[caption id=“attachment_644” align=“alignright” width=“300” caption=“The Sesame Street/USO Experience visits Fort Belvoir and (l-r) Sloan Gibson, CEO and President of the USO; service member and his daughter; and Gary Knell, President and CEO of Sesame Workshop, enjoyed the show”][/caption]

As Samantha L. Quigley of American Forces Press Service is reporting, the USO will build new Family Centers at both the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, MD, and at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.  We are proud to support our wounded troops and their families in this way.  Below is an excerpt from the report.  Click here to read the full story.

“USO officials plan to build family centers at the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Md., and Fort Belvoir, Va., to continue the USO’s tradition of bringing troops a piece of home.

The project was inspired by the Army Community Services center at Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, said Sloan Gibson, USO Inc. president, who toured the facility in March. He said he got to thinking about construction under way at Bethesda and Fort Belvoir for new military medical facilities and decided the new facilities needed similar centers.

The 25,000 square-foot facility at Bethesda will feature phone banks and computer banks where people can stay in touch with home, as well as places to get together and watch movies and football games and for troops and their families to play video games.

“We want to have a huge kitchen, because we’ve learned from [Brooke] in particular … that that winds up being a real gathering place,” Gibson said. “It’s a very important part of creating that environment that makes people feel very much like they’re at home.”

USO officials also want to include a major training facility, as many of the wounded warriors and their families end up spending months – and sometimes years – at the medical facilities…”