Voices of Impact: The Unfinished Debt for Black Veterans with Richard Brookshire & Kyle Bibby of the Black Veterans Project
Voices of Impact is Foundation House's ongoing interview series featuring the leaders and organizations coming through our Activist Residency program. At Foundation House, we believe transformative change happens when there is space to connect, strategize, and take action. Our Greenwich, CT retreat hosts nonprofits and coalitions working across environmental, social impact, and mental health initiatives, giving teams the time and space to think bigger, align deeper, and return to their work with renewed clarity. These conversations are a window into that process.
March 20, 2026
We're excited to share this conversation between Richard Brookshire and Kyle Bibby, Co-CEOs and Co-Founders of the Black Veterans Project (BVP), and Richard Zimmerman, Executive Director of Foundation House.
Richard Brookshire and Kyle Bibby met at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs after each finished their own tours: Richard B as an Army combat medic in Afghanistan, Kyle as a Marine Corps infantry officer who led troops there the year before. What started as a shared instinct that something wasn't being said about the Black veteran experience has grown into one of the most consequential reparations fights in the country, including Monk v. United States, a lawsuit that has survived a motion to dismiss and is now moving toward a first-of-its-kind class action. In this conversation, Richard B and Kyle trace their paths to founding BVP, unpack the historical and present-day data behind their work, and share how their week at Foundation House helped shape the narrative strategy for what comes next.
Video highlights and full transcript below.
Richard Brookshire and Kyle Bibby never crossed paths in Afghanistan, though they came within a year of each other. Their real meeting happened later, at Columbia University, over a student roundtable and a purple sweater. In this opening chapter, they trace the very different roads that led them there: Richard B's path from a military family into a combat medic role, then a suicide attempt that planted the seeds of the work; Kyle's path from a 15-year-old watching 9/11 unfold to a Marine Corps officer confronting the gap between his rank and his race. It's a candid, human start to a story that becomes a movement.
The name almost happened by accident. In this chapter, Richard B and Kyle explain how a conversation over coffee, an entrepreneurship incubator built for beer startups, and a shared realization that no one was building community for their generation of Black veterans turned into an organization. They also introduce the historical throughline for everything BVP does: how the GI Bill, meant to build the American middle class, excluded most of the one million Black GIs who should have benefited from it, and what that has meant across generations since.
This is the heart of the interview. Richard B and Kyle walk through how a partnership with Yale Law School's veterans legal clinic led to the largest race-based data release in VA history, and what that data showed: Black veterans were 30% more likely to be denied PTSD claims. From there, they tell the story of Conley Monk, a Vietnam-era Marine who fought for over 40 years to access benefits he'd been wrongly denied, and how his case is now on the verge of becoming the first race-based class action for Black veterans in the country. It's a story about data, but it's also about one man's decades-long fight, and it's the chapter listeners will want to sit with.
Litigation is only part of the work. Here, Richard B and Kyle talk about what it means to build community for Black veterans, from national calls and regional organizers to a special gathering in Holly Springs, Mississippi, to tying into existing infrastructure like a historically Black VFW post in Jersey City. They also make the case for why this isn't just a Black veterans' issue: membership is open to anyone willing to reckon with the history, including white veterans and families who benefited from the GI Bill in ways theirs didn't.
Richard B and Kyle reflect on their time at Foundation House, a chance to step back from the daily grind of the work and ask the harder questions about what BVP should stop doing, what no longer makes sense, and what they haven't even thought of yet. They close with a candid look at where the organization is headed over the next five years, and an honest acknowledgment that reparations work like this, as past fights like the Black farmers' lawsuit have shown, rarely moves as fast as anyone would like.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Chapter 1: Two Veterans, One Mission
Richard Zimmerman: I'm excited about this, and excited to have you both here. I'd love to hear about your experience with the Black Veterans Project and everything you're doing. Let's start at the beginning: tell us about yourselves, how you grew up, a bit of your background, and how that led you to BVP.
