(upbeat music) - Hi, everyone.

Steve Adubato.

We kick off the program with Joe Mindak, who is founder and executive director of the Foundation for Sustainable Veteran Housing.

Joe, good to see you.

- Good to see you too, Steve.

Thanks for having me on today.

Appreciate it.

- We appreciate you and your service.

We'll put up the website right now and tell us what the foundation is.

- The foundation's mission is to provide housing for homeless veterans across the state of New Jersey.

We started out in Hoboken years ago, and now we have seven locations across the state.

So we tear down old American Legion Halls, VFW Halls, we're provided land and we build brand new halls with housing for homeless veterans.

So we'll provide the housing, we'll provide all the wraparound services they need.

So 575 homeless vets in New Jersey.

Our job is to provide housing for all of them.

- How do you know how many veterans are homeless?

- So we usually get it through the VA and services like that, that kind of count how many homeless people are out there that day.

They have a day of count, so right now it's about 575.

That changes every year.

They do it every year, kind of like a census.

So they provide all that information to us through some of our partners.

- Hey, Joe, with cuts in the VA, the Veterans Administration, the federal level, and who knows where they're gonna go, we're taping this late in March, 2025, what concerns do you have about cuts in the VA and its impact on the work you and your colleagues are doing?

- Well, it's obviously a big concern because again, like I said, we not only provide the housing, we provide all the wraparound services, PTSD therapy, rides to the doctor's office, child training, resume writing, all the different services the vets will need.

And obviously we rely on the VA for a lot of those services.

So we're waiting to see what kind of cuts they're gonna do and then how that's gonna trickle down to the federal grants that we actually get to help build a lot of these facilities.

So that could be a big issue for us moving forward.

A lot of the money we get to build is from federal funding.

- How'd you get into this, Joe?

- So, I owned a magazine in Hoboken and we would raise funds every month for a different charity.

The American Legion came to one of those events.

We were raising money for them.

And they had got wiped out in Sandy and nobody stepped up to help them.

It was two years after Sandy and they were still not in their home.

So nobody came to help them.

And I was the president of Rotary.

We came to their aid and we rebuilt their home.

And then I found Monarch Housing, which is a partner of ours that helped provide some of the funding.

And next thing we know, we built a brand new legion with six units of housing for homeless veterans.

The first of its kind in the country to have an American legion hall with housing for veterans.

And now we're adding 18 more units on.

And this just kind of snowballed into, "Hey, this is something we could take and do it all across the state," and then all across the country eventually is what we wanna do.

- Joe, you keep mentioning the American Legion.

Help folks understand what the American Legion is and how the work you're doing is impacted the membership of the American Legions.

- Yeah, so the American Legion is a place for... When veterans come home, it's a place they call home, right?

Veterans like talk to other veterans, right?

They don't wanna talk to guys like me, I didn't serve.

They wanna talk to people that could understand what they went through.

So this is a home for them to be at.

They provide all sorts of services for each other.

They really look out for the other veterans and they've really been helpful on our mission here.

So it's really a place for them to come and call home.

So we want to keep providing that housing for them so they got a place to go.

And really, the impact has been great in Hoboken.

We didn't think, but after we built it, the membership has doubled in Hoboken.

- It's doubled.

- It's doubled since we built, because now we have a brand new hall.

Some of the younger veterans are like, "Hey, I'm not hanging out in this old dilapidated, garage anymore."

This is a brand new beautiful hall.

I had my 50th surprise party there, right?

It's a beautiful hall for people to come to.

So a lot of the younger veterans are saying, "Hey, this is a place I could come feel at home," and then help with a lot of stuff.

They're helping with social media, helping grow the legion, helping get the word out there.

So it's really been an impact.

- Yeah.

Lemme ask you this.

The suicide rates among veterans is disproportionately higher than the rest of the population.

First of all, why is that?

Second of all, you talked about so-called wraparound services around housing.

Be more specific as it relates to the mental health issues being faced by our veterans.

- Well, the veterans come home and they just need help, right?

It might be PSD, and they're not getting the help they want, and not having a home is a big part of that, right?

So we've noticed that once we put veterans in homes, the suicide rate goes down, right?

If everyone has a place to call home, they're not sleeping on their cousin's couch, their parents' room.

They've just come home from war and they're crashing on different people's couches, moving place to place.

This gives them a place to live.

We give them all the wraparound services they need, whether they need that PTSD training, therapy, anything else they need, rides to the medical facilities, whatever they need.

They just need help and support, right?

And these guys aren't homeless, they're not living on the street.

They're usually at risk to be homeless.

And we're providing that to 'em.

So it really helps with the suicide rate and brings that down.

- So your website's up right now.

If people want to contribute, tell folks where those dollars go?

- So our organization is all volunteers.

So every dollar that you put in is going towards helping build those facilities.

So what we do is we find the location, we go to towns, like we're in Westfield now, we're in South Amboy, Montclair, Vineland, Cape May.

We go and take that money to help those people get started, right?

So we give them that soft money to get the lawyers going, the architects going, all that money they need to.

And then we actually help with the fundraising for each separate location.

So if you donate to our site, we take that money and we help with getting the word out and we also give money to the different locations that we're working on to get them going, - Doing important work.

Joe Mindak is founder and executive director of the Foundation for Sustainable Veteran Housing.

Their website has been up, check them out.

Doing important work every day.

Hey Joe, thank you for the work you're doing.

We appreciate it.

- This is our thanks to the veterans, so this is what we could do to help them.

So thank you, Steve.

- Yeah, saying thank you for your service is the beginning of the conversation.

Thank you, Joe.

- All right, thank you.

- You got it.

Stay with us folks, we'll be right back.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by Bergen New Bridge Medical Center.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

The Turrell Fund, a foundation serving children.

PSEG Foundation.

IBEW Local 102.

Operating Engineers, Local 825.

Stockton University.

New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities.

And by The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Promotional support provided by ROI-NJ.

And by NJBIA.

- Energetic music