Carly Fiorina says that the country’s treatment of veterans is “shameful.”
“Veterans, as a group, should always be lifted up by our communities and our society because they have been willing to put everything on the line for the rest of us,” Fiorina told the Washington Examiner at a veterans-themed workshop for her nonprofit group in Washington, D.C. on Friday.
Therefore, she added, “it is more than heartbreaking, it’s shameful, when we have veterans who have given so much who are suffering with homelessness or addiction or mental illness, and we’re unable to help them.”
For the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, the issue is personal. Fiorina cited her family’s experience with addiction as a reason for her commitment to the veteran community, in which substance abuse is a top problem. Her stepdaughter, Lori Fiorina, died in 2009 after a long battle with addiction.
“This is an area of special importance I think, not just to me, but for many, many Americans,” Fiorina said.
Fiorina has met with many veterans and hosted a roundtable to ask veterans for input on how to improve the Veterans Affairs Department. Her nonprofit organization, Unlocking Potential, is partnering with Wounded Warriors.
Fiorina founded the organization, Unlocking Potential, after her presidential run in 2016. Her group is dedicated to helping nonprofit organizations develop leadership and problem-solving skills in order to become more efficient and effective. Although the charitable organization works with all kind of groups, the workshop in D.C. focused on veterans issues and homelessness as Fiorina said those are “huge issues” in the community.
In the case of veterans affairs, Fiorina warned against putting veterans on a pedestal, noting that veterans groups face the same limitations that all organizations do.
“Sometimes, I think we are so in awe of veterans bravery on the battlefield, their sacrifice, their character, that we forget that they’re human too, and if you put them in a very difficult or very different set of circumstances, then they’ll have all the same issues as the rest of us do,” she said.
Fiorina also wants to help veteran community organizations as sometimes they can “work faster, can respond more quickly, can change more readily” than the “VA bureaucracy,” she said.
“I would say that bureaucracies — and the VA is a bureaucracy by nature — it’s not that the people who work in the VA aren’t well-intentioned, but bureaucracies tend to be difficult to change, because they’re so process-intensive,” she said.
When asked about her future plans apart from the nonprofit group, Fiorina said she is focused on making a positive difference.
“I hope that everyday I make things better,” Fiorina said. “Having spent a lot of my time learning about leadership, developing leaders, developing problem-solving capacity, I think I can make the biggest difference in bringing that to community-based organizations.”
As of now, Fiorina does not have plans to run for president again, but said: “Never say never.”
