Empowering Veteran Futures: The D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families

Discover Ray Toenniessen's transformative journey as he takes us from his early days as an ROTC cadet at Syracuse University to his influential role at the Daniello Institute for Veteran and Military Families. Ray shares his insights on how a generous $30 million endowment from alum Dan D’Aniello has revitalized the Institute, turning it into a powerful force for veteran empowerment. This episode reveals how veteran-owned businesses not only provide essential community support but also play a pivotal role in creating employment opportunities for veterans and their families.

Learn about the crucial steps veterans and military spouses can take to ensure smoother transitions to civilian careers. Ray delves into the unique challenges faced by military families, including the hurdles of certification transfers and frequent relocations, and discusses how remote work is emerging as a practical solution. Hear about the importance of early planning—ideally starting two years before leaving the military—and the progress seen in initiatives like the Army's Soldiers for Life program. Tune in to understand how comprehensive support systems, such as those at the D’Aniello Institute, are making a difference in the lives of veterans and their families. Visit ivmf.syracuse.edu to explore these valuable resources further.

Chapters

• 0:00 Supporting Veterans' Transitions and Entrepreneurship
• 15:32 Optimizing Veterans' Career Transitions

Transcript

Larry Zilliox: 0:14

Good morning. I'm your host, Larry Zilliox, Director of Culinary Services here at the Warrior Retreat at Bull Run, and this week our guest is Ray Tennyson. He is with the D’Aniello Institute for Veteran and Military Families at the University of Syracuse in New York, program there that supports veterans with resources on finding employment and entrepreneurship and then also resources for military families. So I'm really happy that he's able to join us and really fill us in on all the great stuff that they do up there at the Institute. So, Ray, welcome to the podcast.

Larry Zilliox: 1:01

Hey, thanks, larry, I appreciate you having me so if you would just tell us a little bit about your background and how you became involved with the Institute.

Ray Toenniessen: 1:09

Sure. So I actually went to Syracuse University as an undergrad. I was an ROTC cadet there. Originally from a really small town in western New York between Rochester and Buffalo I always like to say more cows than people there, that's how rural it was and I went over to Syracuse for undergrad and was really one of those kids that, but for the Terry and an ROTC scholarship, never would have been able to go to somewhere like Syracuse University for school. So I commissioned out of Syracuse and stuck in lieutenant. I went off into the army as a transportation logistics officer, did a tour to Iraq 2008 to 2009.

Ray Toenniessen: 1:53

And as I came back in 2009, you know, really started, I think, like a lot of folks do at that point, you know, really started, I think, like a lot of folks do at that point, you know I was about three years in started to figure out, you know, do I want to stay in, make a career out of this, do I want to get out? And you know, for me at the time, really just just landing on, I thought I could, I could have a great impact if sort of I tried my hand out in the civilian world. So not really not sure what I wanted to do at all and it just started thinking through the options and, coincidentally, was going to go up to Syracuse to see a football or a basketball game excuse me, a basketball game was over the winter and just by luck, stumbled on the job website at the university and there was a job posting for a national program manager for a small program called the Entrepreneurship Boot Camp for Veterans, and this was a program that had been started out of the business school up at Syracuse. Didn't exist when I was a student there and started to do some research and found out you know it was a few years old bringing transitioning service members, veterans who had been severely wounded, to campus for a nine-day immersion program on how to launch and grow their own business, and some other universities had gotten involved.

Ray Toenniessen: 3:08

It turned into a consortium model and I really saw this opportunity and thought, you know, this could be something great to do for a year while I figured out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and so I applied. They flew me up for an interview, I got the job and a couple of months later I was leaving active duty and driving up to Syracuse to start in this role and my one-year transition job. Here I am 15 years later and that's because it's just been an opportunity to continue to serve and continue to give back, and that one small entrepreneurship's just been an opportunity to continue to serve and continue to give back. And you know that one small entrepreneurship program turned into a couple other programs around small business and entrepreneurship for vets. And then in 2011, I was alongside my boss, mike Heaney, to help launch the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, and that's where we are today.

Larry Zilliox: 3:58

Wow Institute for Veterans and Military Families and that's where we are today Wow and Daniello family.

Ray Toenniessen: 4:05

Is that the folks that invested in the Institute. Yeah, that's right. Dan Daniello is a Syracuse University alum and also a Navy veteran. Dan served during Vietnam, did his undergrad at Syracuse and then had a very successful career in the private sector. Early on, worked for PepsiCo and Marriott and then launched a private equity firm called the Carlisle Group with two other co, -founders, and Dan saw a great deal of business success over the years and early on, was a champion of our veterans work that we were doing at Syracuse. So when we first launched in 2011, you know, we actually launched with an initial grant from Jake and Morgan Chase to help get the Institute off the ground and over the years, you know, continued to raise dollars to support our work from corporate partners, individual philanthropists, and Dan was one of our early supporters. And then, in just coming out of COVID in 2022, dan made a transformational $30 million gift to endow and name the Institute, and so that's why today we are now called the Daniello Institute.

