The Hat

May 2026 Newsletter

Last month, I traveled with my father to D.C. and ended up with the clearest example of client-centered practice I've ever seen.

The sky over Washington was gray and cold when my father and I stood at the apex of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

He walked with a stick, his balance not what it had been, and he carried his Marines yearbook under his arm. Around us, other veterans from our Honor Flight group moved slowly along the Wall. Two young volunteers climbed ladders to help find names, pressing paper against stone to make reliefs for the men and women who had come to find someone they'd lost.

My father wasn't looking for someone he'd lost, exactly. He served during Vietnam but didn't deploy. He looked for names of men he'd known who did, and when he didn't find them, he felt relieved that a chapter had closed.

He told me he wasn't sure he belonged there. Volunteering to serve in the military during an unpopular war, yet never setting foot in Vietnam, had made for an uncertain relationship with his identity as a veteran. It was never something we talked about when I was growing up. It was just something that happened. A snapshot in an otherwise decidedly civilian life.

Now he was 85 years old, standing at a memorial to a war he'd lived through from a complicated distance, reconnecting to a part of himself he'd set aside for decades, the one who existed before he was my father.

Honor Flight, the nonprofit that hosted us along with dozens of other World War II, Korea, and Vietnam veterans, did something that sounds simple but is actually rare: they centered the veterans in everything.

Not the politics. Not the debates about the war or who served how or what it all meant. Not a hierarchy of sacrifice. They honored the people in front of them — men and women who had arrived from all walks of life with only one thing in common: the convergence of their lives at a difficult moment in history. Honor Flight made sure every detail of the day served that one purpose.

My father didn't have his military hat anymore. Someone noticed and gave him one. No ceremony, no fuss. Just someone paying attention to what he needed to feel like he belonged. Other veterans needed wheelchair assistance to navigate the slick terrain. Some just needed a stranger to become a friend because they were there on their own, without family support. All was offered with profound respect and dignity, honoring the person as a whole, not just their rank, status, or history. Because each of the men and women veterans on the trip had carried their own versions of complicated.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

Lots of nonprofits say "we center the communities we serve." But watching Honor Flight actually do it, consistently, I kept thinking: this is what it looks like in practice. It's not a framework. It's an orientation. Every decision, down to the hat, the wheelchairs, and the emotional support, flows from the same question: what does this person need to feel seen and honored today?

Here's what I find myself asking after that day in Washington: How well do you actually know the people you serve?

Not their income level. Not their zip code. Not the risk factors that made them eligible for your program. Who they are.

A grant narrative that describes your community as a set of needs to be addressed reads differently from one that describes them as full people navigating something hard. The second kind is more compelling. It's also more honest and respectful.

The organizations that write the second kind aren't just better writers. They know their clients differently. They've created enough relationship, enough proximity, that they can speak to the human experience of what they do, not just the outputs and outcomes.

So two questions worth sitting with:

When did you last talk to someone you serve, not to collect data, not to close a case, but just to understand their experience?

And when you write or talk about your community, are you describing who they are, or just what they lack?

Centering community is an orientation that shows up in every small decision you make. Your community deserves to be seen and honored, just like my father and the other veterans were in D.C.

Thank you for the work you do!

Warmly,

Laura

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