Editor’s note: This story has been edited to amend a quote attributed to Vic McGuinness and Kelly Knitter. We in appropriately attributed that quote to Knitter as well as McGuinness. We apologize for the error and regret any inconvenience our mistake might have caused.
Forces United, which has billed itself as offering aid and assistance to veterans, has reached the end of its run.
The Forces United website has been taken down, and calls to the organization as well as to James Heffner, chairman of the Forces United board, went unanswered.
Heffner did speak to WJBF Television and confirmed the group is dissolving. According to the broadcast report, Heffner said the group would be offering up its remaining assets to other charities.
Jim Lorraine, president of America’s Warrior Partnership, the group that began as a sort of parent organization for Forces United, says he has not heard that any of the group’s remaining assets will be donated back to the AWP.
“We have reached out to them numerous times over the past several years and never heard back, so I do not know anything about the current status,” Lorraine said.
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Forces United was established in 2007 as the Central Savannah River Area Wounded Warrior Care Project, created by former WRDW television anchor Laurie Ott and businessman Jim Hull. The organization later shortened its name to Augusta Warrior Project.
Over time, what began as a local group serving wounded veterans grew into a national organization that continues to draw national acclaim for its service to America’s wounded warriors.
“We tapped into a huge reservoir of goodwill in the community, as opposed to asking for help from Washington DC,” Hull said.
According to Hull, his biggest motivation to act came when he learned of the abnormally high suicide rate of veterans and says he felt the community needed to step in and offer aid that was not being offered by the Veteran’s Administration or the national government.
Once America’s Warrior Project became a national organization, the local wing, Forces United, split off and became its own entity so that it could continue to receive local grant funding.
According to former employees, once Forces United split from AWP, the local organization changed, and its focus veered away from Hull and Ott’s original intent.
Vic McGuiness worked for Forces United in 2016 and says he witnessed what he, in his opinion, considered fraud.
According to McGuiness, Forces United attempted to claim in a grant application to the Rosalynn Carter Foundation that it had hosted marriage survivorship seminars for veteran couples. In fact, according to McGuinness, such seminars had never happened. He refused to sign the application but says someone else did eventually. The group’s then-president and CEO Kim Elle informed him the group was applying for a grant through the Rosalynn Carter Foundation.
According to McGuiness, Elle instructed him to sign a document stating that Forces United provided marriage survivorship seminars for veteran couples even though the group never held such seminars.
“I told them I wasn’t signing because we absolutely had not been doing these seminars and they said, ‘Yeah, but if you don’t sign then we don’t get the money. We don’t get the funding,’ and I told them, ‘Then we don’t get the funding,’” McGuiness said.
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McGuiness says that the problems with the organization began when Elle took over and started working to sever ties with the parent organization.
“Everything became secretive. Trust was definitely an issue. There was no transparency. It was all about raising funding, not helping veterans,” Knitter said.
Kim Elle, who left the organization in 2019, has not responded to calls for comment.
Over time, it appears that the local grant funding sources began to dry up when word spread that the local organization was no longer fulfilling its intended role.
Mary Harrison, interim executive director for CSRA Economic Opportunity Authority, Inc., one of the former grantors, confirmed her group severed ties with ForcesUnited “several years ago,” but did not elaborate further.
“We decided to move those services in-house,” Harrison said.
Hull wants the community to know that his and Ott’s original idea of an organization to help veterans at the local level is alive and well under Lorraine’s leadership at America’s Warrior Project.
“They do a grand job, and while it is now a national organization, the impact is still local. They do a vital service to our community’s veterans,” Hull said.
Scott Hudson is the senior reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