Richard Brookshire: I come from a military family. My mother is a Haitian immigrant who served in the early '80s, where she met my father, a white Midwestern farm boy who served from Vietnam through the Gulf War. In 2009 I enlisted. I'd done two years of college and was trying to find my way, so I signed up for the Army as a combat medic. I served for seven years, four of those active duty, deployed to Afghanistan.
Richard Zimmerman: What time period was that?
Richard Brookshire: I enlisted in 2009, after Obama won, and deployed to Afghanistan in 2011. I ended up in Germany first, on a former Nazi base, then Afghanistan. I think that's where the seeds of racial justice work were planted for me. I came back shortly after to the death of Trayvon Martin. I'm from Florida, and he was killed in the town I'd canvassed for the Obama campaign. It felt like a full-circle moment, coming back from war and being met with something that visceral. I'd also read a lot about racial injustice while I was in Afghanistan, and when I got back I went to policy school while finishing up in the New York State National Guard. I went to Columbia, which is where I met Kyle. When I took the uniform off for good, shortly after graduating, it was also the rise of Trump, and the country was changing rapidly. I was trying to figure out my identity post-service, and it was hard to find people who could relate, since so few of my friends in New York had served. I struggled with my mental health, and it led to a suicide attempt. It was after that attempt that the seeds for the project really started to take shape.
Kyle Bibby: I'm from North Jersey, East Orange, right outside Newark, and grew up in the New Brunswick area, in a town called Franklin Township, with a single mother. For me, it was the fear and shock around 9/11. I wanted to feel in control afterward, so I looked at the military, ironically the place with the least control, as somewhere I could regain it. I was 15 when 9/11 happened.
Richard Zimmerman: I was going to ask what age you were.
Kyle Bibby: At the time, it felt like the country was asking people to step up. I was a good student and a student athlete, and I chose the Naval Academy. I spent four years there and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, then about five years active duty and a year and a half in the reserves before Columbia. In the Marines I deployed to Afghanistan as an infantry officer, leading platoons and later serving as a company executive officer and company commander. Those experiences broadened my view of the world, and also made me critical of parts of the military at the time, and of my own experience as a Black officer: living with the privilege of rank, but still sometimes feeling outside the mainstream of officers. After Columbia I met Richard, and through my own experience navigating the VA I started reckoning with things I'd been dismissing, like why my jaw clicks and is out of place, which turned out to be from grinding my teeth at night because of PTSD. The nightmares weren't isolated; they were symptoms. One day Richard and I started talking about it and said maybe we should do something. We both had policy degrees from Columbia, so we put them to work. That's when we created the Black Veterans Project.
Richard Zimmerman: Did you two overlap in Afghanistan?
Richard Brookshire: No.
Kyle Bibby: We met at Columbia.
Richard Zimmerman: Not even the same time?
Richard Brookshire: When were you there?
Kyle Bibby: 2010 to 2011.
Richard Brookshire: I was there in 2011.
Kyle Bibby: We didn't even know that until just now.
Richard Zimmerman: The universe was bringing you together even earlier.
Richard Brookshire: We should have known that.
Kyle Bibby: We should have! I never even asked.
Richard Zimmerman: So how did the meeting at Columbia actually happen?
Richard Brookshire: We were both involved in student groups, particularly the students-of-color group, since there were so few Black students in the policy school that you got to know the ones who were there. But I don't think it really clicked until after Kyle had graduated, gone off to do the Presidential Management Fellowship, and had come back.
Kyle Bibby: I first got involved through SIPA Vet, the School of International and Public Affairs veterans group.
Richard Zimmerman: I know SIPA. They have a veterans group?
Kyle Bibby: Yes. Prospective veteran students would come through, and I think that's where we first crossed paths.
Richard Brookshire: No, I remember the first time I actually met you. We were at a roundtable with Mayor Dinkins about the state of race at SIPA. You were sitting at the front, and I remember thinking, who's that?
Kyle Bibby: I was wearing a purple sweater.
Richard Brookshire: He knows about the purple sweater. I hadn't gotten involved with the veterans groups up to that point, I was still technically in the Guard while at Columbia, and I was purposefully avoiding association with veterans groups because I wanted to get as far from the military as possible. The fact that I ended up doing this work a decade later still shocks me.
