Empowering Veterans for Success: Warrior-Scholar Project

After years of work, Ryan Pavel had finally landed his dream job with the Warrior Scholar Project. He was a military veteran turned lawyer who dreamed of working with other veterans. The Warrior Scholar Project had just received a huge grant that would allow them to bring him on as executive director, but right before he was supposed to begin, his boss suddenly left the organization.

So I came on board. And I had this really small team of people who believed in the thing, like a few people, and we had enough money in the bank to be able to pay the bills. But the organization sustainability really depended on it grant. I didn't realize how much depended on it until I actually got a look at the.

Full on financials.

I also didn't realize that we were only in phase one of this big grant application.

Okay, let me just make sure I have this right. You come on board on spec. You don't know how on spec it is. You desperately need this grant way more than you realize. You desperately need this grant, and it's a little further away than you sort of were led to believe. Yeah shit, all right, Yeah, welcome to The Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business.

And I'm Tanya Nebo, a lawyer and consultant for business owners.

On The Unshakeables, we're sharing the daring stories of small business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories of how they got through it. And today I want to introduce you to someone special who will be joining us on this episode. Mark Elliott is Managing Director and Global head of Military and Veteran Affairs for JP Morgan Chase, where I work, and we're excited to have him join us today. Hi. Mark, Welcome to the show.

Ben, Thank you for having me and thank you for hosting this. I think this is important for not just the veteran community, but the entire small business community.

We're fortunate enough to be colleagues, but JP Morgan Chase is a really big place, So why don't you tell everyone what it is you do for the firm.

I do lead our military invention affairs here at JP Morgan Chase. I pinch myself every day just to know that I get to do this. It's a way to give back to a community that I spent twenty eight years serving alongside.

So Mark, hopefully you know what our show is all about, and I think you've heard a couple episodes, but I wanted to have you join us today because you are a veteran and just like Ryan, you work with veterans all the time as they transition from military life into civilian life.

Well, Ben, thank you for shedding a light on this community. I think they are a treasure that we should be proud of and make sure we're helping them be successful.

On today's episode, the Warrior Scholar Project from Washington, d C. So, first of all, I just want to say, in front of everyone, I say thank you for your service.

Thank you so much for your support. It's actually really interesting even that question about how veterans respond to that question of thank you for your service. That's really topical in the veteran community. There's a school of people that really reject that as like something that people don't like being thanked for their service. There's a whole lot of conversation about it, and it took me years before I

Ryan, as you'll hear throughout this episode, has a complicated relationship with the military, but one thing is crystal clear. His support for veterans is unwavering. To understand how Ryan got to the Warrior Scholar project, we have to go back to the beginning.

I grew up in a upper middle class suburb, very privileged, upbringing only child.

Very very fortunate in that regard.

And since I grew up outside Chicago, with the school everybody wanted to go to was University of Illinois, and I got rejected, and rightly so. I was not a particularly compelling candidate. I was not achieving my potential. My extracurriculars were track and cross country and getting last in a lot of those races.

After that rejection, he didn't know where to turn. Then he spoke with a recruiter from the Marine Corps.

Some things clicked for me.

The path that I thought that I was going to do, the path that seemed easy, is not the path that I'm actually going to follow. Of just going to school and taking a major and studying something for the sake of studying something. It seemed like a really good way to be able to wipe the slate clean, at least of the junior ranks the military. It's a true meritocracy. All that matters is can you do this number of pull ups? Doesn't matter where you came from or anything

So Ryan he joined up. He went to basic training and took a series of aptitude tests to see what career he would be best suited for. His testing indicated he would excel in languages. So he set out learning Arabic all day.

Every day. You're learning from native speakers.

It's a tough language too, it's not a Roman alphabet the whole thing.

Right, And you're not just a college student either, right, Like the Marine Corps still owns you, right, And so you are doing all the formations and all the training for the Marine Corps. But then you know your job is really to be able to actually learn that language.

And how that go well, ups and downs?

Right, It was not a particularly easy language right for me to learn, and so I needed some additional tutoring and I ended up doing okay. But the thing about it is that it all that matters is one test at the end.

