Charles Street Chats: Q&A with Dena Allen-Few
Dena Allen-Few has made the most of her first two years as coordinator of veteran and military student services in The Bob Parsons Veterans Center. In 2023, the U.S. Army veteran was named Veteran Champion of the Year in Higher Education by G.I. Jobs magazine and she was selected for the Focus Forward Fellowship, a highly competitive mentoring program for women veteran students reserved for just 24 people out of 200 applicants.
Dena, M.P.A. '23, initially joined the Army reserves to pay for college. That was shortly before 9/11, and she ended up on a completely different path than she anticipated.
BEHIND THE CHAT
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Q: What do you feel is a gap in veteran services, particularly for college students?
A: One of the biggest challenges veteran students face when they go into higher education is there’s usually some sort of age gap. There’s some sort of maturity gap, because these are people that are traditionally right out of high school, you join the military, you spend anywhere from four years to, we do have some retirees, so like 20 years in the military, and then you come out of that experience, and you’re going into the classroom.
Though we are not a traditional institution at UBalt, a lot of our classes still skew to that like younger demographic. So it’s kind of getting over the hurdle of being like the old person on campus. And then your lived experiences being taken seriously across campus, with your professors, and the understanding that, yes, I’m in this Art 230 class, along with all these 18 year olds, but I’m bringing a completely different perspective. There is actually an ART 230 class that one of my students is in, and we’re watching Apocalypse Now, because he needs to watch it for class. Having been in in the military, he has a completely different perspective on this film. So just having the space to have those perspectives and be heard, that’s something that is challenging for veteran students.
Q: When and why did you decide to move into higher education?
A: When I got out of high school, I was obsessed with West Wing; I wanted to work in politics, so I wanted to be educated. But then I got called up to duty as a reservist and had no clue what we were getting ourselves into because 9/11 had happened.
On 9/11, I was making up a drill that I missed and you could see the smoke from the Pentagon from Fort Belvoir, which is where I was. I had no concept of how that one event would completely change my trajectory, my life. A month later, I’m deploying to, originally, Kuwait and then I was there for the invasion of Iraq. Then I spent nine months in Iraq and came home.
And at that point, I’m 21, coming home from war with no support. My family has no clue what I’ve been through because it’s not like something you can talk about. It just stunted me. I gave up any ambition of being in politics. I gave up any sort of ideas, hopes, dreams, because it just seemed like that’s way too serious, like we can’t be serious. It would take me a very long time, until 2014.
Watch: Dena passes lessons on to today’s veteran students
I had been working in wine, like retail wine, for 14 years. So I was in shops all the time and realizing that I could do something better. My husband was like, ‘You’re too smart to be uneducated.’ So I started at Baltimore City Community College and got my associate degree in business management. Then I transferred to Towson in 2017.
I didn’t know that I would be working in higher education. I was at Towson, using a VA [Veterans Affairs] education benefit that was about to run out when I still had a semester and a half left of school to pay for. An opportunity arose for me to work in the veteran center at Towson. I could use tuition remission; it just gave me the benefits I needed to complete my degree. There was no anticipation that I was going to stay in higher education.
But then I got there, and I started working with the students. I saw the opportunities that I could provide for people, and now six years later, I love working in higher education. I especially love working with veteran students because they run the gamut of ages and backgrounds and stories, but yet, there’s something that is just so common amongst all of us having served, that it’s just so easy to build camaraderie and build community. And Josiah [Guthland, UBalt’s veteran center director] has just done so much to like mentor and grow me within higher education, I see nothing but the future going forward.
Q: There are many hardships veterans, particularly women veterans face when they’re looking forward support services and benefits. What is a common misconception about what veterans need versus what they get?
A: Women veterans have it especially hard in the military, because it is still like a completely male-dominated field. Currently, I think it’s 11 percent of the military is comprised of women, and that’s it. The majority are in the Air Force. So women that are in the Army, the Marine Corps, because those are especially male-driven services, they’re thought of as playthings, they’re thought of as not being serious. So that is one hurdle that women have to jump over when they’re in service, along with all of the sexual harassment and all the issues that you’ve read about.
When we become veterans, those stigmas still sort of follow us, but then it’s automatically also like, ‘Oh, you poor thing. Oh, you’re so helpless.’ Neither of these concepts are real. We’re obviously not helpless damsels that need to be rescued. So anything that you’ve gone through has to be put to the side.
When it comes to what we need, we need better support within the health care system. We need better support when it comes to our education, because in reality, women veterans are the fastest number growing population within the military first off, because, we are serving more often now. We are also the demographic that uses our education benefit to its fullest advantage. But veteran women also face the highest numbers of homelessness amongst veterans when they’re first getting out of service. A lot of times, they have families. So they’re getting out of service either still married, but most likely divorced. They have young children to raise. These are all the hurdles that they’re facing and we have to fight harder to get the services that we’ve earned.
What Charms Us
We end all of our Charles Street Chats with the same question: What do you love most about Baltimore? Here’s Dena’s answer.
We’re mid-size metropolitan area, but it feels cozy. It feels like community. What I love about Baltimore is that regardless of like how big it is, it’s still feels like a small town.