Welcome to iHeartRadio Communities, a public affairs special focusing on the biggest issues impacting you. This week, here's Ryan Gorman. Thanks so much for joining us here on iHeartRadio Communities. I'm Ryan Gorman, and we have a very important conversation lined up for you, so let's get right to it. This Tuesday is National Hire a Veteran Day, and joining me to talk about this and other veterans related issues, I have co Lyle, executive director of Mission Role
Call. You can learn about all the work they do for veterans all across the country at Mission roll call dot org. Cole, thank you so much for ticket a few minutes to come on the show and we'll get to National Hire a Veteran Day in just a bit, But first let's start with an overview of the work your organization does. Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me on, Ryan, It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
Mission roll Call is a national advocacy program that focuses on three specific things suicide prevention policy, access to healthcare and benefits, and representing traditionally underserved populations in the veteran community across the country, namely tribal and rural veterans. We do this. We've got about one point four million veterans and supporters that have
subscribed to our text and email polls that we then use. Whenever the VA, the White House, or Congress proposes a policy or a piece of legislation that could potentially affect the veteran community in one of these three areas, we poll that community and then it provide instantaneously that feedback to the policymakers that are proposing whatever it is, so that we can give them a more informed understanding of how the betteran community feels about a particular piece of policy or legislation.
We've been doing this for years. Over the last two or three months or so, I've been up on the Hill testifying a couple of different times about a couple of different bills. So we aim to provide you know, the veterans direct unified voice to policymakers. And I know one piece of legislation that's been passed and signed into law that you played a very active role in,
the Pause Act. Can you step us through what that process is like, the work on a piece of legislation like that, and the work that goes into trying to get it passed through Congress and signed by the President. Yeah. I mean it's important to understand the work that I did with the Pause Act was actually not with Mission Roll Call at the time I started doing that. That was how I got involved in betteran advocacy back in twenty fourteen.
You know, I had issues with post traumatic stress, you know, try to utilize the VA system that didn't work for me. Sought another option, which was service dogs. But the VA didn't provide any funding for service docs
for veterans and post traumatic stress or other psychological or physical mobility issues. So I drafted piece of legislation that ultimately got sponsored by then Congressman to Santists before he was this big national figure, and we worked and it was a very bipartisan effort, even in the heated twenty sixteen election year to get that passed. And it took a few years because you know, I didn't have any
institutional backing. I wasn't a part of any organization at the time, so it was just me and my dog Kai going around and talking to people about the need and the solution to that need that we've proposed, which was expanding funding to service talk organizations so that the PA didn't have to reinfort the wheel. And it was hard. I mean, you had some people at the
VA, you know, opposing it for different reasons. You know, you had kind of parochial interests in Congress and different committees that would that would fight, and I was still a full time student at the time, going back and forth from Texas, A and M. So it took a lot of years and some back and forth and some kind of wrangling, but eventually it got passed and kind of a compromised version in twenty twenty one and President Biden
signed it into law. But you know, after a law passes, implementation is really where the rubber meets the road. So the agency takes the law that Congress passes and provides, you know, rulemaking and regulations per congressional intent, which may or may not actually meet Congressional intent, and so you have to go back and maybe Congress has to through their oversight and appropriations abilities, forced the agency to do what they originally intended. So that's kind of where
we're at. But even if it's dogs and puppies, which this was seemingly too or excuse me, veterans and puppies seemingly two very bipartisan things be very difficult to pass laws just for various reasons. It's tough, like less than one percent of all bills that get introduced in Congress ultimately get passed. So let's say the Pause Act is implemented and up and running as it was intended
to be, what will that do for veterans across the country. Well, the original Pause Act that I wrote was a grant program, like I said, that would provide direct grant funding to service dog organizations. Kenines for Warriors is one in Florida that people know well. And again it was so that the BEA didn't have to get into the dog training business and reinvent the wheel. They could just provide grant funding to organizations that were already doing it that
already had good nine nineties. But through the years that idea kind of got a little compromised. That was before Congress passed the Fox Grants, which was funding to organizations and suicide prevention, So we were kind of trying to institute something that was unprecedented at the time. It got passed as a pilot program and five different locations across the country to provide keynine training to veterans, and at the end of the training they would end up keeping the dogs, so
it was kind of a win win for everybody. And after a certain period for the pilot program, Congress could then go back and permanently authorize the program and expand it. But we're already seeing implementation problems at the VA because frankly, you know, certain officials don't believe in the whole more holistic approaches to
mental health and suicide prevention. Because you've got people that run the Veterans Health Administration that frankly spent years of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars going to medical school learning the traditional approaches to mental healthcare and suicide prevention that are reticent to admit that what they've learned and their processes are not working and have not worked, which objectively, you know, they haven't talk therapy and pharmacology.
