When Bobby Kotick, chief executive of video-game giant Activision Blizzard Inc. and an art supporter, approached Jim Nicholson, the United States secretary of veterans affairs, about opening an arts facility at the West Los AngelesVeterans Affairs building, he got a lukewarm response.

“Bobby, vets don’t need art – they need jobs,” said Nicholson, according to Dan Goldenberg, executive director of Activision’s Call of Duty Endowment, a nonprofit focused on veterans’ employment.

Activision’s board started the endowment, named after Activision’s blockbuster video game, in 2009 to give annual grants to nonprofits across the country that help veterans find jobs. Activision has donated $21 million, plus the cost of overhead and ongoing support, to the endowment. The nonprofits it supports have placed 29,000 veterans in jobs at an average cost of $596 in 2015 compared with the $3,083 spent by the federal government this fiscal year, said Goldenberg, who is a Naval Reserve captain and Harvard Business School graduate.

Although the endowment’s focus is national, it has had a particular impact in Los Angeles County, which has the highest concentration of veterans per capita in the country, according to a spokesman for the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office for Veteran Affairs. There were around 325,000 veterans living in the county in 2014, according to USC.

Last week, Goldenberg appealed to local representatives of companies including Aecom and Amazon.com Inc. on behalf of Mayor Eric Garcetti to join the mayor’s initiative to place 10,000 veterans in jobs by 2017.

Despite the number of employers who say they want to hire vets and the number of veterans looking for jobs, there remains a disconnect, Goldenberg said. The endowment aims to fix the market inefficiency.

“The mayor’s effort is focused more on the demand side, working with the companies,” said Goldenberg. “Our effort is ensuring there’s a supply of job-ready veterans. You can’t have one without the other.”

– Caroline Anderson