GW Celebrates Veterans Day with The First and Second Ladies

News — By Marissa Moran on November 12, 2009 at 1:03 am

Last Friday, the University sent an e-mail out to the entire GW community announcing that First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, would speak on campus on Veteran’s Day. The e-mail said that tickets were available online to the GW Community on a first-come, first-serve basis. The 600 tickets were gone in less than 10 minutes after the e-mail was sent, according to representatives from GW Media Relations.

The First Lady and Dr. Biden joined Alma J. Powell and hundreds of active-duty service members, veterans, military families, and volunteers in Lisner Auditorium on Wednesday afternoon to launch MISSION SERVE: Forging a Continuum of Service. MISSION SERVE will partner ServiceNation, a campaign to increase national service, with veteran organizations, military families, and active-duty and reserve troops of the U.S. military. The goal is “to integrate service to country with service to community,” according to a ServiceNation press release.

“One of the greatest privileges I have as First Lady is to meet with veterans and to meet with service members all across America,” Obama said during her speech on Wednesday in front of a packed audience. “I am in awe of sacrifices they make. If you think about it, a tiny fraction of our population is bearing the burden of eight years of war.”

Obama gave a shout-out to GW at the opening of her speech.

“Go GW!” she said to enthusiastic applause. “As some of you know, a couple months ago I issued a little challenge to this university that if the students, faculty, and staff here did 100,000 hours of service, then I’d do what? Speak at commencement!”

“Well, in just seven weeks you all have done more than 19,000 hours of service,” she continued. “So keep it up and maybe I’ll see you here in May.”

The First Lady acknowledged Alma J. Powell, wife of General Colin Powell, who was awarded the inaugural ServiceNation Award for Excellence in Military and Civilian Service for her years as Army Liason to the Red Cross and in her current position as the chair of America’s Promise Alliance.

After receiving her award, Powell talked about the spirit of service she sees throughout the country and that she saw on the GW campus that morning.

“Earlier today many of you…were busy preparing care packages for military families,” said Powell. “Efforts like this…are essential and vital to the well-being of our American community.”

In addition to the event in Lisner, GW celebrated Veteran’s Day by assembling care packages for families of service members in active duty. Volunteers came to the Marvin Center to create over 500 packages. GW student veterans also participated in a wreath-laying ceremony and demonstrated military-style training activities in the Marvin Center’s Great Hall.

“The day has gone really well,” said Brian Hawthorne ’10, who served two tours in Iraq and is the founder of the GW Veterans Organization. Started one year ago, Hawthorne said his organization works with the University administration “to identify and implement student veteran-friendly policies and procedures.”

Hawthorne said that students returning from military duty are looking for a sense of community and an understanding and awareness from the people around them that they are not traditional students. Though the celebrity of Michelle Obama drew some to the Veteran’s Day events, Hawthorne felt that GW students showed a true spirit of service by turning out.

“We had high attendance and were able to capitalize on this holiday,” he said. “We raised $400 for charity and stuffed care packages….There was a lot of community involvement that went beyond sitting at a ceremony.”

“Here at George Washington…service is both a core institutional value and something for which students are famously passionate,” said GW President Steven Knapp during his opening remarks at the MISSION SERVE ceremony. “All of us at GW were thrilled earlier this year when Mrs. Obama challenged us to perform 100,000 hours of community service this academic year….I am pleased to report that today we tracked more than 20,000 hours of service, and we expect that pace to accelerate next Monday when we launch GW’s VolunteerMatch system.”

VolunteerMatch is a volunteer network that has partnered with GW to launch a site where students, faculty, and staff can track and report their service hours and search for volunteer opportunities.

Knapp also spoke about GW’s recently announced student aid package specifically for student veterans. The scholarship will provide $100,000 from Z-Medica Corporation to finance four undergraduate and seven graduate student veterans, according to a University press release.

“For many of these people, service is the air they breathe,” Obama said about the military during her speech, which she presented without notes. She cited numerous ways that veterans have provided service within the U.S. and ways her husband’s administration has served the veterans, including the recent signing of an Executive Order to hire more veterans throughout the federal government.

“It’s up to every one of us to honor their service with service of our own.”

(Video courtesy of The George Washington University)

Tags: Alma Powell, Jill Biden, Michelle Obama, Mission Serve, ServiceNation, Veterans Day