With the help of DraftKings, military veterans who are part of the VetsinTech program have been honored at several NFL games during the league’s “Salute to Service” month.
Vets attended this past Sunday’s New York Giants game in a suite after going on the field during warm-ups and participating in the pregame flag ceremony. Similar instances occurred at recent Baltimore Ravens and New England Patriots games.
It’s an added bonus for the veterans who join the program after their service to find jobs in tech, said VetsinTech Chief Operating Officer Ikram Mansori.
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“DraftKings has been supporting us for years now. They care. It’s always something to look forward to, and our community is always asking, ‘When’s the next game? How can I be a part of it?’” Mansori said in a recent interview. “For us to provide such an experience, it just goes to show we’re honoring their existence. I get text messages every morning about how cool the experience was, and the fact they’re being honored, it’s unmatched.”
The company was founded in 2008 and has had numerous success stories. With DraftKings’ help, the program has been able to train 1,200 veterans, spouses and survivors in technical skills. Since 2018, DraftKings has donated over $3 million to VetsinTech to train veterans and their spouses in high-demand tech skills, including a $200,000 donation from their free-to-play pool earlier this month in which they donated $5 for each entry.
One success story in particular, Mansori recalled, was a vet who turned his life around after joining the program shortly after living in his car. Another program graduate had lost his son in combat, but after joining VetsinTech, he was able to get out of his “dark” spot and find a sense of joy again after living through the unimaginable.
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The program has been wildly successful, but Mansori believes they are just “scratching the surface.”
“We have 200,000 veterans or military service members that exit the military every single year. 80% of those veterans don’t necessarily have a solid plan to transition to land a job… That’s where we come in. We want you to come in, we want to teach you, train you, and our turnaround is so quick because we’re not a four-year college degree, but we can train you in boot-camp-style and get you an entry-level job in cybersecurity and get you a six-figure income.
“I always look at the way we approach supporting our veterans and spouses and survivors as there’s a reactive and the proactive reactive beam, just having access to the basic stuff, like mental health, hospital, medical, all these things, a roof over your head. You can’t really focus on the proactive things unless those things are done. But where we stand as VetsinTech in partnership with DraftKings, it’s on that proactive side. We want you to have that and then some more and have that financial stability and that better quality of life and the possibilities of remote work versus not. It’s endless.
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“But we want to do more. The goal continues to be, how can we serve those 200,000 members that exit the military every single year?”
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