Campus club to connect veterans, families

When Air Force veteran Clinton Hewitt came to Augustana last fall, he found himself looking for a community that didn’t exist yet.

Hewitt is a graduate student pursuing his Master of Social Work who was active duty from 2006 to 2012, including two deployments to Qatar in 2009 and 2011. Last year, toward the end of his first semester at Augustana, he began working an internship with Community Action for Veterans (CAV) — a South Dakota-based nonprofit that helps provide veterans and their families with support.

At the CAV internship, Hewitt was asked a question about what programs his university has that focus on veterans. He found himself without a response.

“I had no answer,” he said. “Like me personally, I had nothing, no content or experience to go from. Because once I had started [at Augustana], if anything existed, I was never made known of it.”

Luckily, the internship with CAV is all about building connections. CAV has seven interns that are university students — two from Augustana, the others from USD and USF — and while each student’s work is a little different, it often centers around establishing or supporting programs at their own school.

Hewitt wants his project to “create a bridge” between CAV and Augustana. One of his hopes is that by the time he graduates, a student veteran like himself will have answers to that question about how their university helps support them.

“Because to me, that’s a big deal, just going from military service to the civilian world is…in some ways, it could be looked at as leaving Earth in general for a period of time,” he said, likening a return from service to coming back to a world where a hundred years has passed.

In the Master of Social Work program, Hewitt met another first-year student with similar passions: Peggy Nelson, a former military spouse who remembers guiding her two young daughters through one of her ex-husband’s deployments.

“They were so totally in the dark, and I didn’t know how to help them,” Nelson said. “And that was a big challenge, going through that with them, too. Even military family members, like maybe a mom who’s on campus, who has kids, who have a dad who’s going to be deployed — knowing what to give back to those kids is incredibly important because we don’t want them to be lost and confused.”

Around J-term, Nelson also began an internship with CAV, where she currently works to connect with and support elementary students in the region. On April 11, CAV held a retreat for woman veterans at Our Savior’s Lutheran; Nelson’s students made cards for the attendees.

Nelson said that since her project involves working with students from elementary to high school age, Hewitt has headed the university side of things.

“I’m his support for this, and he’s my support on the other side,” she said.

On the recommendation of Randi Maiers, the director of student engagement at the Division of Student Affairs, Hewitt began the process of establishing an official student organization — what’s now known as the Augie Veterans and Families Club. Since the idea’s fruition sometime in February, he has written a constitution and a mission statement, created a logo and applied for ASA approval, which was granted this April.

“That whole moment was as bureaucratic as I’ve ever been in my life,” Hewitt said. “But at the same time, it was just an interesting experience to create something that goes towards a club like this and then to look forward to passing it on to the future students and just getting to see where [and] how it grows.”

That process included finding a club advisor, and the Master of Social Work program once again came through: this time with Sara Bennetts, assistant professor of social work.

Like Hewitt and Nelson, Bennetts just arrived at Augustana in 2025. She has a long history of military connections, including over a decade of civilian work on a base in Germany and several years at the veteran’s hospital here in Sioux Falls.

Her passion for supporting military programs, Bennetts said, comes partly from her love for her field and partly from personal experience: Her husband is a retired Army veteran who was first activated for deployment in 2003.

“It was an exciting experience for him — terrifying for me, because I really didn’t know what to do or what to expect,” Bennetts said.

Despite her recent arrival to the university, Bennetts seems to fit perfectly into the role of club adviser in both a professional and personal capacity. Nelson called her “an amazing resource.”

The group of three has already worked through a number of logistical challenges, including trying to gauge potential attendance when veteran statuses of students are not public information.

Hewitt said that expanding the club’s target audience to include military families helped remedy that concern about low numbers, pointing out that broad connections between veterans and supportive civilians are “part of the idea.”

Though the club has not yet planned an event, both students and their adviser are confident that their target audience is here on campus.

“Especially in a small community like Augie where we have the liberal arts piece, we have the Lutheran faith, we have all of these pieces to scaffold around — I want to make sure we’re reaching that military-connected and veterans space as well because I know that exists,” Bennetts said.