Community Hubs
This paper addresses a prevailing view that a lack of coordination, collaboration, and collective purpose among veteran and military-family serving organizations—public, private, and nonprofit—poses a serious risk to long-term veteran and family well-being. The authors show that collective impact, an innovative approach to cross-sector collaboration on complex social problems, presents an opportunity for communities, in partnership with the VA, other government agencies, and private industry, to improve outcomes for veterans, transitioning service members, and their families. In addition, the paper outlines the Institute for Veterans and Military Families’ (IVMF) ongoing collective impact initiative, AmericaServes, and highlights preliminary outcomes from its first pilot network in New York City.
Starting in late 2015, the IVMF research team took a first step to build a database of more than 70 veteran-serving organizational networks, collaborative initiatives, and higher education institutions active in veteran and military family research. Given the evolving nature of collaborative activities across the country, we aim for the database to serve as a ‘living tool’ that (1) facilitates learning and the diffusion of best practices between veteran and military family serving organizations and (2) informs future social science research on community collaboration, public-private partnerships, and network structure and governance on vexing policy challenges that span both organizational and sector boundaries.
AmericaServes is the country’s first coordinated system of public, private, and non-profit organizations working together to serve Veterans, transitioning service-members, and their families.
Their vision is that every service-member, Veteran, and their family can easily access the full range of comprehensive services required to achieve their unique goals, and to provide a first-class service experience to match service-member and Veterans’ first class military service
They work to ensure all public, private, and non-profit organizations serving Military families are accountable to one another and should embrace formalized communication, coordination, and transparency.
State level governments play a pivotal role in allocating resources, setting policy agendas and direct service delivery to veterans. Because services are delivered at the state level, there is significant variance in the level of, and types of services offered, state by state. To date, no comprehensive assessment of state-level departments of Veterans Affairs (DVAs) has been conducted to analyze these differences and identify the challenges and leading practices across the various states. To address this question, the IVMF, with support from the New York State Health Foundation conducted a study of state-level departments of veteran’s affairs.
The transition from military to civilian life presents many challenges for today’s Veterans. Today, the U.S. has been at war for 17 years in the wake of 9/11 terrorist attacks, with 3.5 million Americans having served in post-9/11 conflicts. Over the past century, a patchwork of organizations and services have evolved to support returning veterans and their families.
The Veterans Affairs Department is of course largest and most well-known, but other federal agencies also provide services, including the departments of Defense, Labor, Education, Health and Human Services and the Small Business Administration. States and many localities, along with more than 40,000 veteran-serving nonprofits and other charitable institutions also provide a wide range of services and care.
The reality that multiple federal agencies, along with their state and community partners, play a role in veterans’ successful transition out of the military and into the civilian world makes coordination in service delivery essential. However, such coordination remains a challenge, with the federal VA and its agency partners continuing to face challenges understanding each other’s roles, responsibilities, and community outreach.
The Bob Woodruff Foundation’s (BWF) Assessing and Improving Community Support for Veterans. This white paper analyzes and summarizes the “checkpoints” that were distributed to the Bob Woodruff Foundation’s network of over 100 local partner collaboratives, representing more than 3,000 organizations across the nation. These individual assessments provide local partners a clear picture of how they and their peers are developing, what they can learn from other communities, and which areas for improvement will have the biggest return on investment—that is, the greatest impact on the veterans and military families they serve.
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