We're not going to prescribe and counsel our way out of the mental health epidemic in the United States or the suicide epidemics. So we already have Congress coming up and trying to go back to the original bill that I authored to provide grand funding, because I think that's really the only way that we're gonna see significant improvement by BA on this issue. I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by Coal Lyle, the executive director of Mission Role Call. You can learn more
and support this organization at Mission Role Call dot org. Can you spend a moment on your personal experience with Kaya and why service dogs have become such a useful resource for veterans who are dealing with PTSD. Yeah, you know, so post traumatic stress and mental health issues like it have become you know, quote unquote the signature wound of veterans in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as these the American public has kind of a stewed perception on veterans.
They think they're either broken and dysfunctional with post traumatic stress or you know, their special operations high speed kind of guys. When the reality is there's a
lot of folks in the middle. But for those like me that have struggled with post traumatic stress but still learn to mitigate the symptoms and lead successful lives, you know, we don't necessarily need the pills, we don't necessarily need the therapy, or we will have tried them and they didn't work for us, but we still need to find a way to figure out how to deal with those symptoms. And I think anybody that's ever owned a dog can tell
you that they can be extremely therapeutic even if they're not trained. But a legally protected and trained service dog is trained to perform what are called work tasks that can help with any number of different symptoms that you have. For instance, Kaya was trained to wake me up from nightmares and use what it's called animal assisted intervention to stop anxiety attacks. So they can do extraordinary things,
and these are extraordinary dogs. You know. The VA and other people will say that there's not enough empirical evidence, when in fact, the VA Zone study that they did part of the Pause Act program has said that there was
a significant reduction in suicidal ideation and symptoms of postraumatic stress. So they can be incredibly powerful to this end, and I think frankly the VA as a whole, and this is one of our big initiatives at Mission Roll calls to try to get the VA to move the Office of Suicide Prevention as a direct report to the Secretary and make it their number one overall priority because it's not always and most of the times it's not a mental health issue. We need
to decouple. Looking at suicide as a strictly reality is when somebody gets to that point where they are hopeless and they feel unloved and all these different things, it is likely a conglomeration of issues driving them to that point. Acute financial stress, relationship stress, maybe they're going through a divorce or a breakup. It could be exacerbated by existing mental health issues. It could be substance
abuse, it could be any number of different things. And asking veterans, hey, if you have these problems, called the Veteran Crisis Line, wish you should if you are in crisis, that the great resource. It's still a very reactionary approach. You're already having those symptoms, you're already dealing with those difficulties, right. So we need to catch these veterans upstream before they have this kind of perfect storm of issues that leads them to spiral down this
path to suicide. And that involves empowering community organizations with grant funding through the Fox grants that I mentioned earlier that deal with acute financial stress relief, the deal with relationship counseling, that deal with peer to peer support. All of
these different things can catch a veteran before they spiral down that path. But the VA looks at this problem and the Office of Suicide Prevention is in the Mental Health Office, where they spend thirteen billion dollars annually on talk therapy and
pharmacology and pills which have a slew of negative effects as well. So it's important that we work and try to get the VA and Congress to force the VA to really embrace these different approaches and provide more funding to grant programs because less than fifty percent of veterans in the United States used the VA, and so there's half of the population that they're not even touching. And these community
