The new Director of the Veterans Resource Center at Portland State University is not qualified for this crucial role. This director has created an extremely unsafe environment for student-veterans in which many choose to no longer make use of the Veterans Resource Center for any function, extremely limiting their access to supportive services. The new director has demonstrated an ineptitude to handle crisis with student-veterans, an inability to empathize with the veteran experience and has shown an extreme amount of distrust among the student-veteran employees of the Veterans Resource Center, disregarding previous accomplishments of the Veterans Resource Center and its community. 

Due to the actions and the neglect of student-veteran's concern by the new Director of the Veterans Resource Center, I resigned as a student-veteran employee, along with choosing to no longer utilize the Veterans Resource Center or their related events. This is in no way due to my personal work ethic, but in hopes that this would be a statement to the director and the administration at Portland State University about the current state of affairs at the Veterans Resource Center. Immediately following this, another student-veteran employee and I met with the Assistant Vice President of Student Access and Success to bring attention to the ample evidence against the new Director of the Veterans Resource Center, to which we were politely "shrugged off", in a fitting and bureaucratic way. The overall response from this meeting was that this is "a part of change" and that future meetings will discuss remedies for moving forward with the new Director of the Veterans Resource Center. 

I believe that there are some necessary changes needed for the Veterans Resource Center at Portland State University to adequately grow as a community and to effectively service all student-veterans. However, the current approach by the new Director of the Veterans Resource Center has done nothing but exclude current student-veterans, undermine student-veteran concerns, and tarnish the hard work and sacrifice of this student-veteran community.  

I can say from personal experience that the Veterans Resource Center that was created by the previous director and student-veterans greatly assisted me in my first months of transition back to civilian life. I struggled daily, and upon my discovery of the Veterans Resource Center, I became a frequent patron, eventually volunteering and being brought on as a student-veteran employee. In less than one month I have witnessed the new Director of the Veteran Resource Center rip apart this environment and its community, and without true intervention from the Portland State University's student-veterans, community partners, and concerned alumni and citizens, they will succeed.