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https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678231204932
Journal of Humanistic Psychology
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© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00221678231204932
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Introduction
Foreword to the Second
Volume of the Special
Issue on Veteran
Community Engagement
Zeno Franco1,2, Katinka Hooyer1,
Leslie Ruffalo1, Rae Anne Frey-Ho Fung3,
Mark Flower1, and Jeffrey Whittle2
Abstract
Veteran community engagement is an evolving discipline informed by traditional
community-based participatory research, veteran studies, and veterans
themselves. This Special Issue suggests that research collaborations including
military veterans, soldiers, and their families as co-researchers is a critical next
step toward a design thinking perspective in social and healthcare systems
for this population. This Special Issue was conceptualized through a veteran
community-academic partnership formed over a decade ago. This partnership
hosted several Warrior Summit conferences from 2013 to present, with
the last of this series calling for academic contributions. The resulting papers
drawn from the conference and other authors form this issue, and include a
wide range of topics: veteran microdosing and psychedelic self-medication; a
historical view of the impact of education exchange between U.S. and South
Korean military nurses; strategies for engaging veterans in research of a theater-
based intervention for PTSD; interprofessional approaches to addressing
veteran identity considerations through collaborations between chaplain service
and psychologists in the VA Healthcare System; an international perspective
1Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA
2Clement J. Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Milwaukee, WI, USA
3Rogers Behavioral Health, Milwaukee, WI, USA
Corresponding Author:
Zeno Franco, PhD, Department of Family & Community Medicine, Medical College of
Wisconsin, 8701 W Watertown Plank Rd, Milwaukee, WI 53226, USA.
Email: zfranco@mcw.edu
1204932JHPXXX10.1177/00221678231204932Journal of Humanistic PsychologyFranco et al.
research-article2023
2 Journal of Humanistic Psychology 00(0)
exploring a community collaborative with veterans in Montréal, Canada;
efforts to build long-term and sustainable models for veteran engagement in
health services research; community-engaged strategies to address veteran
homelessness within broader housing stability efforts; and examining the role of
veteran peer mentorship programs in alcohol recovery. These projects represent
an emerging movement and offer a multidisciplinary roadmap toward honoring
veterans voices in research, clinical services, and program development.
Keywords
veteran community engagement, veteran studies, veteran engagement in
research, community based participatory research, civilian reintegration,
humanities
Introduction
Humanistic concerns in veteran well-being are present throughout psycho-
logical services and allied health fields, most commonly in Veterans Affairs
Healthcare system settings (Baures, 1996; Eisenhart, 1977; White, 2015), but
also in other clinical and social service contexts (Greenleaf & Roessger,
2017). Over the past 15 years, we have sought to engage with veterans
increasingly in the context of community—that is to say largely outside of
hospitals—working with veterans not as patients, but rather as colleagues and
co-thinkers in the places where they live, work, and play in civilian life
(Franco et al., 2015; Hooyer & Kasza, 2018; Yan et al., 2022). Humanistic
psychology as a discipline suggests a client-centered view and also empha-
sizes the importance of strengths in maximizing human potential (Starcher &
Allen, 2016). Achieving optimal outcomes for veterans requires a transition
toward this more holistic view; one which we believe can be achieved by
integrating veteran perspectives in the design of research and care systems
that serve them at each stage of transition out of military service and into a
productive civilian life.
The call for papers (CFP) for this Special Issue was carefully crafted to
emphasize inclusion of articles that involved:
. . . Research collaborations that deliberately include military veterans, active
duty soldiers, and their families as stakeholders and co-researchers are
increasingly recognized as a critical next step in designing social systems and
clinical care approaches that meet their needs (Semaan et al., 2016). Many
community-driven methods and approaches can be applied to develop
innovative strategies for care and scholarship that are not only rigorous, but
Franco et al. 3
also improve relevance to the populations they are intended to serve and are
designed from their inception to be equitable.
The CFP built on a 2017 Wisconsin Warrior Summit event, extending invita-
tions to academic attendees to that conference and beyond. For readers of this
second volume, we strongly recommend you return to and review the initial
foreword, which can be found here:
Franco, Z., Hooyer, K., Ruffalo, L., & Frey-Ho Fung, R. A. (2021). Veterans
health and well-being—Collaborative research approaches: Toward veteran
community engagement. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 61(3), 287–312.
