EVETS raises funds for fight against veteran suicide

BEATRICE, Neb. - A crowd of a few hundred circled around the Veterans Club in Beatrice throughout the day Saturday to support the annual fundraiser for EVETS, a nonprofit dedicated to connecting and reintegrating veterans back into their newfound communities. 

“Our mission is ensuring veterans have the help that they need,” Rikki Stege, EVETS’ executive director, said. Whether that’s through other veterans, community members, family, our purpose is getting them the help that they need, because it’s not out there. It’s not on paper once they come back to civilian life.” 

EVETS stands for Eliminating Veteran Suicide Through Service and Education, and through the understanding that veteran suicide is a serious risk, the group strives to connect former military to their communities, and vice versa. They just attained nonprofit status earlier in 2024, and Saturday’s tailgate fundraiser was their third annual. 

“Now our goal is to see just how big we can get,” EVETS president Davin Stege said.  

Saturday’s event featured dozens of vendors, organizations connected to the cause, the Nebraska football and volleyball games aired on a TV out front, and accompaniment from a Lincoln-based rock band, No Drinking on Grounds. Beatrice’s Veterans Club, which is connected to but separate from the work EVETS does, provided the space – a symbol of the direct connection to both the former servicemembers and the southeast Nebraska community they now reside in.  

And EVETS is in many ways a bridge for the veterans and their community. Their biggest event is a series of spring seminars called No Wrong Doors, a continuing education series where medical professionals, educators, business owners, and average citizens learn about how to interact with veterans and guide them towards success, while also teaching the veterans themselves about all the new resources they have available to them.  

In many ways, these programs are a marriage between the veterans and their new community, and literally so for the folks that head up the operation: Davin is a veteran and Rikki is not, and together with their team they work to bring those two groups together permanently.  

“This group is not for me, it’s for them,” Rikki said. “They’ve done so much for us, the least some of us can do is give back and say hey, we are here for you. We can do this together, you can do it on your own, either way. But it’s for them, the ones that did give it all.” 

“We get to go up on stage, play songs that we love with our best friends, night in, night out, because of the things that they [the veterans] have done,” echoed Matt Fox, guitarist for No Drinking on Grounds.  

And speaking of Saturday’s headline act, bands are usually supposed to hit the right notes, but it’s a bonus when the band you chose to play at your event ends up striking a chord with your audience. Even better when the connection to that band really came about by happenstance – or, perhaps, by good fortune.  

No Drinking on Grounds has been performing together since 2020, right around the COVID-19 breakout. They have three albums recorded with more music coming out this year, and the name, which they joke fits perfectly on a flier or a marquee, was inspired by the text on a sign at a bar in Valentine.  

“It makes you look twice,” singer Taylor Staggs said. “It’s silly but we love it. As soon as you see us, it makes sense.” 

Like most people, the band members have some connection to and familiarity with veterans and the military, but nothing direct. They didn’t really even have a direct connection to this event or its organizers, just through social media. But they jumped at the opportunity for the gig, and along with their normal assortment of their takes on classic rock and modern punk songs they included in Saturday’s setlist something that, somehow, perfectly fit the tenor of the event. 

“We did have a couple of things that we’ll be releasing this winter that were very specific to this event, dealing with veteran suicide, suicide in general,” Fox said. “We don’t want people to think that they’re all alone, and by themselves. Look around. Everybody that was here at this event, almost 200 people, are standing here today to stand next to you and say, ‘We want you here. Stay.’” 

The Steges had no idea that would be part of the band’s slate of offerings, and when they performed that track specifically on Saturday evening, there “wasn’t a dry eye in the house.” For an organization like EVETS that is striving to connect their cohort of veterans to the outside world and vice versa, that song specifically was one more example of the universality, the pervasiveness, of the stigma carried by suicide, both for veterans and the people in their newfound communities and homes.