organizations can really be a forced multiplier. And you're not saying get rid of something like talk therapy, correct, You're just saying we want to add these other options in that could be effective for different people. Yeah, of course, I mean I still use to the a M. I go to a counselor event center. I don't you know, I don't go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but you know, I still I still go to counseling every once in a while because I find it helpful, and I would never
advocate for getting rid of those options. They work for plenty of people, but you know the reality is that they don't work for everybody, and some people are reticent to use pills because of the negative effects after they've tried, which is what happened with me and talk therapy. You know, prolonged exposure doesn't work for everybody when you're talking about symptoms of post radic stress. So
trying to embrace some of these more holistic approaches to mental health. I know there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that medical marijuana helps, there's no empirical evidence because it's still scheduled one, so the government can't even research if it works or not. But there's a lot of different approaches to this issue that can and should be utilized to fight this problem, because, like I said,
most or half of veterans don't even use the VA. Some of them don't use it because they have private health insurance, but there's probably a pretty high percentage of veterans that don't use it because of the horror stories in the lack of trust in the VA itself, because of the historical issues with that agency, and it's bureaucracy. I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by co Lysle, executive director of Mission Role Call. You can learn more about this organization at Mission
role Call dot org. Some of the things that you've been advocating for as we've been having this discussion, I'm assuming this is what you're hearing from the one point four million or so veteran members of Mission Role Call. This is the feedback you're getting from veterans across the country. Yeah, and outside of just the polling data. Last year, in twenty twenty two, we did ten or eleven outreach trips across the country. It was a geographically diverse tour,
you know. We went to California, Texas, Florida, Montana, Idaho, all different parts of the country, Alaska, talking with policymakers on the ground, talking with veteran service organizations and individual veterans themselves to kind of inform some of this data. To get context for why people may have answered
a certain way. We looked at individual experiences in those areas. For instance, LA had a very low approval rating for the veterans out there, had a low approval rating for their VA system as opposed to the Dallas Fort Worth area that had a pretty high approval rating. So we talked to different communities and said, you know, what is working. Why do you guys have a high approval rating versus like areas that did not, what is not working?
And why do you guys not like this system? So that we could go back to Congress and say, this is what we're hearing from veterans on the ground, and this is the data we have to back it up. And you know, Congress as this year have been pretty receptive. So that but that's kind of our mission and what we do, and we do it because we want to see the suicide rate lower and we want veterans to have timely access to good quality healthcare, whether or not that's from the VA system
or with community providers. We've talked about suicide prevention before, but I think it's always important to remind everyone of the scope of the problem. Can you just give us an overview of how prevalent this is within the veteran community, especially compared to the general population. Yeah, so it is a a very
tragic and heavy topic to discuss. But if you believe the VA statistics right now, about seventeen veterans per day commit suicide, and the veteran community at large is about one and a half times more likely tikinite suicide than their civilian peers. And it's a complex topic because, as I mentioned before, there's no one thing we can point to and say this is why, you know, veterans are taking their lives. And unfortunately, you know, the data
is sometimes seemingly contradictory to what you would think would be reasons. Right, So people that went to combat zones are actually, according to the data, less likely to kill themselves than people who did not experience combat. People in the garden reserve are tend to be at a higher risk. People that you know, served three years or less or got a demotion and while they were
in the military have a higher predisposition to kill themselves. So some of the data is a little contradictory than what we know, but there is emerging evidence.