The resulting articles for the first volume of the Special Issue began to be
published online in 2019. This was, to our knowledge, the first academic
journal special issue dedicated specifically to the topic of Veteran Community
Engagement. The title of the Foreword to the first volume was notably com-
plex and overwrought, reflecting the difficulty in integrating several different
ways of thinking about this work—academic efforts to include veterans as
co-researchers working on scientific studies as a strategy to help researchers
better understand and integrate veteran patient perspectives; more traditional
views of community engagement focused on “street level” outreach and edu-
cation about health and well-being in collaboration with veterans; and com-
munity/academic partnerships with non-profit social service agencies
working with this population.
The initial Foreword summarized some of our work here in Milwaukee
and Wisconsin broadly in veteran community engagement, work that has
influenced conversations with the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy (Pazdera et al., 2021) and the Veterans Healthcare
Administration’s Office of Community Engagement. Notably, individual vet-
eran partners we worked with over many years – some of whom were initially
quite critical of the VA system – have gone on to provide advisory input to
national VA Health Services Research & Development (HSR&D)-funded
projects. For us, these instances of individual veterans becoming increasingly
involved in research are not just examples of programmatic success, but also
represent personal transformation in veterans who have moved from being
in recovery to now setting policy for recovery programs (Diaz-Laplante,
2007; Pederson, 2021).
Like all moments of academic disciplinary formation, this seems to be a
zeitgeist; the movement toward Veteran Community Engagement is an idea
that simultaneously moved multiple teams across the United States and inter-
nationally toward a different form of work with veterans. As we put the initial
4 Journal of Humanistic Psychology 00(0)
volume together, we encountered several groups trying to make their own
sense of this space. Since the publication of that volume, a number of others
have described work in their own contexts, showing a wide variety of ways in
which veteran community engagement can be conceptualized and practiced
(see, for example, Chavez et al., 2022; Fehling et al., 2023; Knight et al., 2022;
Wendleton et al., 2023)—ranging from traditional Community-Based
Participatory Research (CBPR) strategies to more focal Community
Engagement in Research (CEnR) approaches (Michener et al., 2012). These
efforts have broadened our understanding and the conversation about the
breadth and depth of Veteran Community Engagement as a nascent subdisci-
pline spanning community engagement (Ahmed et al., 2017), veteran studies
(Grohowski, 2016), and health services research (Morgan et al., 2005).
Notably, in trying to be balanced about the authorship of the foreword to
the first issue, we chose not to favor any one veteran group or partner over
another, despite a long history of involving veterans as co-authors. But the
result was an incomplete picture of the work we have engaged in over the last
decade and a half. There were important reasons to do this at that moment in
time; community engagement is a complex and deeply political form of praxis
(Sandy & Holland, 2006). However, as we are at a different place in partner-
ship work, we have added two key thought partners here. First, Mr. Mark
Flower is a U.S. Army veteran and unfailing advocate for veteran community
engagement since our team started working with him over 15 years ago. Mr.
Flower approaches the work from a fundamentally coalition-based perspec-
tive, encouraging social service agencies to find common ground to ensure
that veterans are served comprehensively and “met where they are” in their
process of reintegration into civilian life. In a number of ways, this special
issue is a reflection of Mark’s vision. He has emphasized the importance of
“warm and fuzzy hand-offs” in transitions in care throughout our journey with
him—a piece of advice that all systems that serve veterans can benefit from if
this phrase becomes a philosophy, a meditation, and a path toward action.
Similarly, in the trajectory of personal academic careers, just like in life, it is
common for more junior scholars to want to differentiate themselves. And in so
doing, we omitted another truth, which is that without ongoing, systematic, and
selfless mentorship this work would not have enjoyed the success and accep-
tance that it has. Dr. Jeff Whittle, a physician at the Milwaukee VA Medical
Center and faculty member at the Medical College of Wisconsin, has invested
a tremendous amount in advancing the work of the faculty and veteran partners
from our team, as well as working tirelessly to integrate these ideas into the
Veteran Affairs Healthcare system as a whole. As faculty members who are
now not so new in the ranks, the importance of calling out Dr. Whittle’s role in
allowing this work to flourish has become all the more significant.
