Veterans Affairs Committee on Oct. 3rd, 2017

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Thanks.

You talked about licensing and credentials following the transition. What can be done, in your opinion, to accelerate that process? Can we be doing something while they're in the military and trying to connect with the workforce to allow them to come out and be better prepared to join the workforce; or do we still have to try to blend in the community college trades to assist them as we move forward?

Is there something we can do prior to release so that the transition will be easier?

[John W. Boerstler]

Absolutely, sir.

I've done many comparative studies of various countries, particularly the U.K., Denmark, Ukraine, and Israel. In the U.K.—and I'm sure you guys have a version of this, depending on the military occupational specialty—if someone is a heavy equipment operator in the British army, they can't operate that equipment on base until they're licensed by the civilian credentialing body.

That makes too much sense for our military to ever invoke, unfortunately, but it's what we need to get to. We can't allow these individuals to walk out of service without something saying that they can operate this equipment, or stand next to a doctor and perform surgery. [Technical difficulty--Editor]] ...we close the skills gap. I think that's a really good best practice.

The United States Air Force also has the Community College of the Air Force, and they encourage their service members to get credentials while they're in service as well. Unfortunately, as marines, we don't have that type of thing. The fact that it differs between services is unfortunate as well.

I would definitely point to the U.K. as a really good example of how credentialing works pre- and post-service.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Thank you.

Ms. Wagantall.

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

Good morning, John. I appreciate what we're learning from you this morning. I can see a lot of ways that could really make improvements in our system.

We have Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for many areas. On the other side we have a lot of veterans groups that have self-organized, and we've seen those gaps that you're talking about, but we haven't quite made a good system of enabling those two to work together.

You talk about the 40 organizations that you have. Is there opportunity for others to engage as well? How do you determine which 40? It's based on your needs, obviously. Here, many of them have solid ideas and do very effective work, but they're cash-strapped. They could do so much more if they had that opportunity.

[John W. Boerstler]

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 front end, the real-time data that we produced showing their effectiveness at achieving those outcomes, and the speed at which they achieved those outcomes really holds the balance, so to speak. I mentioned this earlier, but I think it's important to continue reaching out when we see the gaps, when we see the needs and the categories of service that are being referred to most, and the inability for us to serve those veterans effectively. We need to seek out those organizations. We sought out Hire Heroes USA and the Call of Duty Endowment, for example, to help address the gap in career services and career transitions since that's the number one requested category of service.

We have a long way to go, as I mentioned earlier. We're not going to stop at 40, but we also don't want 200, because we want to make sure that the best-in-class organizations are serving veterans and are held to the higher standard. If they can't do that, then we don't want them to be a part of the system.

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

Thank you.

Do you have any data on the number of veterans who are actually involved on the service side of your organization?

[John W. Boerstler]

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

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

I mean the number integrated into working in the system to provide the services.

[John W. Boerstler]

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 lot of civilians. On my team specifically, as an employment agency, we have 10, and nine of us are veterans, for example. It is common for veterans to work in this space because we've had that “poverty experience” of making that sometimes difficult transition from military to civilian life. We stepped on a lot of land mines in our transition, and so we're able to help our brothers and sisters avoid those land mines in their own transition.

I would say that probably more than two-thirds of the staff who serve in our collaborative are veterans, and then of course we can't do this without our civilian counterparts in some of the more institutional non-profits and government agencies.

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

I would assume, then, that as veterans are receiving services, they are part of the feedback system to determine how effective things are.

[John W. Boerstler]

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 for asking, ma'am. They're able to go in and rate their experience positively or negatively once that case is closed. They're able to rate them on a 1-to-5 scale like the ones on Yelp or Google or Facebook. They all have the same star scale. That shows our qualitative feedback on the 1-to-5 star scale, and then they're able to leave qualitative information in terms of “I didn't get what I wanted” or “these people were amazing”. The agencies are able to improve their services, and the delivery of the services, in real time based on that feedback. That rating system will bring the organization either up or down, and then make sure it turns on or off the number of clients who flow to them. It's fairly intuitive.

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

Thank you.

A lot of the services you are providing are in addition to what VAC provides. How would you compare the cost of those services being provided through the government versus through this type of an approach?

[John W. Boerstler]

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. Employment services is a huge gap, and they're obviously our number one most requested need, and the VA doesn't provide those. I think we can deliver those services a lot more cost-effectively because we are a lot more agile, as small non-profit organizations, and we can make decisions a lot faster through having the second-largest bureaucracy in the world. That's an advantage, I think. That's coming from someone who runs an NGO, of course, but I have also worked for both the federal government and the municipal government and that's just my observation and my opinion. For example, it costs about $1,500 to place a veteran, on average, in most of these employment-serving non-profit organizations. I don't know what it would cost the government agencies, but I imagine it's much higher.

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Thank you.

Ms. Lambropoulos.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Hello, John. Thank you for being here with us today. I am extremely impressed with what we've heard so far this morning. I think it's very concrete and it's great that you guys have found a really good way to collaborate and that all of the programs and all levels of government are in on making the experience for veterans a lot better.

