Our branch service officers are located in 1,400 Legion branches across Canada. In this challenging environment our branch service officers' functions become more important. Our volunteers are the boots on the ground and the eyes and ears in our community. It is important to us that every branch have an active and trained service officer to respond to the challenges facing our veteran community.
Branch service officers assist veterans by identifying those with unmet health needs and their possible benefits from VAC, and by making appropriate referrals to the command at the provincial level. Today the policies, programs, and services available to our veterans and their families are complex. Our command service officers are professional and receive regular training.
When it comes to serving veterans and their families, the Legion continues to be the only veterans organization in Canada advocating for and providing assistance to all our veterans. First and foremost we offer camaraderie in our branches. To ensure that this continues after service, the Legion offers a one-year free membership as part of the release process from the military. Presently 840 members have taken advantage of this initiative. Membership offers veterans and their families the opportunity to volunteer to help other veterans as part of the community building that is an important value of military culture.
The impact that military service has on our sailors, soldiers, airmen and women often makes the transition back to civilian life challenging. Today the Legion is seeing a change in the needs of some of our younger veterans. This is the age group from the early twenties onward. Many have invisible wounds and challenges with their transition back to civilian life. Our experience from the veterans transition program provides evidence that some veterans and their families feel isolated and need a welcome home in a real way. The veterans transition program, the only program of its kind in Canada, assists former members of the Canadian Forces in their transition to civilian life and was developed to address the invisible wounds of our soldiers so they can function and have healthy relationships with their families, friends, at work, and with themselves.
It was established in 1999 with funding from the Legion B.C./Yukon Command. It is a group-based program facilitated by the University of British Columbia's faculty of medicine. It is free of charge to former members of both the RCMP and the Canadian Armed Forces. This program is expanding nationally and is planning to offer sessions uniquely developed for women. VAC supports the program and we recommend that DND and the Canadian Armed Forces support the expansion of the veterans transition program nationally to ensure that serving Canadian Armed Forces members affected by PTSD have access to this program.
The Legion in British Columbia has also partnered with the British Columbia Institute of Technology to deliver the Legion military skills conversion program to help accelerate and advance the civilian careers of former and current reserve and regular forces members. This program offers fast-track education with accreditation at BCIT through credits for military experience and assistance with developing their own businesses and finding jobs, post-release.
While the Legion continues to deliver many programs to veterans and families to ensure quality of life after release, and to ease the transition from service, more research is required to determine the effects of service unique to the Canadian military demographic and unique to Canadian operations. The Legion is currently engaged and supportive of the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research to ensure that this capability is implemented.
With this goal CIMVHR, as we like to call it, and the Royal Canadian Legion have made a commitment to offer a Canadian scholarship that will ensure a lasting legacy for veteran research in Canada by training a future generation of researchers. Beginning in 2013 Dominion Command of the Royal Canadian Legion made a three-year commitment to provide an annual $30,000 full-time master's scholarship to students who demonstrate excellence in their proposed research and exhibit significant potential for a high-impact research career in a relevant area. The research topics are related to an area of priority identified by the Legion and one of CIMVHR's priority research areas, and includes transition from military to civilian life.