Joiner Center initiates new exchange program

By T. Michael Sullivan

After seven years of consultation and collaboration with counterparts from the Netherlands, Paul Camacho has instituted the Joiner Center-Veterans Institute Exchange Program. Hoping to build on the exchanges over those years, Camacho, who is the director of special projects at the William Joiner Center, envisions the new initiative as trading information and ideas from peacekeeping as soldiers to veterans’ issues, utilizing the different perspectives the principals bring to the program.

The first fellow, Gerard Huinink, arrived in the summer of 2008 and, from Aug. 7-16, participated in a number of different veterans’ activities and initiatives. A psychiatric health care worker specializing in family therapy, Huinink visited with the Veterans’ Construction Team, housed at the Bedford, Mass., V.A. to witness how veterans learn trades in order to make money. At a Nashua, N. H., facility in veterans’ family care, he met with key personnel to acquire ideas and share expertise. He also visited Crescent House, a halfway house in Lowell, Mass., which is a re-integrative facility.

Gielt Algra, who has visited the Joiner Center twice previously, in 2005 and 2007, accompanied Huinink, and the two attended the Homeless Veterans Stand Down in Boston and served soup to those attending. Algra, one of the planners of the exchange program, is a research fellow at the Center for Research and Expertise of the Veteraneninstituut of the Netherlands. The institute carries out a wide spectrum of veteran policy activities on behalf of the Dutch Ministry of Defense.

According to Camacho, the Netherlands has been involved in a number of peacekeeping initiatives and its veterans have expertise in nation building as well. Of the new program, Camacho says: “I’d like to see it come to fruition.” Envisioning the input of soldier-veterans, he adds: “I see it as having a lot of potential that’s not realized.”

Huinink, who has over 23 years of experience working with veterans and believes reintegration involves more than the individual veteran, also spent a few days at Victory Farm in Fitzwilliams, N.H., which is run by Leslie Lightfoot, and time at a hospice in Fitchburg, Mass., before returning to the Netherlands.

The initiative came to the attention of James Peake, M.D., secretary of Veterans Affairs, who sent a letter of appreciation and encouragement to Camacho.