HER Stories: Lynette Voss leads 50th Eastern Iowa Honor Flight

This story first appeared in HER Stories - Spring 2024, a biannual special section distributed by The Gazette that features stories of Eastern Iowa women who have experienced powerful paths of achievement for themselves, their families and their communities.

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Lynette Voss is a veteran serving veterans.

Voss currently serves as the president of the Eastern Iowan Honor Flight and is the current recipient of The Gazette’s Outstanding Community Leadership Award.

Just a few weeks ago, the Eastern Iowa Honor Flight took its 50th trip to Washington, D.C. with local veterans, and Voss was thrilled to be celebrating the milestone with the organization. For the past several years, Voss has been instrumental in ensuring the Eastern Iowa Honor Flights truly take flight.

“The Eastern Iowa Honor Flight’s mission is to take veterans to Washington, D.C. to see the memorials that were built in their honor,” Voss said. “My pitch has always been that a lot of these veterans have never received a thank you for the service that they've provided, whether they were state side or whether they fought in combat. Any veteran who signs their name on that contract is basically giving the government their life until their enlistment is over. I think regardless of the veteran’s history in the military or where they served, they deserve the recognition for what they have done.”

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Voss said between 90-100 veterans are on each flight, depending on how many veterans bring along a guardian or buddy for the day. The entire organization is volunteer driven, and all veterans participate free of charge. Voss has helped make each flight a reality since she started volunteering with the organization in 2017.

“A board member at the time talked with me about the organization, and I first went to volunteer at one of the orientation meetings before a flight where we share all the information with the veterans and their guardians. And I just immediately knew that this was something I really wanted to get more involved in,” she said.

Voss started attending the board meetings and then filled in an opening for a flight coordinator role, which lead to essentially being the organization’s orientation coordinator.

“I did that for about a year,” she said. “I've always kind of been the type of person who kind of likes to know how things work behind the scenes and how other things are done, so then I was just helping out wherever I could. Well, then the veterans coordinator position became available.”

Today, Voss still serves as the assistant veterans coordinator while also serving on the board for the past four to five years.

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She was elected president of the board in January of this year and is excited about all that is ahead for the organization.

“I just picked up some new responsibilities, and I’m just having a great time being able to serve the veterans and utilize some of my organizational skills to help in other areas,” Voss said.

“The most rewarding part is obviously [the] day of flight, or even orientation, and just experiencing that day with the veteran,” she added. “For many of them, it is closure … I love to watch the camaraderie of the day. You get these veterans talking to other veterans and developing new relationships and telling stories and finding so many coincidences, [like] finding out they were in the same place at the same time. There’s total excitement and joy that we're able to provide to the veterans. You can just see their face light up.”

Connie Arens, one of the organization’s board members and a fellow veteran, said it’s exciting to have a female leading the Eastern Iowa Honor Flight and to have it be someone so dynamic and dedicated.

“Lynette involves the whole community in whatever she does for veterans. Veterans are everything to her,” Arens said, noting that Voss herself being a veteran brings another level of understanding to the importance of what the organization strives to do.

Board advisor Roger Uthoff agreed.

“Lynette is the kind of person that it has a lot of empathy for veterans. As a veteran herself, she gives her insight into the feelings of a veteran and what a veteran has gone through. But she is also an organizer. She has the ability to assign the right people to the right place at the right time to get things done.”

Uthoff, who has traveled on about 40 of the flights and is one of the original founders of Eastern Iowa Honor Flight, has worked with several presidents of the organization.

“Lynette is just very personable and easy to get along with and organized, and those are the marks of a good leader,” he said.

Voss served in the Navy Reserves, and it doesn’t get lost on her that being a strong female leader was important then and continues to be important today.

“When I was in the Navy Reserves, during that time, women in the military were really beginning to expand,” she said. “I think for women, we just need to be able to encourage and influence each other in a way where we can advance and slowly improve the way we are seen within society and the capabilities women are able to exhibit. I think that being a female leader helps to empower other women to step up or maybe even get the courage to take a little bit more initiative. I just really believe in women supporting women.”

Beyond volunteering her time with the Eastern Iowa Honor Flight, Voss is also very involved with her church and has been for decades, teaching classes for adults or youth of the church community. She has also volunteered with Junior Achievement of Eastern Iowa, a nonprofit organization that aims to inspire and prepare young people to succeed in the global economy.

“I really just enjoy helping other people, and I'm not used to receiving recognition for it,” she said. “I really like being behind the scenes.”

While the most recent flight was just a few weeks ago and included several special features as an anniversary flight — including participation from the founder of the Eastern Iowa chapter and the founder of the national organization — Voss doesn’t plan to let her or the community’s enthusiasm for the program dwindle.

“We have a great foundation to continue to grow upon,” she said. “I think reaching this 50th flight, we have flown over 4,300 veterans to Washington, D.C. … I have no doubt that we will continue to have flights, and maybe we’ll hit that 75th goal. With the foundation that we have and the group that we have, we're just going to continue to be able to grow and continue to serve veterans with this opportunity.”

“We have over 700 veterans on our waitlist,” Voss added. “So, you know, when we only take 90 to 100 at a time … that list continues to grow. So we are not done yet. And that’s exciting, because we continue to bring in new volunteers to provide new ideas and new ways to improve or reach our veterans.”