Larry Zilliox: 5:17

Well for our listeners here in the Northern Virginia Washington DC area. They're very familiar with the Carlyle Group and they are a well-known and well-respected investment company here locally and that's wonderful. That's quite an infusion of funds and I'm sure that changed everything.

Ray Toenniessen: 5:41

It sure did, larry, and you know, I think the biggest thing it allows us to do is we've always been focused on, first and foremost impact serving this community, but also long-term sustainability right, we want to be an organization that is around in 20, 30, 50 years, and Dan's support, and especially that naming gift, allows us to do that, and we understand that how we serve may change based on the needs of this population, but we know that there'll be a solid foundation to help us ensure that we'll be here over those next 50 years.

Larry Zilliox: 6:21

And the thing I like, too, is that the mission today is really close to the mission that you started with, and it's helping veterans who are transitioning build their own businesses to support the community. And we know that for a fact that veteran businesses support the communities that they're in more than any other businesses. They employ other veterans and I just think it's really, really something to be able to say, okay, this is what we started with, and now, all this time later, we're still doing it. It's still the core of what you do, but it's very clear from looking at the webpage that you guys have expanded your mission and tell us a little bit about some of the other programs that the Institute does.

Ray Toenniessen: 7:14

Yeah, you're absolutely right, larry. Entrepreneurship and small business for veterans and military staff is where we got our start and that is still a huge piece of the work we do today. In fact, we have programs, resources, opportunities, technical assistance available to veterans and military spouse business owners, no matter where they happen to be in their entrepreneurial journey. So if you're just starting out and you think I don't even know what I want to do, but I know I want to launch my own business, we have tools, programs for you. But if you've been in business 10, 15, 20 years and you're a growth stage company or a late stage company and maybe you're trying to figure out what's my best pathway to exit or acquisition, we have programs and opportunities for you too and everything in between. But we've also expanded over the years to the other work. We do so outside of just our entrepreneurship programming. We also run a large portfolio of career preparation and employment training, and we do that through a program called Onward to Opportunity, and this is a program that we run on 18 different military installations around the country, but we also do it completely online and it's available to any transitioning service member, veteran military spouse. It starts with some orientation, training and a course that we call Onward to your Career, which really helps sort of some. Again some soft skills training, transitioning type training, leaving the military, going to civilian life. But from there there's about 50 different learning pathways that participants can go through, most of which lead to an industry recognized credential or certificate. So these might be Cisco certifications or the cybersecurity certs. Or we've built an aerospace and defense track with Boeing. We're just rolling out a semiconductor track in partnership with Micron. So these are in-demand fields individuals are looking to go into and that we know employers are looking to hire from.

Ray Toenniessen: 9:21

We also do a lot of work around the country focused on community. So we'll go into cities, states, regions and help communities and geographies build collective impact networks and models so that veterans in the military connected community can better access the best service providers in their local area. And then, aside from that, all that direct program and service delivery work we do. Given that we were started in a higher ed institution, we have a very robust team that does research, policy and evaluation work. So we're constantly doing original funded research around the issues and challenges that this community faces. But we're also doing evaluation work of our own programs to ensure that we're constantly improving them and ensure that they're serving the best way they can. But we've also started to do evaluation work for other VSOs and nonprofits. So we've done evaluation work in the past for the USO, the Travis Mannion Foundation, evaluation work in the past for the USO, the Travis Mannion Foundation, warrior and Quiet Waters, many other organizations that come to us really asking us to evaluate the efficacy of their programs.

Larry Zilliox: 10:36

This Onward to Opportunity program. Like you say, most of it is online, so anybody anywhere in the world, a service member thinking about transitioning in a year or two, they would be able to go to your Web page and register or sign up for this. Is there any cost?

Ray Toenniessen: 10:57

That's exactly right, larry, no cost whatsoever. So everything that we do, we raise the dollars through corporate foundation, individual philanthropy to put this on. So no cost to the service member. Veteran military spouse and that's right. If they're not near one of those installations where we offer the program, we also offer it completely online. So we've had folks going through overseas Europe, asia, africa and we see that a lot, larry, because we know there's service members out there that that OCONUS duty station may be their final duty station and they're separating from the service when they come back to the States, that's it. They're taking the uniform off so they can get a jump on that. You know, six to 12 months prior to that time of separation to start going through the training.