That's it.

But you have to hit a certain line and you can either be a linguist or you can't. And I failed basically everybody around me passed it, and so it's sort of this series of failures. It's like, okay, well, I'm seventeen years old. I get rejected from you know, via Like okay, well, now I'm going to be an Arabic linguist. I tell everybody for a year and a half between boot camp and all these things, but I'm moving towards this thing, and I take this test. Well wait, now I failed this thing too.

Ryan was given an option. He could either find another specialty or he could double down, work harder, and retake the test in eight weeks. Ryan decided to focus and go for it.

I learned probably more Arabic in those eight weeks than and the rest of the sixty three weeks combined. Wow, And so I took it again and I passed, and so then I was able to leave that duty station went at North Carolina, and I went back and forth to a Rock from there a couple times between two thousand and twenty ten.

During his time in the military, Ryan worked as an Arabic translator.

You are working in a secure environment and you are translating whatever comes across your desk. We lived in a bunker, just kind of buried into a dune on the side of a base. I worked the night shift, so it's twelve hours on, twelve hours off for seven months, for seven days a week. So you get kind of weird, right, you know. Imagine that the folks that you're with, like you get real close in real weird ways. We were attached to an infantry unit and a human intelligence unit.

He wasn't only in the bunker though. On his second tour, he went out into the field.

A lot of my memories from Irock are those ones when we were out in the field and actually translating and meeting people from the communities. I grew up a lot like just being able to be around different cultures effectively kicked me into high gear in a way that I was not feeling when I was seventeen.

At that point, Ryan had been in for five years, but he had never stopped wanting to go to school.

Two thirds of enlisted service members are first gen college students, and so I was in the minority that I was not a first gen college student, which means that I had this familial support to be able to say, hey, like, college is a thing that you should be doing, but there still are these challenges in terms of what that transition can look like for me.

So I'm sure many of you have heard of the GI Bill, which was first introduced after World War Two and provided veterans with a host of benefits, one of the best known being tuition coverage for a service member looking to attend college or vocational school. What we have now is a little different, and it was passed in two thousand and eight. This bill, the one Ryan would have access to, covered the cost of tuition for any

I went to Google, and I typed in on Arabic college and veteran and I applied to the schools that popped up. So not like the most sophisticated, you know, University of Michigan popped up at top of that list. So many Arab Americans live in that area that they have a phenomenal Arabic program at University of Michigan. So I applied and was promptly rejected.

It was the University of Illinois all over again. But unlike seventeen year old Ryan, who pivoted former Marine, Ryan didn't back down.

I called the admission's office and said, hey, I was very interested in your institution. Could you give me any sort of input on what led to that rejection. They connected me to somebody who'd actual viewed my application, and she was very blunt about it. She's like, you got some good things you want for you, but you haven't shown you can be a good student, which is fair, right, Michigan requires people to be good to studies.

Yeah yeah, yeah.

Ryan knew he could study. He shown himself that during his Arabic courses. So he enrolled at the community college near his base in North Carolina.

While I was still active DUTEY in my last couple of months, just whatever the classes were that were available, which is a really common path for a lot of veterans using community college.

It's one of the most underappreciated assets we have in this country. It's a whole separate podcaste. We agreed completely under valued, underfunded, underappreciated all across the board.

Absolutely, And I was able to transfer to University of Michigan. I was there for two years, took as many courses as I possibly could to get my degree as quickly as I could, which is not the way that I advise veterans to go about getting undergraduate digression degree in international relations.

So Mark, this is usually the part in our story where we take a moment and talk about what we've just heard. When I first met Ryan, we were introduced and I said it's nice to meet you. Thank you for your service, and he said thank you for your support.

Different veterans are going to feel different about that type of thank you. How that's manifested, I think is really what Ryan was probably trying to say. How is that mana infested in the actions of your organization, the actions of your community, the actions of you maybe as an individual, I think is where maybe the friction into that comes. I always say, thank you for your service is important to me, but let's see how does your organization actually do that on a day to day basis.

