It’s Veterans Day, and people across the state are honoring military veterans of the United States Armed Forces with parades and other events. But for Geri Maples, advocating for that group is a year-round activity. She is the executive director of the Southwest Ohio chapter of Blue Star Families, a national nonprofit dedicated to supporting military families by connecting them with local resources.
She shared her story as part of WYSO’s Veterans Voices series.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Robert enlisted at the age of 17 in the U.S. Army. In 1985, he transitioned to the Ohio Army National Guard. When I met him, he worked at golf and games and wore this homemade security button because he always had this passion to either be in law enforcement or something like that. And the National Guard really fulfilled that for him.
His unit was called up after 9/11 in 2003. They were deployed and called to serve in Operation Iraqi Freedom. And I immediately knew that something was off as soon as he came home. It didn't take long. There's that honeymoon phase where you're just glad everybody's home and safe, and you try to just go back to the way life was before. And, you know, it doesn't really work that way.
It was about three weeks, and I started seeing some very odd things that I knew were wrong and shouldn't be seeing. And we know now those were traumatic brain injuries and PTSD. When I said ‘I do’ at the age of 20, I had no idea it was going to be my husband's caregiver. And I had two young kids who needed their mom and their dad. So it was up to me to save the family. My husband was no longer able to work. We almost lost our house. We were struggling financially. Our lives forever changed. And as military families, and with the military culture, you just adapt and go on, right? These are challenges that we will overcome. I was trying to do my best to keep our family afloat.
So I said, ‘I'm going to school.’ And when I walked into school at Miami University, I began making friends with my classmates who were also military-connected. And I found that they were coming up to me because I had all this knowledge that they didn't have because I was addressing my own family's needs, right? And so, I mapped my education around my personal experience. I graduated from there in 2012 and was trying to find my place.
It was Blue Star Families. It popped up in Google, and I applied and I was blessed with the opportunity to start this chapter in February of 2020. Blue Star Families is a nonprofit organization with the goal in mind of strengthening our communities.
Military families have a whole host of challenges. We see with our active duty families and our National Guard and Reserve families anything from food insecurity to low, no access to child care. And then, obviously, our military spouse employment is in a crisis. Our military spouses, especially on the active duty guard reserve side, are facing a 45% unemployment rate, which is all systematic to the other things, financial stressors, access to child care, unemployment, and food insecurity. They really are all tied together.
And so we need to really holistically figure out how can we support these families as a community? I made it my mission since 2009 to serve families like mine who face difficult, unique challenges that often aren't understood by their neighbors.