Thank you very much.
Hello, everyone. My name is Oliver Thorne. I am the national operations director for the Veterans Transition Network, which is a registered Canadian charity and service provider to Veterans Affairs Canada.
Our mission as an organization is the delivery of our 10-day veterans transition programs across Canada. Our mission is to make those programs as accessible as possible to any veteran across Canada who may request them.
Essentially our program, as I said, is a 10-day group-based program with the mission of helping Canadian Forces service members and veterans to identify and overcome barriers to transition back into civilian life.
We break up those 10 days into three phases, or what we call three workshops, and each workshop has a particular focus. In the first place we're looking at building a cohesive group of those veterans so they can do this work together, so trust-building is very important in the initial stages.
We're then looking to teach communications skills, which we're encouraging the participants to use throughout the program, the idea being that by the time the program comes to an end, these skills will be second nature to them.
The whole basis is teaching skills and competencies that can be used in the transition back into civilian life, so phase one—the focus of the communications skills—is very much around reconnecting with family members and loved ones, perhaps after returning from service overseas or in that transition period on leaving the military.
Of those three workshops, there is a two- to three-week break in between each one. That's specifically designed so the participants are taking these skills back to their lives at home in between the program days and rehearsing those skills, and then returning to the group, reporting on what's working and what's not, and picking up new competencies along the way.
As the members return to the second phase of the program, the next four-day block, we are working on trauma education, psychoeducation, and providing any skills that we can to help them manage symptoms they may have of operational stress injuries or post-traumatic stress.
As we near the end of that phase, they would then return to their day-to-day life again to practise those skills and return for the final two days of the program on phase three. At this stage we're looking at long-term planning for life after the program, connecting them to continuing resources, such as one-on-one counselling or perhaps a career transition they may be looking at, and helping them make long-term plans for life after the program.
As a little bit of background about our program, it was developed first in 1997 at the University of British Columbia by Doctors Marvin Westwood, David Kuhl, and Tim Black. Over the next 15 years or so, it was researched and developed at UBC with funding from the Royal Canadian Legion in British Columbia.
In 2012 the Veterans Transition Network was incorporated as a not-for-profit, and is now a Canadian charity with the mission of taking that program across Canada and making it accessible to veterans. In the same year, Veterans Affairs reviewed our research and reviewed our program and accepted us as a service provider. We've been seeing Veterans Affairs clients now every year since, and we're up to roughly 50 clients who have now taken our program through Veterans Affairs funding.
For about two-thirds of the clients we see, we raise funds from the community in order to put them through the program, because they have either not accessed Veterans Affairs funding or the funding they do have with Veterans Affairs does not cover their attendance on the program.
Again, with our mission as an organization to make this program accessible, a large part of our day-to-day activities is raising the funds to put those members through who would not otherwise be able to access the program.
Since 2012 we've expanded from one province into six. By the end of the year we'll be in seven provinces. We're working to train both psychologists and clinical counsellors across Canada, as well as regional staff, such as retired Sergeant Doug Allen here, who is our man in Atlantic Canada.
We are working to create programs in both French and English, so we're currently training bilingual clinicians local to Quebec, and we anticipate that by the end of next year we will have delivered our first program in French. Really, that is the bulk of our mission, which is to make sure that we make this program as accessible as possible to Canadian veterans.
I'll hand it over to my colleague Doug to talk a little bit about his work, both as a coordinator and now in training with us as one of the clinicians who helps to deliver our program.