{"id":23228,"date":"2016-01-11T07:44:09","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T13:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/?p=23228"},"modified":"2016-01-13T09:15:06","modified_gmt":"2016-01-13T15:15:06","slug":"for-women-vets-its-back-to-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/for-women-vets-its-back-to-business\/","title":{"rendered":"For women vets, it’s back to business"},"content":{"rendered":"

By<\/strong> Aryn Braun<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Hazel Beck, U.S. Navy veteran and Director of Chicago\u2019s new\u00a0Veterans Business Outreach Center<\/a>, sees the jump from military service to civilian entrepreneurship as a logical next step.<\/p>\n

\u201cVeterans are very well-positioned as they\u2019re exiting the military, to become business owners because they\u2019ve got the skills, the experience, critical thinking, problem solving, team building, leadership, I mean you get a list that\u2019s pretty long,\u201d Beck said.
\n<\/p>\n

The new outreach center, one of 15 funded by the U.S. Small Business Administration<\/a>, is affiliated with the well-known Women\u2019s Business Development Center<\/a>, which has aimed to educate and support women in business since its founding in 1986. It is located at 8 S. Michigan Ave<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Two of the veterans center\u2019s programs, Boots to Business and Reboot, provide information and opportunities for active duty military members and veterans, respectively.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of them are stuck, when they exit, with the concept of, \u2018Well I repair tanks in the military, there\u2019s no tanks in civilian life,\u2019 \u201d said Beck. \u201cThe program gets them to move their thinking away from what they did specifically in the military\u2026 to all the soft skills that they learned, and how to apply those to business.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Women\u2019s Business Development Center has been a veteran-friendly organization for years.<\/p>\n

In early 2013, the Center, with the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs<\/a>, started the Women Vetrepreneurship Program, which was sparked by increasing concerns about the economic opportunities available for women after leaving the military.<\/p>\n

Illinois is home to just over 55,000 women veterans, ranking twelfth among all states, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat program was started as a result of us seeing newspaper article after newspaper article about the high unemployment rates of women veterans, accompanied by homelessness and the need for additional benefits assistance,\u201d said Georgia Marsh, Chief Development Officer at the Center.<\/p>\n

The number of homeless women veterans more than doubled in \u00a0four years, from almost 1,400 in 2006 to about\u00a03,400 in 2010, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

Beck and Marsh expect to serve a growing number of women veterans as more women join the armed forces, especially after Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced recently that all combat roles will be open to women.<\/p>\n

Though women only make up eight percent of the country\u2019s veterans, they constitute just over 14 percent of the active-duty military force, according to a 2011 Pew Social and Demographic Trends Report.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn terms of training, you\u2019re never going to be able to overcome the physical differences between a person who weighs 120 pounds and a guy that weighs 200 pounds, but a lot of what goes on on the battlefield today isn\u2019t brawn, it\u2019s brain,\u201d said Beck.<\/p>\n

As a veteran, Beck is especially cognizant of how barring women from combat roles affected their job trajectory in the military.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe that for decades, while it felt like policies in our country were protecting women, they were actually keeping women away from\u2026the job they were born to do,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Photo at top: \u00a0Hazel Beck, Director of Chicago\u2019s Veterans Business Outreach Center, looks out at Millennium Park from her Michigan Avenue office. (Aryn Braun\/Medill)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Aryn Braun Hazel Beck, U.S. Navy veteran and Director of Chicago\u2019s new\u00a0Veterans Business Outreach Center, sees the jump from military service to civilian entrepreneurship as a logical next step. \u201cVeterans are very well-positioned as they\u2019re exiting the military, to become business owners because they\u2019ve got the skills, the experience, critical thinking, problem solving, team […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":185,"featured_media":23288,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[509,28,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fall-2015","category-general-interest","category-public-affairs"],"yoast_head":"\nFor women vets, it's back to business - Medill Reports Chicago<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/for-women-vets-its-back-to-business\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"For women vets, it's back to business - 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