Laurie Ott explains current issues facing wounded warriors during a committee roundtable discussion session. Fort Gordon’s garrison commander recognized one of the many community partnerships the installation has on June 29.

“This is in recognition of all Laurie has done,” said Col. Glenn Kennedy, who presented Laurie Ott the Department of Army Commander’s Award for Public Service at a luncheon at the Hull-Storey-Gibson building in Augusta.

Ott is the executive director of the Central Savannah River Area Wounded Warrior Care Project, an organization, she founded in 2007. Ott was a local news anchor in Augusta for 13 years, and she left the position after covering a story about Spc. Crystal Davis, a Camden, S.C. native wounded by an improvised explosive device during a route clearing mission in Iraq 2006. Davis had part of her right leg amputated.

“It’s a privilege to accept this,” said Ott. “I have a lot of work to do to deserve this.”

The CSRA Wounded Warrior Care Project has developed several partnerships and programs to enrich the lives of returning Soldiers.

The organization formed a research consortium on traumatic brain injury in collaboration with Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center, the Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center, the Medical College of Georgia and its school of nursing, Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center- South at Fort Gordon and Savannah River National Laboratory.

The organization has assisted with marriage enrichment workshops for members of the Warrior Transition Battalion.

Also, it has worked with the Georgia Department of Labor, VA medical center and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Veterans Curation Project, which has provided job training for veterans in the cataloguing of archaeological artifacts the Corps has collected.

There are three Veterans Curation Project centers in the nation including the one in Augusta. The project received the President’s Council on Historic Preservation Chairman’s Award in December 2009.

In addition, Ott and her organization have regular roundtable committee meetings which bring together officials from Fort Gordon’s Warrior Transition Bn., the VA medical center, the Georgia Department of Labor and other community organizations to help address the needs of the Wounded Warrior.

Kennedy said that organizations such as Ott’s are important.

Congressional funding of programs benefiting military families are “feast or famine,” he said. “Congressional budgets are a way of life.”

Lasting programs happen because of partnerships with the community.

“We have to find ways to get out and get embraced in the community,” he said.