Our mission
The next generation deserves the real history.
Echoes of Service brings the military histories that official records missed, censored, or never thought to keep to the younger generations who have never been given a reason to care, the families still carrying unanswered questions, and the communities whose service has gone unrecognized.
We are historians first. Everything we teach and everything we recover is grounded in the documented record and the testimony of the people who lived it.
What we stand on
Four pillars
Education
Returning recovered histories to younger generations through classroom materials, school visits, and student programs.
Truth
Refusing the simpler version. Including what happened, even when it is complicated. Especially when it is complicated.
Recovery
Finding, reconstructing, and documenting the histories that official records missed, destroyed, or never thought to keep.
Preservation
Depositing every recovered history in a permanent institutional archive, including the Library of Congress Veterans History Project.
For students
Where our work begins
Our first year centers on students. They have been handed a simplified version of military history, and they deserve the real one. We do not assume they already care. We give them a reason to.
In the classroom
A high school curriculum built from primary sources and veteran testimony, asking students to compare what they were taught with what the people who served actually said.
Echoes of Service clubs
Student-led school clubs that take on the work of remembrance directly, from researching a local veteran to caring for the graves of those who served.
Normandy
A student journey to Normandy during the anniversary of D-Day, where the history they have studied becomes a place they can stand in.
For families
The story behind what you inherited
A folded flag. A box of letters. A service record with gaps. Many families hold only fragments of a veteran's story, and want to understand what those fragments mean before they are lost.
Echoes of Service helps families reconstruct that story from the official record, the surrounding evidence, and the accounts of those who served alongside their veteran, and returns it to them as a history they can keep.
You inherited the medals. The story did not come with them.
Recovering the record
The record is incomplete, and it is disappearing.
The veterans of the Second World War are nearly gone. Those who served in Korea and Vietnam are aging. Every year, more of their firsthand accounts are lost for good.
Army and Air Force personnel files, covering service from 1912 to 1964, were destroyed in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. For many families, the official record of a veteran's service no longer exists.
Reconstructing what was lost takes specialized research most families do not know exists. Some service was never fully recorded in the first place. Echoes of Service exists to do that work carefully, and to make sure it lasts.
How we work
The RESTORE Method
Developed through years of military oral history fieldwork, the RESTORE Method follows a history from the first record to its permanent return to the people it belongs to.
- RRecordsWhat the official record contains, and what is missing or destroyed.
- EEvidenceLetters, photographs, unit histories, and accounts that frame the gaps.
- SSettingThe campaigns, places, and policies that shaped a veteran's service.
- TTestimonyOral history interviews, begun only after trust is built.
- OOral NarrativeInterpretation and context, building a record that outlasts the speaker.
- RRemembranceReturning the completed history to the family and community.
- EEnduring ImpactArchiving it, teaching it, and making it permanent and accessible.
Leadership
Our founders
Alicia Richardson
Cofounder and Interpretive Historian
Alicia is a military oral historian whose entire academic career has been spent in this field. She was named a National Collegiate Honors Council Portz Scholar, one of four nationwide, and her master's thesis earned Central Washington University's Comstock Award. She has recorded testimony veterans had never shared with anyone, and works from a relationship-first method that builds trust before a single interview begins.
Annette Eros
Cofounder and Executive Leader
Annette has spent her career leading nonprofits through growth and major institutional partnerships. She has served as CEO of Arctic Ice Project, President and CEO of The Kidney TRUST, and an executive leader at Ronald McDonald House Charities in San Diego and the Bay Area, building and sustaining mission partnerships with McDonald's and DaVita.
Get in touch
Partner with us
We are building partnerships with sponsors, donors, schools, and institutions who believe the complete record matters. We would be glad to talk.
Alicia Richardson
alicia@echoesofserviceusa.org
Annette Eros
annette@echoesofserviceusa.org