Kohler is chief operating officer of the Pentagon Federal Credit Union Foundation, or PenFed Foundation. The organization is having its eighth annual Night of Heroes Gala on Thursday at the Ritz-Carlton in Northwest Washington. Honorees include actor Joe Mantegna, and Miss America 2012 Laura Kaeppeler is performing.
What is the PenFed Foundation? We are a national charity dedicated to meeting the unmet needs of military veterans and their families. What makes us different from other organizations is that we have an element of financial literacy in all of our programs.
Tell me about your upcoming gala. This year we’re … honoring the hero at home, which is the families who are often unheralded. And they do work really essential to our military. Everything from helping out during a deployment — moms, dads, brothers, sisters, in addition to spouses — who really come together while a service member is serving. And, also very importantly, the hero at home is also someone who cares for a military service member after they may have become wounded.
What exactly is the Hero at Home Award? Who is this year’s winner? The Hero at Home Award was our way of being able to reach out to the entire national community and get America’s vote on someone who they wanted to represent them. We did a national YouTube competition to seek out a caregiver who people felt really represented the hero at home. Dahlia Constantine was chosen to be our hero at home. She is a third-grade teacher at the Arlington Public Schools, and she really helped her husband, Justin, recover from the wounds that he sustained in Iraq. She had started her doctorate at Cambridge University in England when her husband, who was then her boyfriend, was shot in Iraq, and so she left the program and moved to Bethesda to help him heal. – Naomi Jagoda
— Naomi Jagoda
