NVF Outreach Director Kristine Hesse featured in Empower our Vets Video

Empower Our Vets is a campaign to promote positive messaging related to veterans. By telling their stories – stories of success, of overcoming challenges, of pride in their service – Empower Our Vets intends to draw attention to the power and strength of the men and women of the armed services.

When taken as a whole, current media and imagery of US veterans tends to focus on the extensive challenges they faced while serving, and the continued challenges when they return home. While these stories are very important to tell, the narrative of success and pride is just as powerful – if not more so. By telling these stories Empower Our Vets will educate non-veterans about the power of service and, more importantly, provide hope and knowledge to other veterans who might be struggling with the issues many face when returning home.

The vision for Empower Our Vets is to create engaging content across multiple platforms, including social media, video and workshops. The impact of social media cannot be denied and Facebook, Twitter and Instagram will be utilized to build awareness of the campaign.

The stories themselves will be released as videos, with each individual storyteller telling their story uninterrupted and may be as short as a minute or as long as ten, depending on what is being conveyed. The videos will be presented on the Empower Our Vets website and a dedicated Vimeo channel, with a library of the video content being created to allow viewers to search and find their specific area of interest.

Whether it is the stories of female veterans, or of those who have overcome the battle with Post-Traumatic Stress, viewers will be allowed a personal look into the lives of the storyteller.

 Vet Hunters is a grass roots movement that was started by one soldier who vowed to honor his fallen comrades, by serving the living and leaving no veteran behind. Search and rescue missions in the streets of America were initiated and ‘vet hunting,” was born. During V.H.P’s first year of inception, hundreds of veterans have been assisted all over the U.S. the development of effective outreach and what they call “vetworking”. Their pledge is to continue to increase in intensity until the homeless epidemic is diminished and ultimately ended.

“The words homeless and veteran should never go together! When you think of vet hunters, think of us as being like “e-harmony” of homelessness. We connect the homeless person to resources by bringing them to where the homeless veteran’s live! Our office is the streets and anywhere a homeless veteran may call home. We take the word homeless away from veteran through action. if the veteran lives under a bridge, you will find us there doing everything possible to bring our homeless heroes, home!”