Franco et al. 5
Resulting Papers
The second volume of this Special Issue expresses a wide range of veteran com-
munity engagement and collaboration strategies, including (a) an article on vet-
eran microdosing and psychedelic self-medication (Hooyer et al., 2020); (b) a
historical view of the impact of education exchange between U.S. and South
Korean military nurses (Jun et al., 2019); (c) strategies for engaging veterans in
research of a theater-based intervention for PTSD (Ali et al., 2019); (d) interpro-
fessional approaches to addressing veteran identity considerations through col-
laborations between chaplain service and psychologists in a Veterans Affairs
Healthcare system (Antal et al., 2019); (e) an international perspective exploring
a community collaborative with veterans in Montre΄al, Canada (Fewster et al.,
2019); (f) efforts to build long-term and sustainable models for veteran engage-
ment in health services research (Wendleton et al., 2019); (g) community-
engaged strategies to address veteran homelessness within broader housing
stability efforts (Nelson et al., 2019); and (h) examining the role of veteran peer
mentorship programs in alcohol recovery (Hall et al., 2020).
This introduction to the second volume is personal in tone precisely
because community engagement is personal, relational work. It is work that
is being conducted robustly in a few places currently, and the seeds of this
work are growing at many other locations. It is our hope that the papers across
both volumes continue to set a new direction toward a more holistic, inte-
grated, and community-wide approach to ensuring veterans flourish as they
transition out of military service and into new roles as civilians with a special
history that remains an enduring part of their identity.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article: Much of this work has been supported
by the Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin endowment. Other funders include the
Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, the Patient-Centered Outcomes
Research Institute, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Author Biographies
Zeno Franco, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department
of Family & Community Medicine at the Medical College of
Wisconsin and a staff clinical psychologist at the Clement J.
Zablocki VA Medical Center. His research focuses on improv-
ing strategies for community-based interventions with U.S.
military veterans and the social psychology of heroics. He is a
long-time member of the Society for Humanistic Psychology
and received the Carmi Harari Early Career Award from the Society in 2019. His cur-
rent work centers on technology-driven strategies to improve crisis response for mili-
tary veterans experiencing psycho-social problems in real time. These approaches
focus on smartphone and sensor-driven systems designed in collaboration with veter-
ans. He is a former US Department of Homeland Security Fellow (2003–2006) and
other aspects of his work have involved applying military command and control sys-
tems to civilian disaster response.
Katinka Hooyer, PhD, MS, is a medical anthropologist and
assistant professor in Family and Community Medicine,
Medical College of Wisconsin. She works with veterans
designing interventions to heal moral injury and educate on
military trauma. Her community engagement focuses on arts-
based research, using the humanities as a pathway to convey
difficult experiences. She is a graduate of the University of
Milwaukee-Wisconsin.
Leslie Ruffalo, PhD, MS, is an associate professor in the
Department of Family and Community Medicine at the Medical
College of Wisconsin. She is a community-engaged health
researcher. Her research often focuses on the development,
implementation, and evaluation of systems-based practices to
improve the health and well-being of our communities. She is
also the co-director of the Division of Medical Student Education
in her department. As an educator, she often incorporates medi-
cal students into her community-engaged projects.
Franco et al. 9
Rae Anne Frey-Ho Fung, PhD, is an Operation Iraqi Freedom
(OIF) Army Veteran and licensed psychologist. She is a board-
certified psychologist specializing in evidence-based treatment for
post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma, and comorbid conditions at
Rogers Behavioral Health. In addition, she has also served as an
instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of
Continuing Education, where she co-developed trauma counseling
courses. She also volunteers as a member of the Veterans Health
Coalition, the Veterans’ Suicide Prevention Taskforce, and the
UW-Milwaukee Trauma Conference planning committee.
Mark Flower is a Captain John D. Mason peer-support spe-
cialist affiliated with the Medical College of Wisconsin in
Milwaukee. Mr. Flower served in the US Army and Army
Reserves from 1976 to 1994. He has more than 20 years of
experience working as a community and Veteran partner in
research. He consults with the VA ASCEND study, VA
GROVE, and volunteers for several community organizations
focused on veteran reintegration and recovery. He is active in
the Southeast Wisconsin area Veterans community and served
as an external community partner to the Medical College of
Wisconsin for many years.
Jeffrey Whittle, MD, MPH, is a staff physician at the Clement
J. Zablocki VA Medical Center and professor of medicine in the
Division of General Internal Medicine. He is a national author-
ity on the reasons for racial differences in cardiovascular proce-
dure use. He has developed an innovative community academic
partnership with veteran community organizations including
Vietnam Veterans of America, American Legion, Veterans of
Foreign Wars, and National Association of Black Veterans.
This extends his work on access and quality to community-
based effort to improve the quality of hypertension care for
older individuals by empowering them to take an active role in their own health care.
