Servant leader Servant leader Servant leader

As the youngest awardee to ever receive the University of Washington’s Distinguished Alumni Veteran Award at 35 years old, Jordan Houghton, ’15, has centered his life around servant leadership. While his military honors include the Purple Heart, Combat Medical Badge and Afghanistan Campaign Medal with Campaign Star, it’s Houghton’s work with grassroots community and veterans that means the most to him.

From coalition-building to rename a local baseball field in honor of a fallen vet with UW connections to the cleaning of 6,000 veterans’ headstones at Evergreen Washelli Cemetery, Houghton’s service both inside and beyond the UW deeply speaks to his commitment to cultivating care for community. “At his core Jordan is a man of service, driven by an unparalleled sense of duty to others,” writes nominator Brandon Green, a former combat medic and peer mentor for the UW’s Office of Student Veteran Life. “He has been recognized multiple times for his unwavering dedication to veterans, his work in bridging the generational gap between different eras of veterans and spearheading initiatives to honor fallen vets and their families.”

Born in Ballard in 1991 and raised in both Hawaii and the Seattle area, Houghton joined the military in 2009 as a way to afford school. He deployed to Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom, serving as a combat medic with the Army with an infantry battalion (5-20 IN) from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. During his service, Houghton provided medical care to American and Afghan personnel and civilians in a challenging combat environment. His deployment was cut short in 2012 when he was injured in an explosion that burst both of his eardrums and left him with inner-ear damage and a traumatic brain injury. During his recovery at the Warrior Recovery Center in Kandahar, he saw how other injured soldiers from his unit were changed by the trauma of war. “I wanted to figure out how I could help them,” Houghton says. “As a medic, I could treat a wound, but I wasn’t sure how to help someone experiencing suicidal thoughts.” When he was released from the Army in 2013, he applied to the UW to study psychology, hoping to continue learning more about trauma and its impacts.

Award nominator A.P.D.G. Everett, ’13, who started his studies at the UW a decade before Houghton, recalled that for years very little existed in support of veterans at the University. “There was effectively nothing. It had to be grown from a nearly empty field into a small patch of growth.” The small Veterans Education Benefits Office processed enrollment forms for student veterans on the third floor of the HUB, a challenging and overwhelming step to getting established at the UW. And that’s where Houghton found himself on his second day at the UW, navigating the paperwork of qualifying for GI Bill benefits, registering for classes and transitioning to civilian life.

By chance that day, the Husky United Military Veterans (HUMV) student group happened to be meeting at the veterans office. The group advocated for the needs of student veterans and helped build relationships among students, faculty, staff and University leadership and invited Houghton to join them. By the end of the year, Houghton had been elected the group’s president, while one of his mentors, Benjamin Wiselogle, ’12, ’16, became vice president. Houghton learned from the results of a 2014 campus-wide assessment that the student veterans community wanted a dedicated space across all of its campuses that could welcome veterans and military-connected collegians. Following in the footsteps of the Q Center, which grew from being an informal LGBTQ+ group into a funded program, Houghton and his team approached the student activities fee committee and submitted a proposal asking for a space and funding for a permanent staff member for veterans. The request was approved and the Office of Student Veteran Life was established in 2015 with its own dedicated director.

After graduating from the UW, Houghton shifted more of his attention toward service in the community, while pursuing his doctorate in counseling psychology at Northwest University. He had started volunteering with the Ballard post of the American Legion, an aging organization that was keen to attract younger members to its ranks. Houghton served the group as an officer but felt drawn to establishing a new post that could facilitate community service projects and center servant leadership as their primary mission. While at the UW, Houghton had developed a rapport with former UW Dean of Arts & Sciences Robert Stacey, whose son had been killed while serving near a region of Afghanistan where Houghton was deployed. In 2017, Houghton proposed and successfully established American Legion Post 206, which is named in honor of Stacey’s son, Marine Sgt. William C. Stacey.

Jordan Houghton currently serves as the interim director of the Office of Student Veteran Life, connecting students with fellow veterans who have transitioned from service to civilian life.

“I first met Jordan when he came to see me in his role as president of the newly formed student group HUMV … to ask what he and the other [HUMV members] might be able to do to help my wife (UW Professor Emeritus Robin Chapman Stacey) and me deal with our loss,” Stacey says. Houghton played an instrumental role in helping to get a Roosevelt-University- Greenlake Little League ball field in Maple Leaf renamed in 2025 to The Will Stacey Fields after a multiyear public campaign that involved persuading Seattle City Council members, the neighborhood council and local residents. By inscribing Will Stacey’s name into the physical landscape where he grew up and played, his community and the land will continue to hold his memory.

Houghton has organized other service projects that memorialize fallen veterans. Throughout 2018 and 2019, Post 206 cleaned and washed veterans’ graves at the Evergreen Washelli Cemetery in North Seattle, including the resting place of a Medal of Honor recipient. William Kenzo Nakamura, who served in the highly decorated 442^nd Regimental Combat Team, attended the UW before joining the military. The cemetery also serves as final resting place for numerous other local Nisei servicemen who fought in the 442^nd.

Houghton was recently appointed interim director of Student Veteran Life at the UW, having served as assistant director for the office since 2019.  “My success is not solely my own,” he says. “I have had the privilege to collaborate and be mentored by amazing individuals throughout my journey. I am grateful for how far we have come as a community at the UW, but the work has only just begun.”