So that's really helpful because I'm educating myself now. Ryan went to school, but many service members don't take that path. Talk to me about other transitions out of the military.

Some people say I'm going to stay four or five years and I'm going to get out. I was one of those, and then some say I'm going to stay thirty years and they get out at five and so you just never know. Assignments happen every two to three years, and so you know there's a transition opportunity every two or three years. It just may not be a transition out of the military.

So when you talk to veter into a transitioning from active duty into the private sector in some form, how do you tell them to think about figuring out that transition.

It's all about prepping yourself. And to me, that's what this is all about. This is what helping service members transition is all about, is making sure they are prepared. If we can build relationship with service members while they're still serving, to help them tap into skills that they didn't know they had, help them develop skills that they didn't know were dormant. You're not sure about how do I value at You're not sure what you bring to the table, and we're going to point you to some

Back to Ryan, he got his degree in two years, which is not something he would advise people to do, by the way, but at the time he just didn't know better. It was just one of a few challenges he never anticipated about returning to civilian life as a college student.

One of the big challenges is, particularly when you're junior enlisted, the question of why is not acceptable. Like if you were to take it to the extreme example of a boot camp of a drones Starctter says, you know, do fifty push ups and you say.

Why, it's not going to go over well right.

In the college environment, if you don't ask why, then you're missing a huge part of it. If you don't understand a concept, really understanding why going to office hours doing those things.

So there's a big.

Challenge there in terms of the difference of community and in terms of what the culture expects of you in one environment versus another. You can short circuit that if you really directly ask the question of what's your response the first time that somebody asks you if you've killed anybody?

Right? Like, that's a very stark question.

But you should think about your answer to that question before somebody asks it. It's a crazy thing to ask somebody, it is, but it happens. How do you have these sorts of discussions, How do you join student groups? How do you go to these meetings? How do you embrace everything that this college campus and this college unity has to offer. But I needed some fellow veterans to walk me through that.

Ryan's identity as a veteran stayed with him as a student and then as he transitioned into the workforce.

So I wanted to continue to serve. So I actually taught with Teach for America for a couple of years in Detroit. My taught high school hardest job I've ever had by some margin. I was not cut out for that work. I committed to doing two years and there was no chance that I was going to quit. But it was not the best application of my skill set.

We've heard this name, the Warrior Scholar Project a few times now, but let's talk about what it is. The Warrior Scholar Project is a national nonprofit five oh one c three that equips enlisted veterans to succeed in higher education classrooms and beyond. It was founded in twenty twelve

The first branch that they allowed us to really be able to franchise what they were doing at Yale. That was a very easy decision for me to be able to do that because they were doing something at Yale in this Warrior Scholar Project classroom that was unlike any other transition program, any other classroom environment that I had been a part of.

It was this like intoxicating thing.

The Warrior Scholar curricul KALEM creates a highly structured environment where enlisted service members feel confident to prepare them for academic life.

It is primarily a series of academic boot camps where you are taking enlisted service members who want to be able to pursue their undergraduate studies, and we put them in a safe, but ungraded, unaccredited environment that is really demanding. We mean it when we call it a boot camp.

Of that with do this while they're already in school or in prep to go to school.

It's a mix. They cannot yet have a bachelor's degree. For most of them, they're saying either I want to make a change. I'm currently pursuing my studies and I want to make a change, or they're people that are just saying, Hey, I'm about to get out of the military. I want to pursue my undergraduate studies. How do I do this? So it's very much about confidence. It's about saying no, you actually do have what it takes that Yale,

What is this?

I asked afterwards, is this just like what classes are like at Yale? And the press was like, no, this is this is not your average class. There's something going on here, and it was really about veterans respond really well when you throw it on the gauntlet and you challenge them.

Ryan loved working with WSP. He finished his own studies at the University of Michigan and went on to law school at the University of Virginia. I want to take a moment here. This is someone who didn't get into college the first time he applied, and now he's going to one of the best law schools in the country. Anything is possible.

For five years, that was my part time involvement, was going back every summer and doing this program.