Larry Zilliox: 11:49

And these certifications? I don't know anything about them. I don't have any kind of certification like that, but I would imagine that in the civilian sector, if you wanted to get something like this, it would be expensive.

Ray Toenniessen: 12:03

Yeah, absolutely. I mean some of these trainings on the low end you're talking a few thousand dollars. On the high end, some of these prep courses and training are up in the $10,000 plus range. And you're exactly right. If you go to the civilian sector or some private training providers, you're either paying out of pocket for that or you're using your GI Bill for that. And you know we've we've stayed very true to we don't even take GI Bill dollars for these certs through Onward to Opportunity. Because what we find is that you know, sometimes maybe you go through that certification, you still want to have that GI Bill because maybe you also want to finish a degree or you can save that GI Bill to go back and get a master's degree. So we don't even take the GI Bill for the certification piece of it.

Larry Zilliox: 12:53

And do you know what the sort of top certifications that folks are signing up to take, what they might be?

Ray Toenniessen: 13:00

The number one that we see people going through are the PNP certifications. So that's the Project Management Professional, that's the top one that we see folks going through. The PNP certification. So that's the project management professional, that's the top one that we see folks going through. Because we have a lot of individuals that come to us. They've done project management, program management in the military, and so then they go through the prep course and sit for the exam and then get that PNP credential. But we also have a growing number of individuals coming through some of our cybersecurity courses. We have some of those.

Ray Toenniessen: 13:33

We actually just rolled out a new cybersecurity cert through Google. We have a fundamentals AI artificial intelligence training that we've rolled out that we're really seeing a lot of interest in. Training that we've rolled out that we're really seeing a lot of interest in. And then, most recently, we're seeing a lot of interest in our brand new we just piloted it and we're going to roll it out fully later this year. Our semiconductor track, because, given the interest in the Chips and Science Act and what you're seeing with a lot of the chip companies reshoring chip manufacturing we know that's going to be a growing industry and seeing with a lot of the chip companies reshoring chip manufacturing. We know that's going to be a growing industry and I think a lot of folks in the military community are noticing that too. So we're starting to see a lot of interest in that track as we start to roll it out too.

Larry Zilliox: 14:22

And the program is available to active duty military veterans and spouses.

Ray Toenniessen: 14:28

That's right, and also National Guard reservists, so we cover everybody yeah.

Larry Zilliox: 14:34

I want to, you know, just remind our listeners that if you had a cybersecurity certification and you had a top secret clearance Northern Virginia, but Northern Virginia, that's gold, right here, 100%, you know. So the idea that you know you could spend your last bit of time on active duty, getting this kind of certification, not having to pay for it, and then coming out with that, you're going to have a handful of jobs to choose from in this area for sure, guaranteed, that's just amazing. That'sed that's just amazing. That's right, that's really great.

Ray Toenniessen: 15:13

And the other thing we're going to do for you as you go through that. Once you hit a certain point through the process of your training, we start to work you into our employer support services. So we have direct employer relationships. But we also work with other VSOs like Hire Heroes USA and Vent Jobs. So we're working to try to either get you if it's that first job out in the military, or what we see a lot of times too, larry, is veterans that come to us that are underemployed and they're upskilling, they're using that certification for an upskill and then we're working. You know how do we get them into that next job, into that better job, always really focused on the goals and aspirations of the participant and putting them on a path to a meaningful career.

Larry Zilliox: 16:01

Hmm, well, I also think that this would be amazing for military spouses, because they can do this from any location, any installation, and they can do a lot of these jobs remotely. And so, in case they do get transferred somewhere, it doesn't mean the end of employment, which we see is a major problem for spouses and especially military families that need that to income, that get transferred and all of a sudden they're professionals, they're nurses or or accountants or, but they're transferred to a place where their certification. It's going to take them months and months to get transferred into that state or, worse yet, that country, and that is that salary that they've lost and it's a huge hit. But something like this that they could do remotely, I think is just great. Yeah, what's the one program that you would like to see in the future that you all don't offer right now?

Ray Toenniessen: 17:06

That's a great question, larry. You know, one of the things that we're always doing is looking at where are the current gaps and needs in this space, because from our standpoint that's always been sort of our true north right. If we stay focused on the veteran, the service member, the military spouse and their needs and build meaningful programs to meet those needs, then we feel like we'll be successful. The other thing we always do is, if somebody else is already out there doing it well, we have no desire to go in and recreate that. We would much rather partner with an organization to maybe do more together. I still have that to set up.

