Summary: Where does one look to find out how many military service-people live in your county/district?
Background:
I’m trying to plan a program for my final this term, and it’s being … we’ll go with “difficult.” We need to find a specific and interesting service population to market the program towards, and it has to be a population that 1) isn’t being duplicated by any classmates, 2) isn’t a group I’ve programmed for in my working life, and 3) isn’t a group I’ve used as a target population for other homework assignments. As there are roughly 30 of us in this class, I have run all the programming at my library branch for 5 years, and at another system for 3 years previous, and I’m in my last semester of a degree that was heavy on the developing and designing public service programs angle, this is becoming a right bitch of a requirement set.
To top it all off, in addition it IS supposed to be something that we could conceivably do in reality in our community, so I’m not allowed to choose a target population that doesn’t exist in large enough numbers to support/justify creating the programming for them. In other words, no moon-people or North Koreans or anything. Part of the assignment (and of previous assignments) is citing a community analysis that proves that there are people for the programs.
So, to repeat - how does one (can one?) go about finding population statistics for returned military peoples?
Need answer not really fast - I’ve got a few weeks on this.
I’d start w/ the census figures for your city or county; often these are on Wikipedia. I’m confused by your OP; are you looking for veterans or for active duty military?
Often, an active duty or recently separated military member’s family doesn’t live in the same place they do. Also, people don’t always leave active duty when they return from deployment; as a matter of fact, they’re paid a nice bonus to reenlist while on their deployment so many opt to arrange that.
Many things that are available for military and their families are online rather than in person anymore; have a look aroundthis website to see if any of it is what you’re thinking of and whether it could be adapted. Are there military bases in your state?
My initial thought is to look for military installations in whatever area you’re interested in. Fort/Naval Air Station/Naval Base/Air Force Base/Marine Corps Air Station/Marine Corps Base. And I’m pretty sure the majority of mobilizations are done by Reservists, so you could go the extra mile and look for all the Reserve centers–many of them will have deployed at some point in the past 5 or so years.
How you’d get in touch with these people, if that’s your desire, is another story. How you’d gather stats on them is also another story. The VA may keep some sort of statistics on retirees, but I don’t think they’d have any on Active Duty. I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what DoD department may track who’s living where. I’d assume they leave that type of thing up to the services, and I don’t know of any office in the Navy’s Personnel Command that would keep any kind of stats. Even getting down to the operating level of the individual Reserve centers that the Navy uses, none of them are tracking any kind of demographical stats (again, to my knowledge, and I work for the entity that manages those Reserve centers). Sorry I can’t be of more help.
When I’m not rescuing cats, my road brothers and I raise money for the Wounded Warriors and ride to deliver it once a year.
The money we give pays airfare for family to visit, for entertainment, for books and DVD’s and etc. Our yearly visit and BBQ for the Heroes is always welcomed and seems to be enjoyed by all.
The CO of the barracks we support is always very responsive and very willing to talk to anyone who wants to help. I’m guessing if you called the barracks close to you, they would be happy to help you to help them.