While Ryan was part time, the program wanted him full time.

Right before law school, I had this would go I'm get to my second program the second time I had run it, they offered me the position to come on board and to become the executive director. The founder was leaving and they wanted to be able to grow it. And even though I felt so strongly about this thing, I said no. And I wondered for years if that was like the greatest professional mistake of my life, was saying no to this thing that I really believed in.

That little feeling that tickled his brain to enlist in the Marines was also tickling him again. He wanted to work with the Warrior Scholar Project, but he knew he wasn't quite ready.

I couldn't really identify it when I turned down that job to become the Warrior Scholar Project executive director back in twenty fourteen. I couldn't have really told you here are the seven things that I need to be able to learn before I would feel qualified for it.

He worked with WSP in the summers, graduated law school, and went on to start at a large firm.

I intended to be there for a few years, build the connections, work a lot, make some money, and then figure out what's next.

For him, what was next was a federal clerkship, then going back to public service. He still kept in touch with the Warrior Scholar founders and would meet up with them socially. One day, they were all out to lunch.

And I talked about that moment of when they offered me that position, that executive directorship in twenty fourteen, and I said, you know, I always think like, if only there was a way I could work for WSP full time now, And you just said, well, what if there was the.

Warrior Scholar Project had just received a large grant that would allow them to expand the team. They wanted Ryan to come on board a COO working under the executive director for the company. Ryan was over the moon. He accepted the position in August, and he was winding down his last case with his law firm. As he was getting up to speed on WSP. In September, we.

Had a case that was in trial in the Northern District of Illinois. So going back and forth to the courthouse from there, as I'm starting to field everything that happens on the inflow of my ramp up to WSP, the executive director where I was supposed to be working under, left right.

Then, as often happens in businesses, there are moving parts that not everyone may be privy to. The executive director that Ryan was supposed to be working with, learning from and jumping into the organization with he was gone. He was on his own.

So I came on board, and I had this really small team of people who believed in the thing right like a few people, but the organizations sustainability really depended on it grant. I didn't realize how much depended on it until I actually got a look at the like full on financials. I also didn't realize that we were only in phase one of this big grant application.

The grant that WSP had gotten, the very grant that allowed them to bring Ryan on board full time, wasn't actually theirs. And it's not just that the money hadn't come through, that had only just submitted the application. And to make things worse, the application it wasn't great.

I've never written a grant application in my life. I've never run operations for aniche. You can read, I can read. And here's the thing. The thing that I had going for me in spades is that I knew the core deliverable. I knew the thing that we did on a visceral level.

Ryan brand New, relatively unsupported new hire a WSP had to make the call. He had to find a way to fix the grant to save both his future with WSP, but also the future of the organization itself.

One of the first calls that I had was just to the program officer and just basically it's said to them, like, hey, like, I'm the new guy. Here's the challenges that I'm up against. Like I've never run a nonprofit. I believe in the thing. I know what we do. I know that this thing can work, and I know this grant application isn't really going to get us there. I read that the bridge band due diligence, this is not where it needs to be, and they said, yeah, you're you're right.

There will never be an alternate universe where Ryan doesn't make that call. We'll never know what would have happened if he didn't speak up and say, hey, guys, this isn't going to cut it. We've got to do it again. But that's what it means to be unshakable. It's to be able to see a problem, tackle it head on, and be brave enough to step in whatever is waiting.

For you, being very real and being able to be vulnerable in that moment. I know that it was as a game changer. You know, I'm not going to rewrite this application by myself, right like, I need the buy in from everybody that's on the team, and so I need everybody to be able to contribute to the thing.

Grant Ryan was promoted to CEO in twenty nineteen.

I was both very concerned and very honored by that. There is a deeply embedded notion of feeling like an impostor, like I don't have the chops to be the CEO of this organization. I'm not a fundraiser. Right then you have six or seven months later you have the pandemic that hits, and so I'm start to get my I start to get myself a little bit more in the zone of running an organization, and then that happens. Same sort of thing of digging deep and relying on the

Today, the Warrior Scholar Project has served twenty five hundred people through their academic boot camps. Ninety nine percent of participants go on to recommend the program to others.

