Meredith “Mabs” Brose is the new Recreation Project Coordinator for Mission Redefined Wyoming (MRWY), helps connect veterans with community partners and events to help make the activities/events more accessible for veterans.
Brose is able to help focus on maintaining the partnerships MRWY currently has and helps to build new partnerships in order to provide more opportunities for veterans.
“She (Brose) is just hitting the ground running,” Hannah Ginn, project coordinator at Wyoming Institute for Disabilities (WIND), said. “She is really focused on looking at all the different type of community services, groups and programs out there that are veteran led or can serve veterans, or in some way support veterans. She is looking both at the needs the veterans have and their interests. She can then match it to what community resources are available.”
This is a new position to help support MRWY in connecting the group with community partners to provide opportunities for veterans. Before, other leaders of MRWY had to take on these responsibilities, but with the addition of Brose, she is able to focus on making the community connections.
“It has been a huge boom for us to have Meredith here,” Marty Martinez, senior project coordinator, said. “Even though it is a part-time position she has been able to commit many hours. She was able to commit what we couldn’t. She is able to be the face in the community and be the earpiece in the community as well. The community will hopefully start to voice their needs, their desires, their hopes for our program and she can hopefully be able to bring that back to WIND and back to us here at the veteran’s center so that we can bring it to Mission Redefined Wyoming.”
Brose may be working for UW but she is not restricting her outreach to the campus but the entire Laramie Community.
“I am reaching out to the people at the University of Wyoming and to the entire community to tell them about the recreational activities I can set up for them, designed to meet their interests,” Brose said. “Things like fishing and bike rides, hiking and there is the Casper Mountain Biathlon. Those are just some of the things coming along and we will do even more depending on what people would like to have us do.”
Brose has reached out to the local American Legion chapter in Laramie and the Veterans Affairs in both Cheyenne and Sheridan to help get them involved and her goal is to help build a community for the veterans. With this, MRWY is not only having a local impact but an impact on the entire state.
“When we first formed this (MRWY) that was one of the things about Mission Redefined Wyoming we were concerned about,” Martinez said. “Obviously we have a great connection with the veterans here on campus, which is an easy connection because I have 700 students coming to school here. Where we were not making great connection was the veterans in our community and beyond. That is why we didn’t call it Mission Redefined Laramie or Albany County, we wanted to express that was something we wanted for the entire state. That we could have a continuity of services and resources for veterans all over the state that they could utilize.”