How do you reach out to veterans, or how do they know what programs exist in order to reach out to you guys when they realize there is a problem?

[John W. Boerstler]

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 the U.S. Army they call it the E-4 Mafia. That's really buddies telling buddies about how they got their VA benefits or how they found the great job they have. That is really the most effective form of marketing we can rely on.

Of course, we employ geofencing and social media tactics apart from our coordinated marketing campaign that we launched with the chamber of commerce. That's extremely effective, but one of the other most effective ways veterans find out about the suite of services is through that no-wrong-door approach. Technically they can walk into our transition centre and receive services from all the organizations that are co-located here, but if they come in electronically, either via word of mouth or via social media or the marketing campaign, they then have access to all 40 different organizations based on the needs assessment that they take on the front end. Each of those organizations, while it is talking to the veteran.... if I'm talking to a veteran about employment services and I realize they need help with VA benefits, I can then go into the system and refer them to organizations that provide the services to achieve VA benefits.

It's that no-wrong-door approach that really allows that and really holds those organizations more accountable and makes sure that no veterans fall through the cracks.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you. You say there is a no-wrong-door approach and that so many different organizations offer different services to their veterans and that there is great collaboration between them. Is there a database that everyone's information gets entered into? How is that communication held? How do you guys keep that communication going?

[John W. Boerstler]

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 or volunteer services, they then input that into their own system, but then they have to go back in and make sure that activity is updated in the Combined Arms system so that the other organizations know and we can track all of that data. Everything is housed in what they call Salesforce communities, which is a proprietary way of really connecting all of the organizations. It only costs us about $40,000 all in, which I think is a significant return on investment in terms of being able to create a dynamic system. Salesforce itself is free for non-profit organizations and all you need to do is pay for the development and for dropping the app on top of the CRM itself.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you.

I have one last question. I read in your article that you had recommended a standardized uniform national system that translates military vocational skills into civilian credentials. I was wondering where your government is on that. Has there been any improvement as to turning the skills people have in the military into something they can use later on in civilian life?

[John W. Boerstler]

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 construction side specifically together and we engaged the dean of the engineering and construction school at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and he was able to sign off on the fact that we basically took industry and a credentialing body and crosswalked. Say you were a 12R electrician in the army, then that means you are a level 2 NCCR-certified electrician in the civilian world, and you can go to work as soon as you step off active duty. That has been a huge success, but it's been done, I would say, at the operational level instead of at the strategic level. The Department of Defense had no bearing on how that was achieved, and now they're kind of running to catch up to use that as a case study so that they can apply it to other military occupational specialties and corresponding civilian credentialing bodies.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Thank you.

Mr. Calkins.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

John, I want to thank you for your service to your country and to the greater good of allied forces. I really appreciate it. Whether you know it or not, you've kept Canadians and people all around the world safe. I want to thank you, sir.

I want to ask you a question about equality of services. In Canada, one thing that comes up quite frequently is the frustration that veterans feel. Some of them are from smaller communities and are more isolated. You, sir, are from a very large metropolitan centre. Your organization is doing great work for a large number of veterans where you have a critical mass and where it makes sense to do so.

How would a veteran who is, say, returning to Knox City, Gorey, or O'Donnell, Texas, find the level of services that they get there, and what would your organization be able to do in the context of providing equity of services for somebody who doesn't live within the region?

[John W. Boerstler]

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 which veterans return, and it connects them to institutional services, be those state agencies or other non-profits that may be headquartered there, which can provide them the services they need.

Also, the VA outpatient system—they call it the CBOCs, the community-based outpatient clinic system—is specifically punched out to areas from which it's too far to drive to the VA hospital for just routine medical appointments and mental health appointments. It makes sure that they are connected into those organizations and that they also have access to such opportunities as the 211 hotline, which covers the entire state here in Texas—Louisiana, our neighbours here, have a similar program—and that they are then triaged and sent to organizations that have the appropriate geographic coverage in that rural area.

It's not perfect. We're working on funding streams so as to be able to send more outreach workers to engage veterans in those rural communities, because the gap in the access to services, as you mentioned, sir, is a significant problem. This is the area in which we're seeing many of the more chronic mental health issues arise, because employment is down and entrepreneurship is down. We need to be more proactive on the front end and get out in front of those veterans.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

I want to go back to something you brought up earlier, which is the stigma of PTSD. I want to know how relevant it actually is, because I don't think we talk about it here in that context. I found it quite refreshing to hear you say that most veterans don't have this problem. If you believe the general discourse of the conversation from the media and other sources here in Canada, you would think that every soldier is returning home somehow broken and is unable or incapable or will be a liability at some particular point in time in the transition to civilian life.

How much of your efforts go into, how much success have you had, and what are the best practices you've used in dealing with potential employers to remove the stigma of PTSD? Could you elaborate on that a bit more?