When Greg Hillman walks into the Eddy House, he starts with a simple act: learning names.
“There’s this thing called homeless blindness, where people won’t look at homeless people,” said Hillman, a student in the 夜色视频’s School of Social Work. “So I really try and learn names and see people and give them good energy when I can.”
Hillman, a medically retired U.S. Marine Corps veteran, is completing his practicum as a case management intern at Eddy House, a Reno support center for young people ages 18 to 24 experiencing homelessness. His work there goes beyond his practicum: As treasurer of the Undergraduate Student Social Work Association, he helped prepare food and hygiene kits for people in Reno and Sparks.
Hillman’s path to the University was unconventional. A former foster youth who joined the Marine Corps after losing his home, he now uses those experiences to connect with the young people he serves at Eddy House and the veterans he mentors through his nonprofit, .
His classes keep showing him what was missing when he was young. Programs like the University’s Fostering the Pack, which supports former foster youth in college, did not exist when he was younger.
“Every few weeks I learn something,” he said. “These things didn’t exist when I was in foster care.”
Foster care to the Marines
Born and raised in Reno, Hillman grew up without many steady adults. But one stood out: Mr. Paulson, his sixth-grade teacher at Echo Loder Elementary School.
“I think he was the first healthy adult male I’d ever met in my life,” Hillman said.
When Hillman was 15, his grandmother died and his family was evicted. He entered foster care, an experience he remembers as a blur marked by loss. He left behind his belongings and much of the support network he knew.
“You lose all your stuff and kind of your identity,” he said.
A church family later adopted him but asked him to leave at 18.
He was working at a skate shop and sleeping at a friend’s when he met a Marine Corps recruiter. He knew almost nothing about the military.
“I can go have a place to stay and a purpose,” he remembers thinking. “I’m grateful that I went through foster care,” he said. “Now I have a place in my heart that can be the quiet place that someone sits and tells me their story.”
He served more than 11 years, deploying to Afghanistan as an explosive ordnance disposal technician. On his second tour, Hillman helped medical teams triage wounded Afghan civilians, including children and elders.
"Veterans Day is about honoring each other, and I really like that."
“That hurt my heart in a way that I think set me up to learn later that I wanted to serve people who were maybe underrepresented or vulnerable,” he said.
Marines to the classroom
Leaving the Marine Corps in 2016 cost him a big part of his identity. After his medical retirement, Hillman struggled to find a new direction. A Student Veterans of America fellowship in Washington, D.C., focused on purpose and identity, helped him see that his values had shifted from the Marine Corps’ honor, courage and commitment to community, love and service. He changed his major from theater to psychology, and then to social work. The same organization later named him one of 10 national finalists for its 2025 Student Veteran of the Year award.
A lecturer projected live captions during class. Hillman, who is hard of hearing, noticed she did it without being asked. “She kind of set the bar,” he said.
University Faculty have shaped how he wants to practice. In a structural oppression class, lecturer built what she called a “brave space,” where students could disagree and still be kind to one another. Marina Murphy, a former child protective services worker who taught a course on social work with children, projected live captions of her lectures. Hillman, who is hard of hearing, noticed she did it without being asked.
“She kind of set the bar,” he said.
Outside class, Hillman traveled with the school’s first global engagement program in London, where students compared how social services are delivered in England and the United States.
Classroom to community
Hillman often borrows an analogy from social work researcher Brené Brown: Sympathy calls down to someone who has fallen into a hole, while empathy climbs in beside them. He said the program has given him practical tools for that kind of work.
He already puts those tools to work through , the nonprofit he founded to mentor veterans in Reno Municipal Court’s CAMO Court program. In October, he traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to mentor a combat veteran through , a nonprofit that pairs veterans with songwriters to turn their experiences into music.
After graduating, he plans to earn a Master of Social Work, become a licensed clinical social worker and work with families.
“I want to help families build good environments for children as they grow,” he said.
What Veterans Day means
For Hillman, Nov. 11 is about the living.
“Veterans Day is not Memorial Day, so we’re not honoring the dead. We’re honoring each other, and I really like that,” he said.
It’s also a chance to carry what he has lived through, from foster care to Afghanistan, forward in service to others.