Richard Zimmerman: And yet, here you are.
Richard Brookshire: Here we are.
Richard Zimmerman: When you mentioned the VA, was that through DC, or somewhere in the New York area?
Kyle Bibby: When I got out, I went back to my hometown and started at the East Orange VA Hospital in New Jersey, where I first filed disability claims, very meager ones, because I still wasn't connecting the dots. I told them my jaw was messed up and I didn't know why, without understanding it was tied to stress and anxiety. It took a couple of years of therapy, through the VA and private therapists, to figure that out. I was briefly at the Bronx VA while at Columbia, since it was the closest one uptown, then in DC during my time as a Presidential Management Fellow at the Office of Management and Budget, so I was going to the DC VA there. Now I split my care between the Manhattan VA and Jersey, since I like some of my doctors in Jersey.
Chapter 2: Why "Black Veterans Project"?
Richard Zimmerman: I want to get to the creation of BVP. Your stories are so important to it, and I want to come back to the mental health piece too, because that's critical to the work you're doing, and something we're trying to figure out how to support at Foundation House. It's affecting every aspect of society.
Richard Brookshire: Absolutely. What was the question?
Richard Zimmerman: What was the actual genesis of the idea? Were you sitting around having coffee, sketching it out on a napkin?
Kyle Bibby: I think you called me and said you'd been thinking about something, and I said I'd noticed the same thing. We got a beer or coffee and started talking. I remember the name was your idea, you said we should call it the Black Veterans Project, and it stuck.
Richard Brookshire: I said we should do a Black veterans project, and we just kept the name.
Kyle Bibby: To this day I wonder if that was a misunderstanding. I thought you meant that was the actual name.
Richard Brookshire: We did an incubator, at an organization called Bunker Labs. It's now part of Syracuse University, but at the time it was mostly for veteran entrepreneurs starting businesses, breweries and the like, and we came in wanting to build something different. Going in, the one thing we knew for certain was that the story needed to be told more coherently. There were already Black veterans organizations around the country, built up over decades, but they were mostly older and didn't have much of a digital presence, so there was no real online community. Our generation, who mostly finds each other online, had nowhere to gather. And the traditional veteran service organizations, like the American Legion or the VFW, our generation doesn't have much affinity for to begin with, and they've always had racial blind spots. So we saw a need to build an ecosystem, and we wanted to tie in an intergenerational conversation about benefit obstruction, the fact that access to veterans' benefits has never been equitable.
Some of that came from my own story. When I was in the psych ward after my attempt, there wasn't much to do for two weeks except read, and I had a few books left over from graduate school. One was called When Affirmative Action Was White, by a Columbia professor, and it covers how mid-20th-century social welfare policy, the New Deal and the GI Bill in particular, mostly benefited white Americans and helped build a middle class that hadn't existed before. A few chapters focus specifically on the GI Bill, and research since, including a study out of Brandeis, shows that most of the one million returning Black GIs had almost no real access to VA home loans, to the tune of roughly $80 billion in wealth that would exist today.
Richard Zimmerman: So this is historically, due to racial covenants...
Richard Brookshire: Due to redlining, racial covenants, and a host of discriminatory banking practices that locked Black families out of the VA home loan access that helped build and bolster the white middle class at scale.
Richard Zimmerman: So this is really the more recent version of something still playing out.
Richard Brookshire: Right, and these harms are intergenerational. We're also still seeing discrimination in the system today. The premise of our project is to tie that historical legacy to a framework for reparative justice, because the harm of the GI Bill is still reverberating through families who never got access to the benefit, and the country hasn't adequately contended with that history. Then you have the decades that followed, through the Vietnam era, with discrimination and discharges that disproportionately affected Black troops and locked them out of benefits for decades. And you have disparities that have likely always existed but that we've only been able to document over the last few decades, especially in the post-9/11 era, pointing to disparities in disability compensation that amount to billions of dollars siphoned out of the Black community. Cumulatively, from the GI Bill to today, there's an eight-decade legacy of benefit obstruction that needs accountability and a framework for repair.
