Virtual Hug a GI campaign earns GVSU Veterans Resource Center MVAA honors

Grand Valley and the Peter Secchia Military and Veterans Resource Center will receive an education innovator award from the Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency (MVAA) on Friday, May 9. The award honors the center's virtual Hug-a-GI campaign, which aimed to bring the GVSU community together to honor student veterans. It was the center's second year running the campaign.

GVSU was among five institutions of higher education to receive the innovator award, and it was the university’s second year in a row receiving it, having received innovation honors for the TRIO Veterans Upward Bound and Michigan Veteran Entrepreneur-Lab programs the previous year.

“Veterans on campus get to be appreciated by faculty, students and staff, and then students get reminded that there are people that walk the halls with them who also served [in the military],” said veteran resource center director Shane Scherer.

Scherer and his team placed yard signs around GVSU’s Valley Campus in Allendale inviting the community to participate and give a virtual hug to a GI by scanning a QR code on the sign. Participants were then able to write a message to the student veterans that Scherer shared with them on the designated virtual hug day.

The idea was first planted two years ago, when a student veteran approached Scherer about Hug a GI Day, a celebration of veterans where, as the name suggests, people give veterans a hug. When Scherer considered how the Veteran Resource Center could adapt the idea, he wanted to ensure he respected the student veterans' personal space. With that in mind, he developed the idea to be virtual, with a message of support replacing the physical contact through a hug.

Scherer said it was an honor for the center and Grand Valley to be recognized for the second consecutive year for developing innovative ideas in community building with veterans in higher education. However, he said are not what motivates him to continue coming up with new ideas.

“I don’t like doing anything that anybody else has done,” he said. “So for me it is a personal mission to keep reinventing new, creative ways to build community and to raise awareness.”