We Interview: Call of Duty Endowment President Dan Goldenberg

If you don’t know anything about the Call of Duty Endowment, it’s about time you did. This organization is usually recognized by their abbreviation, C.O.D.E., and most players see that on packs in the Call of Duty in-game store. They’re about more than just a few skins and weapon blueprints however, as C.O.D.E. is a driving force behind employment for our nation’s veterans. At Call of Duty: NEXT, we had the opportunity to sit down with President Dan Goldenberg to talk about what C.O.D.E. does, along with the reveal of this year’s DLC.

Our first question regarded how the Endowment started. Back in 2009, the Call of Duty brand was ascending. Activision had a strong desire to give back to those who were the inspiration for the games, our veterans. While there were some government programs in place to assist veterans in certain areas, those just weren’t working.

Activision had a discipline in place called Narrow and Deep, where they focus on something and drop resources into understanding it to be successful with it. The focus that came in these meetings was “How can we use that discipline in this social impact area with veteran employment?”. It took some time, but in 2013 they were able to conduct root cause analysis to find out what services were correlated to helping veterans land good job outcomes.

This led the team to interview practice and help with resumes. Working with high quality non-profit organizations, they developed a methodology called the Seal of Distinction in order to find the best ones and fund them effectively. These weren’t the most known charities, but were ones that put their heads down and did great work. In partnering with these organizations, the Endowment was able to help these nonprofits to identify high performers that could do the work of helping these vets.

From there, it’s been a steady climb. In the first four years of the Endowment’s existence, they placed a thousand vets in new jobs, and since then, they’re over 130,000. Not only that, today they’re doing it at 1/20th the cost of the federal government’s efforts, which is their secret sauce.

Get swagged out and support veterans with the latest Call of Duty Endowment merch. 🔥

Check it out: https://t.co/t9sxPFYAf1 pic.twitter.com/43hQ1PX4y7

— Call of Duty Endowment (@CODE4Vets) July 12, 2024

While what the Endowment does is good, a lot of people are hesitant when interacting with charitable organizations due to misunderstanding the work they do. That was the point of emphasis on our next question, “What don’t people realize or understand about what the Endowment does?”

Dan had two different answers here, one at the beginning and another later in our discussion. The first was about people’s assumption that the government will take care of it all. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Penn State has data that tells us that there’s a very high combined underemployment and unemployment percentage rate amongst veterans. Veterans are much more likely to be underemployed, working beneath their skill sets, education, and experience. This means they’re grabbing any job possible as opposed to the right job.

This shows that the government programs aren’t working, but the Endowment’s involvement has helped. They’ve been able to be twenty times more cost effective, while producing more quality outcomes. The nonprofit sector has proven to be in a better position to do this job, and it’s great that they’re doing so. The number one service veterans ask for is employment and, even with the federal government’s budget spent on veterans, less than one tenth of a percent goes towards that employment. Given the Endowment’s grantees placed half of the number of vets in jobs as the government did in the last year for a fraction of the cost, it’s indicative of how important the Endowment is to this cause.

One of the funding sources for the Endowment are the packs that release every year alongside the new game and throughout the life-cycle of the live service. This was another misconception that Dan cleared up; when they say 100% of the proceeds go towards placing veterans in jobs, they mean it. Activision actually covers the Endowment’s operating expenses, so when that pack comes out and the store takes its cut, every bit left over goes to helping put veterans in jobs.

This year’s pack is co-created by ThruDark, a high performance clothing brand founded by British military veterans. That brought us to another question, “Does the Endowment craft these packs, or do the devs pitch ideas? Does it fall in the middle?”

In Dan’s experience, it’s generally a collaborative process. Sometimes they have a fun idea, and other times the devs will wake up thinking of something interesting for a pitch. No matter who comes up with the idea, they work together to build it all out.

With Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 coming up, the Endowment decided to work together with ThruDark for the upcoming Endeavour Tracer pack. Not only is the pack itself going to help the Endowment, but ThruDark is even working on bringing the apparel featured in the pack to their real life store. A portion of those proceeds will also go to the Endowment, continuing the tradition of these unique ways we see Call of Duty supporting a great cause.

To finish out our interview, we wanted to hear from Dan on any particular stories from the Endowment’s efforts that have resonated specifically with him. He said he had a bunch, but provided just one. There was an Army infantryman who had been in an explosion in Afghanistan and had no idea what to do with his life from there. He was a typical infantryman and unfortunately had the mindset of “I’m just a doorkicker, who would want to hire me?”.

The Endowment team went to work, with the grantees getting him to take his experience and make it work for him, asking him about what he did in his unit but translating it into a language employers would like to hear. After all, these skills are applicable to civilian jobs, but not everyone knows how to relay that to a potential employer.

Thankfully, after some time with one of the Endowment teams, they were able to get him some training in IT after finding out his affinity for computers. He quickly got a job, and almost immediately his employer saw his leadership potential. Suddenly, this young infantryman was leading other IT professionals, and continued to grow in his field. Even better, he paid forward his experience, working to hire other veterans alongside him and to his team. This is just one of 130,000 stories of job placements through the Call of Duty Endowment, something the entire organization should be proud of.

Here at GamingTrend, you’ll see plenty of posts about news coming from the Call of Duty Endowment. We urge you to please read them, support the cause (go to www.callofdutyendowment.org), and if you want to watch the 2024 CODE Bowl presented by USAA, you can watch it above. We ourselves make sure to purchase the packs that release, because someone somewhere will be helped by our contributions. Make sure you plan to pick up the Endeavour Tracer Pack when Black Ops 6 launches. Thank you Dan for taking the time to sit down with us and tell us about this amazing organization that’s doing wonderful things for our veterans.

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