Veterans Affairs Committee on Oct. 3rd, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and a motion adopted on February 6, 2017, the committee resumes its comparative study of services to veterans in other jurisdictions.

I would like to welcome John Boerstler. He's the executive director of NextOp and is video conferencing in from Houston, Texas.

John, you have 10 minutes, and then we will hopefully go into some great questions.

Thank you, John, for joining us this morning.

[John W. Boerstler, Executive Director, NextOp]

Thank you for having me, sir.

In Houston here, obviously we've had a bit of trouble with a hurricane, if you haven't heard, and it's brought up this idea of resilience and what a resilient city would look like. Although we bounced back very quickly in terms of hurricane recovery, and everyone is back to work and everyone is housed, we found that the veteran community was one of the major things that led the resilience of our city in the return to normalcy after the hurricane. That fit in line with everything we designed when we built the Combined Arms system.

I come from the United States Marine Corps. I worked in the United States Congress as a military liaison, and then worked at the municipal level to build the Houston-Harris County returning veterans initiative, which was led by our then mayor and county judge in a collaborative effort. Being an entity of municipal government, we ceilinged out very quickly and realized that creating one program can't address all of the complex needs and issues of the entire veteran community, the second-largest of which in the United States is in our area, smaller only than the community in Los Angeles.

So we set out to create another program, through the United Way, which is a very institutional NGO here in the United States. The United Way set up a 211 hotline for veterans, so they could be directed to resources. We quickly found out that only elderly veterans and veterans who use the phone instead of the Internet were actually accessing these resources. We were missing the entire transitioning military and post-911 Iraq and Afghanistan populations and their families.

Then we set up another program, after ceilinging out yet a second time, called the Lone Star Veterans Association. That was meant to recreate that network of camaraderie that we enjoy in the military and be kind of a net to catch all of the returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families, and to ensure that they make that successful transition from military to civilian life.

Yet again, because it was another program, we ceilinged out very quickly. It took us eight years to make those mistakes and to figure out that we can't just create another program to find a solution to the complex needs and problems in the veteran community. We needed to create a system of programs that connected all of the government agencies, the NGOs, and the private organizations that have a stake in military transition and veterans affairs.

That's when we created the Combined Arms system. Some of the data points we used when we created this system were backed by the University of Southern California and their survey on the state of the American veteran. There's another one out of Cincinnati that Deloitte backed, which basically showed findings and recommendations. It showed that veterans are unprepared, obviously. We all know that. How do we address that problem? Should we conduct an awareness campaign that targets veterans and their families to make sure they're connected to resources?

One organization really can't address all the issues. For so long, people believed that the United States Department of Veterans Affairs was the solution in terms of veteran transition. In fact, they provide only three services: health care delivery, benefits administration, and cemetery administration. They technically cannot be—because we have such a limited government—everything to everyone. We needed to establish a community support network that really addressed veterans issues in a holistic way, and held these agencies more accountable to ensure that these veterans didn't fall through the cracks and that we weren't getting bogus organizations joining our network.

The organizations themselves were disjointed. Organization A and organization B didn't know what one another did, and they certainly didn't know how to properly refer to one another. That's why we created our integrated technology system to develop that collaborative accelerator, to ensure that we lower the overhead and reduce programmatic redundancies when veterans enter the system, either electronically or physically.

Finally, one of the last findings and recommendations that we derived from all of our research is that data is not consistent, nor is it shared. If we're able to standardize this data capture and share it across the networks and the community, we can use that to identify redundancies, lower the overhead, and also go for more consistent funding in a collaborative way.

Our mission in Combined Arms as a backbone organization here in the Houston area is to unite the community to accelerate the impact of veterans in Houston. We're not serving veterans. We're not helping veterans. We don't have the traditional mission statements that have operation and heroes and all kinds of weird terminology in there. We're actually here to accelerate their impact, accelerate their transition, so that they can make a more significant economic and social impact on the communities they return to, particularly here in southeast Texas.

Our three major strategic objectives are to create a system and to really establish and nurture the system of organizations that provide holistic services and support. We're built on efficiency, as I said, so we want to reduce those programmatic redundancies and costs, and make sure we're serving veterans quickly and effectively. Collaboration is at the core of everything we do, so we want to increase the collaboration of organizations and also increase the quality of services. We do that in really four different ways. We have a transition centre. We have a physical single point of entry for our large community. We're the third-largest city in the United States; Chicago will argue that it's third, but if we actually count our undocumented population, then we're definitely the third, and the 2020 census will absolutely show that.

Our transition centre is centrally located. It's available via the rail line and the bus line. It has free parking, a café, and a gym. It really serves as not only a co-working space for our organizations to collaborate more effectively but also really that one single point of entry, that one-stop shop, so to speak, for transitioning service members and post-9/11 veterans and their families to access so they can be served not just by one service but, holistically, by, on average, six different services when they enter the system physically or electronically.

