Walmart Foundation donates $1 million to help vets return to civilian life

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory said on Tuesday that the Walmart Foundation has donated $1 million to a public-private partnership aimed at helping returning veterans readjust to civilian life.

Studies by the Pew Research Center indicate that in the past decade, over 40 percent of veterans re-entering the civilian work force report some type of difficulty in doing so. Programs such as WalMart’s NCServes work to ease the transition with therapy, job placement and other services.

“We want veterans to choose North Carolina as their new home,” McCrory said. “Veterans enrich our work force because of the skills and discipline they received throughout their military career, and their leadership skills will strengthen the communities in which they live. I want to thank the Walmart Foundation for assisting us in helping newly separated veterans get off to a good start in their new civilian life.”

The public-private partnership is being led by the North Carolina Division of Veterans Affairs through its NC4VETS initiative. NCServes, a network of service providers for veterans and their families, is operated by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University. Already, many successful partnerships have been formed with NCServes.

“The purpose of this partnership is to ease and streamline the access to services an individual veteran and family members need,” Ilario Pantano, North Carolina’s Veterans Affairs director, said. “NC4VETS has tremendous reach, and by partnering regionally with NCServes’ community-based networks, we have a winning formula to attract veterans and help them make North Carolina their new home.”

McCrory, in office since January 2013, is the 74th governor of North Carolina. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1956, McCrory previously served as the 53rd mayor of Charlotte from 1995 to 2009. McCrory was educated at Catawba College.