From Uniform to Community: How California’s Veterans Are Stepping Into Leadership
By Nick Busse · June 26, 2026
Across California, veterans are trading the uniform for a seat at the table. They are filling council rooms, running organizations, and walking the halls of the Capitol. It is a quiet but unmistakable sign of something larger: service members are completing their transition to civilian life and carrying their ethic of service straight into the civic fabric of the state. They are not stepping back. They are stepping in, and they are becoming part of California’s future rather than a chapter in its past.
The clearest signal came this year from Sacramento. For the first time in state history, a bipartisan group of veteran legislators formed the California Legislative Veterans Caucus. Its co-chairs, Senator Caroline Menjivar and Assemblymember Jeff Gonzalez, are both Marine Corps veterans, and the caucus draws members from three branches of service. Among them is Senator Shannon Grove, an Air Force veteran and the first female veteran ever elected to the California Legislature. These are people who once answered to a chain of command and now write the laws. Their stated focus is squarely on the issues driving veterans out of the state, namely the cost of housing and childcare, and on keeping those who served rooted in the communities they came home to.
That leadership is already producing results. As the 2025 legislative session closed, veterans secured a string of meaningful wins. California enacted its first-ever state tax exclusion for military retirement and Survivor Benefit Plan income, up to $20,000 a year, a change expected to put money back into the pockets of roughly 130,000 veterans and surviving spouses. A new Master Plan for Career Education will translate military training into civilian credit, opening faster pathways into the workforce. And AB 2022 is on the move to its last committee before.a floor vote — a vote that can lead to cutting disabled veteran property tax in half. Each of these started as a priority championed by people who had served.
The pattern repeats at every level of the state. Standing committees on military and veterans affairs in both the Assembly and Senate are chaired and staffed by members who understand the community from the inside. The Governor’s Military Council works to protect the state’s installations and its military mission. County Veterans Service Offices, locally funded and often veteran-staffed, sit in nearly every county to connect service members with the benefits they earned. This is what an embedded community looks like: not a population waiting to be served, but one organizing to serve itself and its neighbors.
The momentum is broadening, too. Women are now the fastest-growing segment of the veteran population, climbing from roughly 7 percent of veterans in 2010 to nearly 11 percent today. California-born organizations such as the Women Veterans Alliance have built the networks, conferences, and peer support that did not exist a generation ago, and women veterans are increasingly the ones leading the conversation about how care and representation should evolve.
None of this happens automatically. The same 2025 session offered a sobering reminder: on one major veteran-protection bill, lawmakers reported hearing from only 134 veterans while opponents spent half a million dollars lobbying. Leadership in council chambers and caucus rooms means little without the grassroots voices behind it. The veterans stepping into formal roles are building the structure. The wider community has to fill it.
Still, the direction is unmistakable. California’s veterans are no longer simply transitioning out of service. They are transitioning into civic life, into leadership, and into the long work of shaping the state they chose to stay in. If this is the kind of reporting you want more of, subscribe to Veterans of California and share it with someone who served.