Richard Zimmerman: So bringing up that history puts a spotlight on what's still happening now as a result of it.
Richard Brookshire: And its manifestations.
Richard Zimmerman: Is your focus more on the policy and systemic issues, or on the people who were affected, historically and now?
Richard Brookshire: It's a combination.
Kyle Bibby: We organize our work around three lanes. The first is impact litigation, working with allied organizations to litigate against the government over these lost benefits; Richard leads a lot of those relationships. The second is movement building and advocacy, organizing veterans across the community, helping them understand what they've often already suspected about their own experiences, and mobilizing them, whether through press conferences or trips to DC or their state houses to push for policy change. The third, which is why we were here this week, is what we're calling the narrative lab: collecting individual stories from veterans. They're powerful on their own, but they're also data points that support the advocacy work. Beyond the policy outcomes and restitution we're seeking, there's real value in just collecting the community's stories. This is our history as Black veterans, and it's important to preserve it and deliver it back to the community, so people understand why we are where we are, and what we can do going forward.
Chapter 3: Inside Monk v. United States
Richard Zimmerman: I want to get to the litigation, but first, the constituency you're reaching, is it mostly people your age who've come up through the system in the last decade, or people from three or four decades ago too?
Richard Brookshire: A combination. We're reaching out broadly, saying everyone's been affected in some way, some more recently, some further back, and we want to hear and relay every story.
Richard Zimmerman: Got it.
Richard Brookshire: The baseline for where the project really took shape: the first two years, we were mostly ideating around that broad, intergenerational vision. We knew we wanted to do research and storytelling work, but we also both needed jobs, since we'd just graduated. Kyle went to work at Common Defense, doing political organizing in the veteran community. I became the communications lead for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. That was our training ground in veterans advocacy, how policy work actually gets done on the Hill.
Two years in, in 2020, we knew data was going to be essential, and I'd scoured the internet trying to find substantive studies on present-day disparities affecting Black veterans and couldn't find much. So I built a relationship with Yale Law School, which has a strong veterans legal clinic, and we spent almost two years cultivating what became the largest race-based data inquiry in the history of the Department of Veterans Affairs. We litigated for about another year and got the VA to release race-based data for the first time in its history. That data, covering disability compensation from 2001 to 2020, showed systemic and sustained racial disparities affecting Black veterans, including that Black veterans were 30% more likely to be denied a PTSD claim.
Richard Zimmerman: So this is entirely within the VA system, not something external.
Richard Brookshire: Entirely within the system. We combined that data with whistleblower accounts and internal VA reports showing the agency had been studying racial disparities in its benefits systems for over 20 years without acting, despite multiple internal studies. That data and information underpins a lawsuit called Monk v. United States.
Conley Monk is a veteran from New Haven, Connecticut. His father was a World War II veteran who worked as a janitor at Yale Law School. Conley volunteered for Vietnam at 17 and served two tours as a Marine. Vietnam was the nation's first fully integrated war, and there were race riots within the ranks that don't get much attention, but it was a contentious climate for Black troops. After serving honorably for two tours, Conley got into an altercation with a white superior who used a racial slur, and he was given a dishonorable discharge because of it. He spent over 40 years fighting for access to everything from disability compensation for the PTSD that was eating him alive, to a VA home loan he was never able to use to buy a house for his family, to education benefits. He applied multiple times over four decades and was denied.
He started working with Yale Law School several years before BVP got involved and eventually won a case that forced the government to admit he'd actually been suffering from PTSD since the early '70s, meaning he should have had access to benefits all along. But the government only gave him three years of back pay. Using the data we'd helped surface, he's now arguing the government owes him at least a million dollars in damages: for the wealth he never built through a VA home loan, for education benefits he couldn't pass to his children, and for the monthly disability stipend he should have received for being 100% disabled by PTSD, which alone cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars over the decades. His father, also a World War II veteran who served honorably, never got access to the GI Bill either, so there's a generational compounding of harm the case is trying to illuminate. It's been in the courts for almost three years now, and last year it crossed a major threshold: surviving a motion to dismiss, something very few, if any, reparations-oriented cases have done. It's now in active discovery, where the government has to be more forthright about its data, though this administration hasn't been especially forthcoming. It's moving toward becoming the first race-based class action for Black veterans addressing the history of benefit obstruction.