When I say electronically, the second way we do this is with our technology platform. It's built on Salesforce.com, which is a really innovative Fortune 500 client relationship management tool. We essentially customized that with the developer to ensure that each of the organizations has an account, and that whenever they received a referral from a veteran entering the system electronically or physically, or through one of the 40 organizations that are partners, this referral would be tracked and this organization would be held accountable. When I say held accountable, it's not that somebody's calling them to let them know that they're behind. We actually have a scoreboard that's posted here in our transition centre in the café, which holds everybody very publicly accountable, so it kind of creates this collaborative competition in which you can see each of the 40 organizations that are in this system. You can see how far behind some are and how quickly some are responding and how quickly they close the cases, and which result in positive outcomes for the veterans, be that in employment, mental health services, veterans assistance, community service, volunteering, or camaraderie, etc.

We have an integrated marketing campaign, and it's something that I think a lot of communities miss. If we collectively pool our financial resources, we can actually actively market to the active military populations on base and sell Houston as a destination, so we say, “Check out of your unit in San Diego, California, or Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, or Norfolk, Virginia, and check into your new unit here in Houston, and we'll help you find a job, help get you housing, help your family, and help you find financial assistance and benefit services from the VA. We'll really help address everything as holistically as we can.” We're doing it almost as an economic development initiative.

Really, our value—and I'll finish with this and allow everyone to have some questions, because I know I don't have too much time, and as I said, I'm a marine, so I want to be as brief as possible—is accelerating impact through value. The veterans come in and they have an assessment. With our no-wrong-door approach, the veterans can really enter our programs through any of our 40 partner organizations or through another method that leads them to us, such as the marketing campaign or word of mouth or their transition-assistance counsellor. The value to the veterans that the Combined Arms system—which is kind of a third-party, backbone organization that connects all of these different agencies, government, non-profit, and private—offers is really speed, efficiency, accountability, and holistic support. The value we provide to our 40 member organizations is shared data, collaboration, feedback, mission focus, and free space.

When we are selling to Houston our value to the community, we show our economic impact. I actually show the average starting salary of veterans and show their economic impact, because they're buying groceries there, taking their kids to school, paying their property taxes, buying houses, and getting engaged and involved in the community and showing how much we're volunteering, because we all want to continue our service after we take off the uniform. We want to show how much we're impacting low-income and at-risk neighbourhoods in the city. With regard to social growth, we can show that veterans not only participate in civic organizations more but we tend to vote more, and we're more civically healthy, so to speak, if we have that ability to transition successfully from the front end of our service and move into civilian life.

And really, it's just getting civilians more involved. We all talk about bridging the military-civilian divide. We're really trying to bring in the community.

Today, for example, one of the big Hurricane Harvey relief efforts is brought in by Ford, the truck maker—well, it's a truck maker down here in Houston but of course a car maker everywhere else. The Houston Texans, which is our American football team, of course, are coming in and doing a lot of fanfare for all the organizations that volunteered and stepped up for the Harvey relief. So it's really getting the community involved and engaging media, engaging our politicians, and really activating those institutional NGOs like Easter Seals and United Way, and of course, getting government agencies like the VA, state or provincial government, and our municipal government activated and aware of who we serve.

I wanted to be brief because we have other presenters, but if you need to see any of our data in terms of the veterans per category of service, the number of clients, the response time in hours, or any other data showing the number of connections made this year to date and some demographic data on the veterans we serve, I'd be happy to share my screen and show that to you.

Thank you having me.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Great. Thank you, and thank you for your passion.

Mr. McColeman.

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, John, for your testimony.

Are there any other programs similar to this one in any other major municipal centres or other parts of the United States?

[John W. Boerstler]

Yes, sir. We collaborate directly with Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California runs the LA collaborative. They're currently shopping for an integrated technology system, so maybe they'll be using ours soon, but their collaborative is very well developed in terms of how they get their organizations on the same sheet of music.

AmericaServes, which is an initiative led by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families out of Syracuse University, which isn't too far from a lot of cities in Canada, has a very well-developed program that is very well funded by JP Morgan Chase and the Walmart Foundation. It uses a proprietary technology platform called Unite Us, which essentially does the same thing, but it's a little bit more cost prohibitive to some communities that don't want to make the significant investment.

Other platforms also include America's Warrior Partnership, which is based in Augusta, Georgia, and is significantly funded by the Wounded Warrior Project, which is the very large, $330-million charity based in Jacksonville, Florida.

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

It's no small task, I would imagine, getting something like this up and running. Where did the capital dollars come from to get you up and running?

[John W. Boerstler]

We had to seek seed funding from large institutional foundations at the national scale in order to kind of prove the pilot and show proof of our concepts. We're seeking other local dollars from local foundations here in the greater Houston area now that we have the data to show the positive outcomes.

We also have earned-revenue models for corporate sponsorship and earned-revenue models for some of the organizations that house here. For example, Team Rubicon and Lone Star Legal Aid are up on our second floor now, specifically here for Harvey relief, and they're paying rent. We have a lot of avenues from which we can continue to generate revenue to accelerate this process and really scale it to meet the great needs.

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Our Veterans Ombudsman has recommended a similar but different thing, and I want your thoughts about it. He has recommended a concierge service, which is a central point where veterans could go, that one-stop-shop idea that you brought up.

