{"id":53827,"date":"2014-07-14T07:00:14","date_gmt":"2014-07-14T11:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=53827"},"modified":"2014-07-13T18:36:38","modified_gmt":"2014-07-13T22:36:38","slug":"vets-as-urban-warriors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=53827","title":{"rendered":"Vets as “Urban Warriors”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m sure you’ve read about the terrible death toll and of the rising violence in Chicago over the last few weeks. There have been 171 homicides so far this year and over 1300 wounded in the city. In comparison, there have been 34 US deaths in Afghanistan this year. <\/p>\n

The Stars & Stripes<\/a> writes about a group calling themselves “Urban Warriors” on the mean streets of Chicago. It’s a group of veterans from the most recent wars who try to connect and commiserate with youngsters there as folks who have been under fire;<\/p>\n

[Eddie] Bocanegra and his co-director, Ryan Lugalia-Hollon, started designing trauma-based treatment programs a year ago across the city. By the end of the year, they will have served 400 youths and 100 parents. Urban Warriors was launched in Little Village but will expand into South Chicago at the end of the summer.<\/p>\n

Vets chosen for the project, after two rounds of interviews, indicated a willingness to work with at-risk youths. They also suffered stress from having served. And many, having grown up in Little Village too, talked of their own scrapes with trouble or of having family members involved in violence. One, Alberto Boleres \u2014 who survived a roadside bomb near Tikrit, Iraq, in 2007 \u2014 had been shot in Chicago.<\/p>\n

Organizers of Urban Warriors also saw a critical benefit to the veterans \u2014 providing a sense of purpose, something many who leave the military crave but struggle to find, they said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m sure you’ve read about the terrible death toll and of the rising violence in Chicago … Vets as “Urban Warriors”<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-veterans-in-the-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53827\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}