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Date: 8/8/2023
AMHERST — It begins with lunch.
Forging a stronger connection between the community and the town’s military veterans is among the goals of Amherst’s Community Responders for Equity, Safety and Service Department.
As department members attend to the non-emergency, resident-based calls for service once handled by the police, other areas of response and interaction are the responsibility of volunteers with particular skills and experience.
Eugene Herman has been a volunteer with CRESS since the beginning of this year and he currently serves as the department’s veteran’s outreach volunteer. Herman’s work started with doing some homework on the community, the veterans and the town.
“I spent my first six months familiarizing myself with veterans in the area, with services and planning this lunch has been in the works for several months,” he said.
“I’ve been working up towards this,” Herman said. “The lunch is the first step, the first part of what I hope to be a more robust outreach.”
Herman said there are lunch programs and events already around the Pioneer Valley and the area, many sponsored by the Building Bridges organization. While lauding those programs, Herman said he is hoping for something in particular for Amherst.
“What’s different about those lunches is the veterans come, they gather and they eat and they go home,” he said. “I am hoping to have more of a community where, yes, they’ll come and have lunch, be together and visit but then there will be some sort of a, you can call it a talking circle opportunity to share stories, talk about an issue. To have it be a little more cohesive than just coming to have lunch and go home, that’s my hope and that’s CRESS’s hope.”
The inaugural lunch took place on July 27 at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst where Herman, himself a Vietnam veteran, is a member.
“We had six veterans come to the one last month,” which was fine, Herman said. “I was told by the Building Bridges people that to start off something new like that is to start small and then one tells another and word gets out.”
“We had chili for 60,” he said, noting that he himself was the chef this time out.
Herman said the group was largely Vietnam era veterans with one World War II veteran in attendance.
“I’m hoping to have a little more also of an intergenerational make up,” he said noting that his experience finds that Desert Storm, Gulf War and Iraq/Afghanistan veterans don’t often come to such gatherings. Something he is hoping to change.
“It would be a nice opportunity for some of the older vets perhaps to be a mentor or help out some of the younger ones,” he said. “Whether that happens or not I don’t know but that would be my wish.”
Herman said the lunches are the first major initiatives to reaching out to the veteran community and that is why he is there.
“Being that I am a vet, that’s where I chose to put my energies,” he said.
He also said while CRESS supports veterans as they would anyone else, he would like to arrange more volunteer activities with a specific purpose in mind.
“To find a way to push back on the narrative of, ‘we’re needy or broken or there are problems,’ but instead to contribute more to the community, which would lead to a little better relationship between the veterans of the town and the town of Amherst,” he said.
Herman points to an environment of misunderstanding and unfamiliarity between the two communities and he would like to see that change.
The lunch events going forward will be scheduled for the last Wednesday of the month with the North Fire Station on East Pleasant Street eyed as the planned location.
All the updated information will be made available on the town calendar, via social media and local fliers.
Herman said the intent is for commercial sponsorship or donations from local stores or restaurants to help drive the effort.
“Leftover chili is great,” he said. “But the intent is to have partners in town.”
Herman said neither he nor CRESS really know where the effort will go beyond the lunches and the hope for the discussion opportunities, so they are taking it a day at a time.
“It’s a work in progress,” he said.