As the city faces a $158 million shortfall, Thursday’s budget proposal floats eliminating funding for a military spouse employment program.
The proposed change would eliminate $150,000 in funds for Hiring Our Heroes, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation program aimed at helping service members, veterans and military spouses find employment in the civilian world.
The new budget would cut 16 regional fellowships for military spouses offered by the program through city funding.
The program paired military spouses with local companies for 12-week fellowships, with no monetary cost to the host organizations.
Anticipating cuts, in July Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones asked local businesses and philanthropists to consider funding 15 local charitable organizations that the city currently funds.
Hiring our Heroes is one of only three of those on Jones’s list that are slated to lose funding in the city’s current budget proposal, City Manager Erik Walsh told reporters in a media briefing Wednesday. The San Antonio Botanical Garden received a $200,000 reduction and the scholarship portion of the San Antonio Education Partnership was eliminated in the proposal.
“We didn’t get a lot of activity in that area this year,” Walsh said of why the military spouse program was axed.
The city’s Military and Veterans Affairs section of its website touts the program as a “highly successful Military Spouse Fellowship.” It notes that the city has contributed more than $500,000 to the program over its seven years of existence and that 92% of fellows received permanent employment with a $61,000 average annual salary.
The nationwide Hiring our Heroes program came to San Antonio last week for a career summit to provide transitioning members and military spouses with tools for employment. Its director of events and engagement, Crystal Kearns, said hiring military spouses helps the military as a whole.
“Employing a spouse is securing our nation because our service members want to remain in service if their spouses can gain meaningful employment,” Kearns said.
The U.S. Department of Labor puts the military spouse unemployment rate at 21%, compared to a national average of around 4%, partly due to the need to move around or otherwise sacrifice for their spouse’s military career.
“Military spouses are at a disadvantage because not only are they unemployed, but they are underemployed,” she said. “They are highly educated, highly skilled, highly trained, but they will take an opportunity at the very baseline just to get their foot in the door.”
When San Antonio’s military spouse fellowship program with Hiring Our Heroes was formally established in 2019, it was the first of its kind in the state of Texas and the second in the nation.
“We have had a long collaboration and relationship with the City of San Antonio,” Kearns said last week. “Military City USA has always been a wonderful place for HOH to provide our resources, and so they have always partnered with us just to ensure that their military community has wraparound services.”
City Council will now debate the budget proposal and pass a final budget on Sept. 17.
The San Antonio Report’s military and veterans coverage is supported by Report for America.
This story first appeared in the San Antonio Report.