Ray Toenniessen: 17:58

I wouldn't necessarily say it's a specific program, larry, but I would talk about it as more of a specific point in time, and that's trying to figure out how do we get more left to the point of transition, and what I mean by that is, you know, we still often see a lot of service members coming to us with limited time before they take that uniform off right, and they're just starting to think about where do I want to live, what do I want to do? Okay, based on those things, do I have the requisite skills? Do I need additional education, upskilling, training, right. And so what happens is many, you know, start to back themselves into a corner from a timing perspective, and often it's not their fault, right, I mean, you are on active duty and you are serving in that role until the day that you either go on terminal leave or, you know, you fully take that uniform off. And there's been some programs, you know, skillbridge and career skills programs that have helped this, but we still see a lot of inconsistencies across different commands on how supportive they are to letting the individual take advantage of these.

Ray Toenniessen: 19:13

So, you know, I would say, really, transition should be something that starts from the day you enter the military and having a good system to you know, how are you cataloging all of the training that you're doing, any of the certifications you're doing, and almost programming check-ins with yourself to say, okay, where you know, where do I want to go, do I want to stay in, do I want to get out? What are my options? And then really matching those things up to your goals and aspirations so that you're, you know, at a consistent time, interview, checking in on that, versus waiting to okay, I just spent, you know, four years or six years or 12 years or 20 years in and now, all of a sudden, I have to figure out what's. What's next in my life?

Larry Zilliox: 19:57

Yeah, you know, I will say that the branches have gotten better in helping, or at least they don't look at transitioning soldiers as a liability anymore. That's right, I think the Army probably has the best program with their Soldiers for Life program. But I know, when I was in, you know, when you said you were getting out, well, they just, you know, they just thought of you like, well, you know, goodbye, we don't need you, you know, and we're not going to spend a dime on you. You're lucky we're giving you a plane ticket home and that's all changed. I could be better.

Larry Zilliox: 20:38

I get what you're saying Exactly. I get what you're saying Exactly. I mean, I think that service members who are considering getting out should really be thinking about it two years ahead. Yeah, absolutely yeah, and really really thinking, contemplating, what do I want to do? First, not so much what can I do, but what do I want to do, because what you can do and what you want to do, if they're two different things, you know, the Institute is one of those places where they can get what they need to do, what they want to do.

Ray Toenniessen: 21:13

I think that's a great point.

Larry Zilliox: 21:16

I just love the programs that you have and the mission that you all have to support veterans, who very often feel alone when they leave. Not only are they losing their tribe and their support system, depending on their service Some have issues with PTS, tbi, medical issues resulting from their service All of that's compounded with employment issues and then just trying to find a job in an economy that, depending on where they're going to end up, it may or may not be that great. So having a leg up with something like this, I think, is just absolutely amazing. So for our listeners, we'll have the webpage in the show notes, but it is ivmfsyracuseedu.

Larry Zilliox: 22:18

I encourage everybody to go to the webpage and take a look at it and check out all the resources. You can do a real deep dive on it. Go down the rabbit hole. Every time I clicked on something, I was going someplace else and there's reports and there's programs and a lot of resources that'll take you off of their page and onto a real vetted resource. So federal agencies for small business loans, things like that. I encourage everybody to go to the webpage and check it out, but we will have that in the show notes. Do you have veterans come to the university to take advantage of these programs, or is it all sort of online or how does it work?

Ray Toenniessen: 23:03

Yeah, it's a little bit of both, larry. So a lot of our programs we do in different cities around the country, so or they're a hybrid model. So some of it is online and some of it is we come in person. Some of those we host, you know, a few days at a time up at Syracuse. Others are again held in different cities around the country. But we also, on the more traditional higher education side, we have a very robust military-connected student population on our campus. So we have Army and Air Force ROTC, you know. We have student veterans who are there completing an undergraduate degree, graduate degree. We have military children who are dependents of service members or veterans who are there on GI Bill dollars. So we have another whole office on campus, our Office of Veteran and Military Affairs. That has done a great job and I think is one of the leading examples of how higher education should really approach student veterans in this country and have really broken down a lot of barriers around campus so that veterans and military-connected students can have a better experience at Syracuse.

Larry Zilliox: 24:22

Yeah Well, that's wonderful because it is a for veterans and especially those that are transitioning. Going to a university like that is it's quite an experience, not something they're quite used to. That's right. That's right. Yeah Well, listen, I want to thank you for taking the time to join us and really tell us all about this program, and I can't thank you enough for the great work that you all do up there.

Ray Toenniessen: 24:51

Oh, thank you, Larry, I appreciate you having me on Well for our listeners.

Larry Zilliox: 24:54

we'll have another episode next Monday morning at 0500. If you have any questions or suggestions, you can reach us at podcastatwillingwarriorsorg. Until then, thanks for listening.