Scientific studies, Operation Deep Dive being one of them that Duke University is doing collaboration with America's Warrior Partnership, actually suggest that because the VA does not use these statistics for overdose steps what are called self injury mortalities, that the suicide rate amongst former service members could be as high as forty four a day because the individual states all collect data like death data, not in a uniform
manner, So California and Florida or New York and Texas ways that they verify somebody who kills themselves, the way they verify their status as veterans is completely different. And then they sometimes will count overdoses as suicides and sometimes not. That data gets to the CDC. The CDC sends it to the VA, and they have their own methodology for counting. You know, how many veterans
even exist in the United States? The census data estimates twenty twenty one seventeen point four, but the VA uses like an eighteen point two million number,
which we're not really sure why that's the case. So the data itself seems to suggest that the rate is higher than the VA's stated number at seventeen per day, which I mean, even that is very tragic, but it is when I talk to veterans around the country, it's frustrating because it's you rarely need a veteran that either doesn't know somebody themselves or know somebody whose friend that they served with killed themselves, Like it's it's a pretty high, like anecdotal,
Like everywhere you go, people are affected by this and the veteran community. And clearly, the VA's is the largest healthcare system in the country and should be the lead on any effort with regards to suicet prevention. But they can't tackle this on their own. They have to utilize community organizations, and they have to look at this problem in a more holistic approach or we're not
going to get anywhere with this problem. Ryan Gorman here with coal Lyle, executive director of Mission Role Call. You can learn all about this organization and support the tremendous work they do for veterans across the country at Mission roll call dot org. So, Cole, let's talk about National Higher a Veteran Day coming up on Tuesday. In addition to all the issues we've been talking about facing veterans in this country, employment is also an issue and this is a
day to bring awareness to that. So tell us a little bit more about it. Yeah, National Hire a Veteran Day, as you've noted, is observed every year on July twenty fifth. Marine Corps Veteran and Hire our Heroes founder Dan Caparrali created the day as a call to action for companies to hire
and encourage veteran job applications. Years ago, the veteran unemployment rate during the height of Iraq and Afghanistan was higher than the national average, and since then there's been a concerted effort by public entities like the VA and the DoD and
the White House and private companies too higher veterans to reverse that trend. Now, you know, we see that the veteran unemployment rate for the last few years has actually been lower from the national average, and I think for a number of different reasons, because you know, veterans bring competitive skills to civilian jobs and then also some intangible, you know, soft skills and leadership abilities
that make them good fits for as employees and as employers. Mission roll Call did a research study that last year that was representative of the national population that said that Americans overwhelmingly think that veterans make good employers and good employees. So we're happy to see that the national average for veteran unemployment is low currently, but we want to make sure that it stays low. And that's kind of
the purpose and attamp behind days like this. What are some of the challenges for veterans when they return home from serving overseas trying to get back into the workforce. Most veterans, you know the Transition Assistance program as you transition out of the military. It has a pretty notoriously awful reputation for actually getting veterans
and activeuty service members prepared for life in the civilian world. And there's a pretty high percentage of veterans that get out that don't have a job lined up or aren't in school, so they have to kind of navigate this process without their genet command, without their peer support network, in a completely kind of different cultural environments in the military and the civilian world, which can be pretty daunting, and there's frankly a lot of what I call paralysis by analysis.
There's a lot of different options and there's a lot of different programs that veterans can utilize, so some of them just it takes them a couple of months, but luckily, most veterans find a job within a year of leaving the military. But the DoD has come out with programs like skill Bridge to try
to ensure that service members have options before they even leave the service. Skill Bridge is designed for active duty service members within one hundred and eighty days of leaving the service to go do while they're on active duty and getting paid to duty, pay do internships with corporations, big companies and small company to try to get some experience and hopefully have a job before they even get out of the military. How much does that transition impacts the mental health of veterans.
