Veterans Affairs committee  We were far from national interconnectivity between the community hubs, but we have set up MOUs and partnerships with AmericaServes and America's Warrior Partnership, which are two of the larger community hub programs that represent about 24 different communities collectively. We

Veterans Affairs committee  Absolutely, and our new GI Bill.... In the old GI Bill you had to spend it within 10 years. Now it doesn't have a ceiling in terms of time frame, but the money does have a limit. If I serve 48 months, or four years, in the army, for example, I am only eligible for 36 months of sc

Veterans Affairs committee  Absolutely. I think it's a question of educating employers on the value of hiring veterans and on the skills that we bring and showing that if combat and operational stress is an issue, it's acute, typically, not chronic, and that we can make it more acute and less chronic the fa

Veterans Affairs committee  We originally went in very punky about it. We have these terms like API, and all these data and technology terms; we have to make sure the APIs measure up. One dumb marine infantry guy came into the room, and he asked why we didn't open an account with one community hub and an ac

Veterans Affairs committee  There's a nice way of answering that. I think at the highest levels of the bureaucracy at the defence department that hasn't been achieved yet, unfortunately, so we took it upon ourselves to bring industry, the credentialing body, and the U.S. Army Engineer School for the constru

Veterans Affairs committee  That's a fantastic question. It's a huge dilemma for our public organizations that serve veterans. Fortunately, within the system there are some extremely.... Particularly the Military Veteran Peer Network is a state-wide initiative that specifically goes to rural communities to

Veterans Affairs committee  It's no different here. The VA doesn't provide employment services. That's the one major difference. The VA does provide some housing services, but a lot of that's grant-based to NGOs. The VA likes to indirectly fund a lot of community-based organizations to deliver the services.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's a great question. In fact, the marketing campaign is one way. That's only going to touch maybe a quarter of the veteran population that's transitioning into Houston. The best way though is word of mouth, what we call in the Marine Corps the lance corporal underground or in

Veterans Affairs committee  The integrated technology system I referred to is based on Salesforce.com, which is a Fortune 500 client relationship management tool, a cloud-based system in which every organization has an account, so whenever they receive a referral as an organization via employment services o

Veterans Affairs committee  The competition for limited resources is always going to be a barrier for many smaller non-governmental organizations that are serving an at-risk population. But typically, as I mentioned earlier, the KPMG tool that we asked them to develop, which vetted the organizations on the

Veterans Affairs committee  Do you mean the number of veterans who work in the NGOs and government agencies or the number of veterans coming through the system?

Veterans Affairs committee  That's a good question. Here locally we have some nationwide organizations that have a regional presence, which have anywhere from four to eight people. The VA, of course, is a massive organization. It has an entire hospital here. It has a lot of veterans who work for it and a lo

Veterans Affairs committee  The veterans who receive services—and we have now 1,200 clients year to date, and we're probably going to hit closer to 2,500 before year end, because this is a busy time of year—are able to go in and rate their experience. This is something I didn't mention before, so thank you

Veterans Affairs committee  Absolutely. There's a lot of data that we can't access when we refer to the Veterans Health Administration that is operated by the VA—all the VA health systems. What we can see, though, is what is reported on the back end of that to Congress, showing how effective our local hosp

Veterans Affairs committee  Well, we're always the best. Isn't that right?