The percent of students that complete their degrees within six years for all veterans is about forty seven percent. For our students, it's about ninety percent. Wow, that will persist and will actually complete their degrees. Different and importantly even for the ten percent. So long as that's an informed choice.

Also a success.

This year will serve just shy of four hundred people thro those academic boot camps and about six hundred people through other services, through career services, through graduate school services, community college services, we have partnerships with community colleges, so we'll serve about one thousand people this year alone, and we have pretty aggressive plans to be able to grow and scale and next years. We have a five year strategic plan. We have twenty partner schools operating this summer.

So talk to me a little bit, Mork then about let's break it down into two pieces if we could, so, you know, and for our listeners who you know, many of them may want to hire veterans just like we do, or they may be veterans themselves who are looking to start a business. What are the unique challenges of veterans and the transition from military service to civilian life in

Yeah, so I'm transitioning. I'm leaving this thing called the military big organization, but it was actually my family. It's probably the only thing I've known. It's the thing that I've grown up with. It has a culture, and now I have to walk away from that. In the military, you had this thing called a mission. You knew what that meant, you knew what it took to deliver against that mission. You understood what the larger organization was trying

Many of our listeners are either entrepreneurs, slash business owners, or aspiring business owners. Talk to the veterans who are listening today who are thinking about starting their own business and why that make such great entrepreneurs.

As you think about a veteran, whether it's a young enlisted kid who's coming up, who becomes a squad leader, who's given a number of individuals that they're responsible for. That's a little small company that you're running, and you keep layering that to the platoon sergeant, the platoon leader, and that scope gets a little bit broader. They're literally running small businesses. They have equipment that they have to maintain,

As a way of closing this out, Mark, can you talk about what JP Morgan Chase as a firm is doing to support veterans both in our own workforce and as entrepreneur And because I want to see it as many ideas out there as I can, so that a broader portion of the population gets behind this idea and comes up with their own ways of solving is challenged.

Yeah, I would say, first, know that you're not out there by yourself, and know that JP Morgan Chase is just one avenue. We actually lead an organization called the Veterans job Mission, which is like minded Companies, something that started back in twenty eleven with eleven companies. Today is over three hundred and fifteen companies who are doing the same things that we're doing, trying to ensure veterans can be successful post their military career, whether it's in employment

To the military.

And so organizations like that are ways that you can tap into it. But it's also organizations like the Institute for Veterans and Military Families IVMF, or Bunker Labs or some of the nonprofits that we work with that I would argue you are great places to start. When you're saying I want to start a business, Okay, let them help guide you in the early stages of that. Am I really ready to start a business? Do I have

Well, it's a rich resource for a whole country in terms of our veteran Phillips call it our veteran families because it's veterans and their spouses and families. And I hope we take more advantage of it and help them, you know, lift themselves up as they as they transition into civilian life.

Well, Ben, thank you for shedding a light on this community. I think they are a treasure that we should be proud of and make sure we're helping them be successful.

Ryan, what advice do you have for aspiring business owners? And I accept that you don't give yourself as an entrepreneur. That's okay. You're running something, you're running something from small to large. Yeah, some of our listeners didn't start their businesses, they bought them, so it's kind of the same. And I'd like to know from you, you know, if you could impart a little bit of wisdom that you've learned along the way that you wish you'd known back when. Sure, what would that be?

It is?

Everything is about relationships. Everything is about relationships. To give you one quantifiable thing. Two years ago we got a five million dollar Mackenzie Scott grant or a five million dollar organization, So that is a huge transformative, transformative. I don't know which relationship triggered us getting on our radar, but it absolutely came down to a relationship. I think about like the reason that I'm at WSP to begin with in twenty eighteen, just connecting with one of the

Amazing advice for everyone. Ryan what an inspiring story. Thank you for sharing it, and thank you for being on the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks so much for listening to The Unshakeables. If you liked this episode, please rate and review it. It'll help our show find more listeners. I'm Ben Walter and this is The Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia.