Gary Sinise is a beloved actor and humanitarian known for his exceptional contributions both on and off the screen. With a prolific career spanning decades, Sinise has earned critical acclaim for many film roles, including his role as Lieutenant Dan in "Forrest Gump" and as Detective Mac Taylor in the popular TV series "CSI: NY." However, his impact extends far beyond Hollywood. In 2011, he founded The Gary Sinise Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting veterans, first responders, and their families. Through various initiatives, the foundation provides vital services, including but not limited to housing assistance, mental health support, and adaptive technology for wounded veterans. Gary Sinise's unwavering commitment to honoring and assisting those who have sacrificed for their country has made him a respected and devoted advocate for veterans and first responders' well-being.
Gary's memoir, Grateful American: From Self To Service tells the story of how he found his true calling in life. GarySiniseFoundation.org
Why did you start the foundation?
GS: Beginning with the veterans in my own family. When I met my wife, not my wife at the time, but when I met her, she introduced me to her brothers who had both served in Vietnam. And her sister was in the Army and she married a Vietnam veteran who was in the Army. And they had a son who was in the Army. And my side of the family, lots of veterans, World War I, World War II, Korea era, so lots of veterans in the family.
I actually started getting involved in supporting local Vietnam veterans groups in the Chicago area back in the early eighties. And that was because I was impacted by my wife's two brothers and her sister's husband. And I got to know them, and I started talking to them and picking their brains about what it was like to serve in Vietnam and come home to a difficult situation in the country where the country was really turning its back on our Vietnam veterans. I really was curious about all that.
I realized in getting to know them, that while they were serving in Vietnam and going through all the hardships there and the difficulties and the challenges, I was pretty much oblivious, even though I would see it on the news every night. I was just playing my guitar and chasing girls around and doing plays. And so, I started to feel somewhat guilty, and that's when I started to think I want to do something for our Vietnam veterans. So I started supporting them locally in Chicago. And those were the early seeds that grew in the nineties when I played a Vietnam veteran in Forrest Gump and started working with our wounded.
There's a chapter in my book, Grateful American, called Turning Points, and it really is the September 11th chapter, as it reflects on how I view the eighties and nineties as just teeing up something that would take full flight after September 11th into a full-time service mission.
Did you feel that services for veterans were lacking?
GS: It wasn't that I felt that they were lacking. I wanted to help by getting involved in a lot of the different nonprofits that were in the military and veteran and first responder support community. So I would just raise my hand and say, "Do you need me to do a fundraiser for you? Do you need me to do a PSA? Can I help you with your mission?" And that's one of the ways that I found I could do a lot more was by getting involved with a lot of nonprofits.
I got involved with maybe 25 or 30 different military support organizations. And by doing that, I really saw where the needs were, because a lot of them were involved in different types of things. Some were helping our wounded service members, some were helping our firefighters, some were helping our Gold Star children, and I was just spreading myself all over the place. I found a lot of people were involved in trying to do something positive. And so, it just became clear to me, at a certain point, that the next step for me in this journey was going to be starting my own nonprofit. It wasn't that I thought there was a shortage of nonprofits out there in the military world. There are thousands of them, big ones and small ones. But I knew that I could play a role. I'd seen lending my services to these other nonprofits as being effective in helping them. And I thought, 'I'm just going to continue that by creating my own.'
What went into your decision to move it to the Nashville area?
GS: Well, different things. I've lived in California since 1987. I started thinking there might be a different state in the future. So I was looking at all those no tax states. I'm used to California. It's hard to beat the weather out here. That's what's kept us here for so long. And of course, we raised our kids here.
I have a bunch of friends in the Nashville area, in the music business and the movie business. A buddy of mine said, "You know what? We're moving our business out to Nashville. We're leaving California." And I had been thinking about Nashville. So I said to my daughter, "If I said I wanted to move to Tennessee, to the Nashville area, what would you say?" And she's got three little ones. So I needed to know that she was on board, because we weren't going to leave if she didn't want to. We weren't going to leave her and the babies, right? Plus her husband works for my foundation. He's a wonderful guy. He's one of the directors at my foundation, and the foundation is based here {in California}. And so that night, after I mentioned that to her, she went online and she sent me like six different houses to look at, and she said, "Dad, look what you could get." She was all excited.
And then my other daughter, I'd been trying to get her to move back to California. She went to college in Washington, DC and she was living there. She got married and I was trying to get her to move back here {to California}, and she didn't want to. So I said to her, "I talked to your sister about the idea of maybe moving to Tennessee. Would you do that?" And she said, "Yes, I would do that."
With both of our daughters on board, I then went to my board of directors and said, "Guess what? I'm going to leave California and move to the Nashville area, and that means the foundation is going to go too." So we ended up moving the foundation before we left. We're still here in California. We've had some complications that have kept us here, but we're getting ready to move. But my daughters and their husbands are all there.
You mentioned your son-in-law. Are your girls or other family members involved in the foundation as well?
GS: Both my daughters' husbands work for the foundation. My son worked for the foundation for a while, but he couldn't do it anymore. And my nephew worked for the foundation for a while. In fact, when we moved from Woodland Hills to Nashville, my nephew was working for the foundation. He's a two tour Afghanistan veteran. He was in the Army for 13 years. And he moved with the foundation. And then, you know what? I got a call from him not too long after he moved there. He said, "Uncle G, I love working for the foundation, but I think I want to be a police officer. I'm going to go to the academy in Nashville." And he just graduated from the academy and he's a police officer in the Nashville metro area. I'm very proud of him. He's serving the community there.
Where do you see the foundation in five years?
GS: The foundation is always going to be driven by the need. I've said this multiple times to our leadership team and to the board. A lot of times they will look at the growth of a foundation based on the amount of money that comes in, and what level you want to be at a certain point, or something like that. I don't really look at it that way. I want to always be able to expand our services depending on where we see we could be beneficial to somebody. The mission statement is broad. We operate in a lot of different areas, and that's because that's what I was doing before the foundation. Like I said, I was supporting multiple different nonprofits doing a lot of different types of things. So I wanted to continue doing that, but I wanted to create an entity that actually that the public could support.
Because people were asking me all the time, "Where should I donate and who should I donate to? I want to help the kids, and I want to help the wounded, and the police... And so, I would point them to all these different organizations and everything. And then I thought, 'Well, I'll just create something that's operating in all those spaces.' We'll take those resources in. I'll be able to hire people to actually work full-time to expand the mission. I'm just one guy going out there volunteering my time, and I wanted to do more. And building a team and an army whose full-time job it is to carry out this mission is what I wanted to do. And that's where I see the foundation continuing to grow. I'd like it to dig its heels in and have a strong base for many years to come and be able to expand where we see the needs as they grow and change.
Let's talk about the Lieutenant Dan Band, 13 members. How did you put all those guys together? That's a lot of guys that have to travel with you!
GS: It was very grassroots. I played when I was a kid and played music through high school. Then I got very involved with acting and starting a theater company. I stopped playing and just focused on acting and building the theater company for a long time. But then in the late nineties, I just started jamming around again with some guys in Chicago. And when I would come to town, I'd call them up and we'd get together and play a little music. In 1997, I did a movie up in Montreal and there were some guys that played. And we ended up playing in a club. I started to get back in the music again.
And then September 11th happened, and I started going on USO tours. I would go just as Gary Sinise, the actor, and shake hands and take pictures and sign autographs and visit with the troops and that kind of thing. And on some of those tours, there were entertainers. In the great spirit of Bob Hope, there were singers and rockers and people that were performing. And having a little garage band that I would get together with every once in a while and play, I pitched that to the USO and said, "Hey, would you let me take some musicians on a tour?" And they said, yes. And I thought, 'Well, I'll just call it Gary Sinise and the Lieutenant Dan Band. People know who Lieutenant Dan is. That was 20 years ago. Since then, I think we just played our 550th concert.
How can people get involved with your foundation?
GS: We operate all over the country. We have chapters. We have a chapter in Florida. We have a chapter in San Diego. We're expanding, going to create some additional chapters in different cities around the country. You can certainly donate. You can learn about the foundation and visit our YouTube channel.
Are you still acting these days? Do you have any acting projects coming up?
There's one project I'm involved with if it gets off the ground, and I think it will eventually. I'm an executive producer on it. And eventually, I'll do something. The last thing I did was before the pandemic. In 2022, I've just been focused on the foundation and family business. But I'm not out of the business. I just haven't been doing anything right now. I've been focusing on the mission of the Gary Sinise Foundation and getting us moved from California to Nashville.