Richard Zimmerman: What's BVP's role in all of that?
Richard Brookshire: We helped conceptualize the case and build it with Yale. We've led the data collection and storytelling collection, essentially serving as the narrative engine, while also organizing the community. A few years ago we helped build a coalition of Black veterans groups nationwide, which was a valuable learning experience, and we've since shifted to building our own membership cohort as the litigation moves forward. Since Yale is leading that case, we've also started working with Harvard Law School's legal services center and a few other firms to think about a broader litigation strategy, testing different cases to see if we can set a precedent for repair.
There's also been a policy piece: a bill called the GI Bill Restoration Act, which we championed with the coalition we built, that would give descendants of Black World War II veterans access to VA home loans and education benefits, a form of restitution for the harm caused to their families. It would cost around $70 billion, which sounds like a lot, but we spent $100 billion in a single month on a pointless war a couple of months ago, and we're a few weeks into the conflict with Iran, spending close to a billion dollars a day. We have the money to solve this. We're just making excuses for why we don't.
Chapter 4: Building a Movement
Richard Zimmerman: That's clearly a lot of work, and it seems like you're also building a community around it. What's your vision there?
Kyle Bibby: That comes down to the organizing and membership work we want to do on the advocacy side. Regardless of what happens with the lawsuit or the policy, it's worth it for us just to tell the story. We joked about this at the retreat: people show up excited about the Black Veterans Project, and a few minutes in they'll ask, so what exactly do you do? There's still a real desire among Black veterans to just be in community, the way anyone seeks community. Beyond the trauma, there's something meaningful in the shared experience of having served and having people to reflect with. So when we show up in these spaces, even if people don't fully understand our mission at first, they're glad there's a place for them.
Richard Zimmerman: Like-minded affinity.
Kyle Bibby: Exactly. From there it's easier to organize them, and they're more willing to share their stories, which we can direct toward the work.
Richard Zimmerman: Are you building a communication platform for that, something online, or more in-person gatherings?
Kyle Bibby: Over the next year or so, as we grow, we want to have national calls and go beyond what we've done so far, which has mostly been some newsletter work and events here and there in DC. We did a special event in Holly Springs, Mississippi, as a test case for going into communities, connecting with veterans, hearing their concerns, and collecting their stories to support the lawsuit. Our intent over the next few years is to build a national presence with regional organizers who can build that level of community, some of it layered on top of existing veteran infrastructure. I lived in Jersey City for a while and used to go to a predominantly Black VFW post there with a lot of history. The guys there were interested in our work too, but they already have their own network, so a lot of what we're building will tie into that existing infrastructure. What we add is the fight for restitution and the work of collecting and archiving the history.
Richard Zimmerman: When people get involved and start learning about the lawsuit and the broader push for systemic change, do they also come to you with personal needs? Do you refer them elsewhere?
Kyle Bibby: We do get that a lot, since people often show up without fully understanding the scope of the project, which is part of what we were working on this week: making sure our resources are clear when people come to the website. We get emails every week about individual cases people need help with. We have to explain that we're not a veterans service organization and don't work individual cases, but if someone's interested in our litigation, we can help with that, and otherwise we point them to other resources.
Richard Brookshire: There's no shortage of places to get help, and we've built enough relationships over the years that it's easy to point people in the right direction. As for membership, we're trying to catalyze a movement among Black veterans and their families, but we're also thinking about mobilizing Americans more broadly. Anyone can become a member of BVP, because we want to break down the idea that this history belongs only to us. Some of our biggest champions may end up being white veterans, or families that benefited from the GI Bill, who can speak to what that benefit meant for their own families and help bring their neighbors along.
Richard Zimmerman: Or people who aren't Black but have hit their own walls along the way and can relate for their own reasons.
Richard Brookshire: Absolutely.
