Representation Matters

I want to hear you talk some more about how your experience in the Air Force really affects what you do now, influences what you do now. When you were in the Air Force, one of your responsibilities was getting more diverse recruits for the US military. And I have heard you say that it was incredibly challenging. What were the hurdles you encountered? And how did you keep persevering through all that?

Yeah, specifically, it was increasing representation at one of the service academies, the United States Air Force Academy. And thinking about all the service academies, it’s the largest sphere of officers in all the officer corps. So, if we don’t have representation, at West Point, at the Naval Academy, at the Air Force Academy, then we won’t have that representation and the officer corps leading the charge and leading those missions. And so we have to start there. And what I actually found was, I was hyper-critical of the Air Force Academy’s efforts and the Air Force’s efforts in recruiting and retaining, particularly black officers.
But what I actually found spending my senior year at Capstone project getting very deep into the data is that this starts way earlier. We need to think about obesity rates, we need to think about incarceration rates, we need to think about early drug and alcohol use, and what folks need to do, even starting in middle school and high school, to understand the opportunities at the Air Force Academy. So, we actually spent a lot of time in high schools, at middle schools, and just saying, hey, you can go be a pilot, and what does that mean? And we definitely made strides, but there’s definitely a lot of work still to do.