homeless people—people with disabilities, veterans, caseworkers, job developers. I found pieces of paper and a scrawny pencil and I wrote a book called “28 Days To Employment.” Then I met two schoolteachers that were homeless. We converted the book into a classroom training program and now we’re in our 12th year with our ninth edition. I’m proud to say we have a 97% hire rate and 98% retention rate of those who complete and follow the program.
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The new one that I developed strictly for veterans, “From Deployment to Employment,” is a program focused on starting with the vets’ time in the military and going through that process and then taking that process and transitioning it to the 28-Day Program. That brings them to the civilian level. As a result of that, in testing it with veterans, we had a 100% hire rate, 100% retention rate.
What is unique about the VEA Center compared to other job-readiness organizations?
Veterans are roughly 7% of the population. Roughly 38% of the unemployed are veterans and 56% of the homeless are vets. When you’re homeless or unemployed, you really don’t have a lot of money or any money at all. So when you go to these organizations, they give you brochures, say go here—how do you get there? So I thought, we need to bring everything under one roof. And that’s what the VEA Center is. When veterans come here, they don’t have to go anywhere else. We work with them on transitional housing, transitional employment while they’re going through training, permanent housing and it goes on. We have a network of 25,000 employers nationwide and another 4,000 in Europe. We don’t talk about jobs; we focus on the careers. That’s why we have such a high retention rate. And we don’t just work with veterans; we work with people from all walks of life.
The public and businesses think the VA takes care of every vet. That’s not true. Unless you’re 100% disabled from the military, the only thing you get is your college education and a no-down payment loan for a home. If you want more, you have to pay for it. I go to the VA for healthcare, but I’m on a co-pay, just like if I went to any other hospital. Even if the vet can get healthcare, the family can’t. The social service side for jobs? They say, “Go to a job center, look for a job on the computer.” That’s what’s sad.
What does the Career Camp entail?
It’s a six-week process. It’s intense. Veterans come in for two hours a week and then they’re given homework assignments to do through the rest of the week. It’s a lot of work and by the third week, we’ve developed a team and they work together. We teach them to how to sell, because they’re the product, the employers the consumer. If you don’t understand the product, you can’t sell it to the consumer. The program teaches them about themselves and pulls them out from inside. You can have 5,000 people apply for a job that have the skills and ability, but who has the talent? That’s the key. That’s what we extract out of them, that talent. We focus on that and draw that toward the areas of employment that they should focus on. And then we tap into the hidden job market—people are not aware of that. Like right now, 95% of jobs are not advertised. Our people also never see HR until it’s time to fill out their W2 form. We take them right to the decision maker.
And the whole program is cost effective. We can do this program for the government for half of what they spend now. We can actually create 3,200 jobs throughout the state of Wisconsin, we can save the state between 4 and 6 million dollars and we can make welfare to work really work.
For more information about the VEA Center or the program, visit veactr.org or call 414-918-9225.
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