I'd like to thank the chair and this committee for inviting me to present again.
. I have been here in the past, and I'm happy to provide an update about the Veterans Transitions Network. This is a network that provides a 10-day program for veterans transitioning out of the military and into the civilian world. It was a program started at the University of British Columbia by Dr. Marv Westwood and Dr. David Kuhl in the Faculty of Education. The program brings veterans together in a group setting and helps them share their stories, ideally integrating some of their experiences, overcoming barriers to transition, and learning how to transition forward despite things like post-traumatic stress disorder.
I came across the program when I returned from Afghanistan myself. I served in a convoy escort platoon in 2008. Our primary job was to guard supply convoys from Kandahar airfield to the different forward operating bases in the Kandahar province. What I can say from my personal experience overseas and my tour is that we did our job, we were well trained for it, but what none of us really expected, including me for sure, was the toll that we would have to witness on the Afghan people from this conflict. In 2008, the biggest risks were the suicide bombings and the improvised explosive devices. Our vehicles were good at that time. We still sustained casualties, but for the most part, when the IEDs were going off, we were not being killed or injured at nearly the same rate as the Afghan army and Afghan civilians were. Having to go through the city and see the devastation and the lack of regard for the women, children, and anyone who happened to be out shopping in the market on the day of an attack was something that stayed with me.
Although we all bunkered down, I was able to continue to do the job, but I did notice when I came back from overseas that I would start to think about those experiences and start to ruminate and wonder if there was anything I could have done differently. There are all sorts of labels out there with post-traumatic stress disorder, operational stress injury. When I was 23 years old, coming back, I didn't understand what any of that stuff was. All that I knew was that I was spending a lot of time and energy thinking about the tour. I remember at one point a girlfriend at the time asked me if there was ever going to be a day when I didn't talk about Afghanistan.
So I was still high functioning; I went back to school to finish my degree. I was transitioning successfully by a certain measure in that I was finishing the degree, moving on into the workforce, yet there was something slightly different. It wasn't until I found the Veterans Transition Network that I really started to realize that there had been an impact and that I could start to open up emotionally again and become more of my old civilian self.
I'll talk just a little bit about the history and the lessons learned from the Veterans Transition Network here in Canada, and hopefully talking about this can help set a model for other organizations that are trying to innovate in this space right now and other organizations that are trying to help out.
Our story really started back in 1997 when the professors came together to address a need of many of the veterans coming back from the former Yugoslavia at that time. They evolved the program at UBC, iterating through different versions, trying what was working, and always evaluating it with academic rigour. The evidence was presented yearly at the CIMVHR conference, the organization that Dr. Alice Aiken runs. The evidence was able to be put up on screens, presented, and challenged by other academic minds, and the program ended up coming to a place where the final product was rolled out in 2012.
I was able to come here to the committee to present the program, and I was extremely excited to see that almost nine months later, after the committee had come out to B.C. to see our program, the Minister of Veterans Affairs took leadership to fund the program nationally. They joined with other partners, primarily the Royal Canadian Legion, whose BC/Yukon Command stepped up with funding, as well as the True Patriot Love Foundation and Wounded Warriors.
To date we've put almost 500 veterans through this program right across the country, actually bringing our clinicians into their communities, running the group-based program, and leaving the veterans with an opportunity to continue supporting each other in a sort of organic way.
This brings me to some of my recommendations for today.
When we talk about transitioning out of the military, there are two very different experiences, from what I found with the graduates of our program. The experience transitioning from the regular force where you're paid full time versus transitioning from the reserve force where you're paid full time while you're overseas, and then back to being paid part time when you're in Canada, can be quite unique.
What I'd like to state is that transition for reservists can quite often start when they come back from their tour. They'll come back off a tour, they'll have a week's leave, then they'll be back into civilian life. If they are to go back on tour again and again, they'll continue training. They might try to work full time with the military, but some of them decide that's the point when they're ready to leave the military. The actual day they'll get the release, though, could be three, five years later. So if we think of the transition only starting when they're leaving the military, that will leave a reservist in a three to five-year limbo quite often. This is something that I think we can look at how to address and try to get more of these programs and services further upstream. The reservist can't apply for their Veterans Affairs benefits while they're still in the military, yet many of the programs like the retraining program that's there, the veterans rehabilitation program, often don't start until the reservist is actually released from the military.
The other key point I want to make today is about the outreach that's still needed. Our organization brings in 75% of our participants using our peer-to-peer network. When we advertise our program through Facebook, through social media, through sending out letters to Legion halls, we get very people calling us asking to take the program. The hyper-masculine culture that still exists within the military community and veteran community, I believe, is a major barrier to people accessing help. There have been so many stories of young soldiers whom we've met who have never been into a Veterans Affairs office, who have never thought about going to see a counsellor, and yet when we speak to them for just five or ten minutes, you can tell they've really struggled a lot. Reaching out to those people, I believe, is essential.
There's an organization that started up recently called Send up the Count, which was using the peer-to-peer buddy system to check in on their friends. We've found that the most successful sort of model. If you try to use a psychologist, somebody who is not necessarily familiar with the military to do the outreach, it's often not successful. Nothing is quite as successful as a buddy reaching out and saying there might be something wrong, come check these guys out, you can trust them.
The last point, and something that was helpful for me in my transition, was the education piece. When I got back from my tour, about three days later I was back to the University of British Columbia to finish my undergraduate degree. It was really difficult to make that transition right away but I think it contributed to my success. It put my mind to work and at the end of that year, I had my degree. I went on to finish a master's in counselling psychology later on. Definitely my experience overseas impacted me. I definitely struggled when I came back, but I can stand here today and say I feel like I'm fully functioning. I'm very grateful for the support I got from Veterans Affairs. I know that's not always the case for veterans, but in my case, I was quite impressed by it.
I'll end up by saying thank you to this committee again for your advocacy on behalf of the Veterans Transition Network and for your recommendations. It's made a huge impact on my life and on many veterans here in Canada.
Thank you.