Chapter 5: The Retreat, the Vision, and What's Next
Richard Zimmerman: Tell us about the week here. What did you come in hoping to work on, and did it turn out that way?
Richard Brookshire: Our work is quite ambitious and expansive. Most of it has happened over the last seven years, six of which were part time, on top of whatever jobs we had. Last year, given the political moment and the momentum we'd built with the legal cases, we decided it was time to scale the organization fully. We've been working at that for the past year; we actually just passed the one-year anniversary of going full time last March. Being here has been the culmination of years of thinking about how to build a narrative hub more formally. Most of our narrative work up to now has been working closely with reporters, being in the news, making sure conversations about Black veterans and inequality stay in focus, and offering our perspective on issues that affect all troops regardless of race.
We spent almost three months laying the strategy with the team, and Yolanda, our creative producer, who's been with us over a year, is the one who found the Foundation House opportunity and applied. Once we found out we'd gotten in, a few months ago, we started planning. We wanted to focus specifically on the narrative work, the storytelling and cultural production that will play out over the next five years. That's what we spent most of our time here discussing: a broad overview of what BVP is trying to accomplish organizationally, with real focus on narrative strategy, creative projects, how we work with artists and writers to produce material that can shift the public's imagination toward the case for reparations, and how we go about collecting the narratives themselves. Right now there are about 250 people actively participating in different forms of litigation, many of them waiting for the Monk case to become a class action, but there could be tens of thousands mobilized over the next two years as the litigation moves forward.
Richard Zimmerman: Getting set up to meet that moment.
Richard Brookshire: Exactly, and being prepared for it programmatically. We came up with nine streams of work that will unfold over the next five years.
Richard Zimmerman: So five years from now, what's happened?
Kyle Bibby: We'll have a fully stood-up membership model: affiliates who generally support our work, advocates we've trained and invested in to take the story to the community and bring stories back from it, and a staff building out the multimedia products we want to produce, whether that's a newspaper or a documentary mini-series. I think we'll be at a place where people in the veterans space know about our project and understand our goals, and ideally elected officials will have started forming commissions or plans. That said, we have no illusions that five years is an aggressive timeline. There's a past lawsuit for Black farmers that took around 20 years, and we're about three years in. There's a high probability that in five years, Richard and I will be looking at who leads the organization next and carries the membership and the work forward.
Richard Brookshire: Over the next five years there will be a proliferation of narratives that help shape the public's understanding of this history. But we can't escape the political moment we're in and the threats to democracy happening right now. We see reparations work as reparative for the country as a whole, work the country will have to do after this moment, but it also has to contend more honestly with its racialized past, something it's only done in superficial ways so far. There's never been a real federal reparative effort for a legacy that goes back not just to Jim Crow but to slavery, and the area most ripe for legal reckoning is the decades of racial apartheid this country has never adequately addressed.
Richard Zimmerman: A lot of healing still to do.
Richard Brookshire: Yes. But we think it's possible. Hopefully in five years we've moved past this political moment, though we all have to be part of making that happen.
Richard Zimmerman: Learn from it, heal, and redesign.
Richard Brookshire: And redesign. We hope the narratives of repair are part of that process.
Richard Zimmerman: This has been so inspiring, learning about BVP and your team. We're really fortunate you were here.
Richard Brookshire: Thank you for the space. It's a special place, and we got a lot of productive work done. We hope to come back.
Richard Zimmerman: Please do, and not just for this. Come back for anything we're doing regularly, and tell other groups about us too. We're doing residencies and convenings, and some residencies are turning into convenings. We have a group coming up for their second gathering; it started with a focus on men's mental health two years ago and has grown into something closer to a global movement around mental health more broadly. They're doing a retreat here, and we're hosting a showcase for them. You two should think about plugging into things like that as well, so we can keep doing this work together and help spread the word.
Richard Brookshire: That's wonderful. Thank you for the generosity of spirit.
Richard Zimmerman: This made my day, and my weekend. Thanks so much.
Richard Brookshire: Thank you for the thoughtful questions.
Kyle Bibby: Thank you for having us.
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