How much is that a part of some of the struggle that we hear about once they return home. Well, it can. It's hard to say definitively
that it negatively impacts one or positively impacts one way or the other. You know, I think that the biggest hurdle is just a cultural shift that I was talking about, going from an organization where you are serving with people with a similar mission and a similar mindset, and it's it's very much a kind of a team mentality, and it's just a different culture than going to the
civilian world. And you've got to remember, most of these young men and women signed up at a high school and the military is all they've ever really known. And then they get out and now they're expected to, you know, take care of themselves again, but without those kind of support networks and chains of command that they have had for the last you know, a few years or longer in the military, So it can be fairly daunting and probably
could lead to some negative mental health effects. But you know, I think veterans tend to rise to new challenges and that's one of the reasons that makes them good employees. So it's hard to say definitively if that has a huge effect one way or the other, but it could. But I don't think that's as big of an issue as maybe say, making sure that they have access to quality healthcare and benefits at the VA, or getting them plugged into
a peer support network or community provider or something like that. And how supportive have businesses small and big, like being towards the hiring of veterans and making
sure that our veterans are taken care of in the workforce. You know, there are plenty of initiatives, particularly at the larger corporations, to higher veterans and internally, uh, you know, corporate veteran initiatives to make sure that veterans are have a community within organizations and that they are their progress is encouraged
and they're encouraged to thrive within companies. I mentioned earlier, you know, public and private partnerships between uh, you know, there was the Governor's Challenge that the Obama's instituted from the White House to try to get more veterans hired at corporations. I think, like I said, born out by the study that Mission Roll Call did, most employers see veterans as a value add because
they bring specific skills to the table based on their military experience. But they also bring uh, you know, small unit leadership, and they also bring a very a very good work ethic and a very good team mentality. So
you know, I think they make good employees. I think most people recognize that there are you know, the outliers that, as I mentioned earlier, people tend to think of veterans as either you know, these these they have these skewed perceptions of veterans as either special operations and great leaders or broken kind of dysfunctional. And so there might be some outliers that have some incorrect and negative perceptions of veterans as employees. But I think the data and you talk
to most people and they'll tell you that veterans make great employees. I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by coal Lyle Executive Director, of Mission role calls. I don't think I want to touch on the work you do advocating for tribal and rural veterans. What are some of the unique challenges that they face. Yeah,
I think the biggest one is just access to healthcare right. People on tribal lands and reservations and people in rural communities, say in Montana or Alaska, just have access issues because they tend to have to drive a lot farther to go to a VA facility. So this is one of the reasons why we've been very supportive at Mission roll call of codifying the access standards in the
Mission Act. The VA has has tried to kind of undermine the Mission Act of twenty and eighteen because it a lot of veterans are starting to utilize the program, particularly in tribal and rural areas, because they want to if they have to drive three hours to a VA facility versus like one hour or less to a community provider, they should have that option. They should have that
choice. But the VA in some cases is reticent to let in certain areas, veterans kind of flee the use of the eight facilities because then you know, the next year following year, they would see a decrease in funding as the expansion of community programs expand. So that's one of the reasons we advocate
for them. I think, you know, even in communities tribal in particular, even telehealth can be sometimes a challenge because they don't have access to the same kind of internet capabilities and things that the average American does, So there can be a lot of different access issues, and particularly to suicide prevention because these communities have different cultures, like rural communities and tribal communities have different cultures
than say communities in big cities like New York or Washington, DC or Los Angeles. They tend to be more tight knit, more close, but a little wary of kind of outsiders. So it's harder for the VA and community organizations to come in and try to affect change on the ground and help promote those policies. But we're doing the best we can to advocate for their needs on Capitol and hopefully Congress. Listen. Coal Lyle, executive director of Mission
Role Call with us. You can learn more and support this organization helping veterans at Mission Role Call dot org and again this coming Tuesday, is National Hire A veteran day Cole really appreciate obviously your service to this country and your time. Thanks so much for coming on the show. All right, Thank you,
Ryan, always a pleasure. All Right. That's going to do it for this edition of iHeartRadio Communities. As we wrap things up, want offer big thanks to our guest Coal Lyle, and of course to all of you for listening. I'm your host, Ryan Gorman. We'll talk to you again real soon.