Have you considered that, or are you aware of any state or municipality that's considered that as a way to get something going without really...? If you're lacking the capital to cover the cost of the physical plant, the building, and the staff, that's a way to focus on veterans by helping them individually and uniquely with their own problems.

What are your thoughts about that?

[John W. Boerstler]

I think that's a great way to leverage the local municipal elected and appointed relationships. Usually cities and counties have a lot of open space, a lot of buildings that are just sitting idle. We actually did that for the Lone Star Veterans Association, one of the programs that I mentioned, as one of the lessons learned from the past.

They had free space given to them by the City of Houston, and the City of Houston is heavily involved and invested in this. The mayor's office does have a seat on the board of directors at Combined Arms and has been a part of the formation of our collaborative since the beginning. We are getting some tax incentives, and we do have—and I neglected to mention this on your previous question—some state-level funding provided by the Health and Human Services Commission of Texas, which is funnelled through the City of Houston and executed as a major partnership grant for 14 different organizations.

I definitely believe that if we can activate those relationships at the local level to identify buildings where these single points of entry can be used in partnership with the federal government and in partnership with private organizations, then they can definitely be leveraging points for transitioning service members and their families.

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

You mentioned 40 different partners in the program, and they were organizations. The two I remember are the United Way and.... I forget the other one. It doesn't matter. I'm just thinking about the logistics of pulling together 40 organizations. Many have competing agendas. If I look at the NGOs and such, they're often competing with one another for funding that's available. How did you pull that off?

[John W. Boerstler]

We started with a small group, a brain trust so to speak, of six organizations that really identified the need to collaborate more effectively. At that time, during the Obama administration, we were facing large-scale reductions in force. We thought we would see almost double the number of service members coming into our communities, so we needed to prepare ourselves. And it's good to prepare ourselves, no matter what, for the future transitioning population.

We started with six organizations that were like-minded. They were willing to give up a little bit of autonomy and a little bit of their time in order to make the community more effective and a lot more collaborative. When we did that, everyone else.... It was the Field of Dreams concept—the Kevin Costner movie—“If you build it, they will come.” Sure enough, once we built it, we all moved in together instead of being located all over town, which had made it very difficult for service members to access those services provided. We co-located, and when we did that, everybody wanted to be a part of it. We grew from six to 40 within a year.

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

That's excellent. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Thank you.

Go ahead, Mr. Fraser.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, sir, for joining us this morning. I really want to commend your city for its incredible resilience following Hurricane Harvey. We did follow it here in Canada. Our thoughts are with you as you continue to rebuild. I really appreciate your mentioning the veterans who obviously were, first and foremost, there to help their city.

I want to follow up on the previous questioning about the NGOs themselves. Can you tell me how it was determined which ones would be asked to come in? How did you get to the number 40? Is there any plan to continue reaching out to other organizations that could help veterans?

[John W. Boerstler]

Absolutely. That's a great question, and this will also help to answer the previous question.

We actually engaged KPMG, which of course is a top-five consulting firm globally. They wanted to be a part of what we were doing here. They're a local veterans affinity group, so all the veterans who work at KPMG in their consulting vertical wanted to be a part of this.

We asked them to build us a tool that they use typically for evaluating companies they want to buy but to adjust that to the NGO and government sector, the public sector so to speak, and then to evaluate organizations based on their governance, based on their financials, and based on their programmatic outputs, making sure they didn't have any outstanding litigation or any red flags in terms of media stories that have ever come out about them.

That generates a report that is electronically directed to the board. Once they pass that first test, then the board of directors has to do a two-thirds majority vote in order to ensure that these organizations are properly vetted and allowed into the system. From there, they're trained and on-boarded, and their staff is brought into the fold.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

That's very good.

You talked about holding them accountable, and you said that there was basically a scoreboard to determine how far along they were with each individual veteran, I suppose. Could you talk a little bit more about how you actually hold them accountable? If one organization or one part of the process is not performing adequately, what actually happens?

[John W. Boerstler]

There is basically a corrective action provided by the backbone staff. We have five full-time staff members who work for Combined Arms. It really functions as a chamber of commerce, so to speak, for these organizations. If they don't accept the corrective action, then the board can take immediate action to remove them from the system. We haven't had to do that yet. We haven't had to remove any organizations or ask them to leave.

All of the corrective action that the executive director has led with his staff has been to essentially consult on how to either turn off the flow or slow it down. If they're getting too many clients and they can't serve them all adequately and effectively enough, then we'll make sure to adjust those settings in the integrated technology system.

There are a lot of different tactical things that we can do before we have to, unfortunately, ask somebody to leave. As I said, that hasn't happened so far, in two years.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

You talked a little bit about capturing data. I agree with you that it's extremely important to have all of the relevant information to make good decisions. What actual data are you capturing as each veteran goes through?

[John W. Boerstler]

We're capturing what category of service they're requesting. Typically, one in three veterans comes through the system looking for career transition, which I think is obviously the most important part. If we can prevent unemployment, we can prevent substance abuse, family challenges, homelessness, criminal behaviour, and suicide, most importantly. It really all starts with career transition.

When they come in for career transition, they take the assessment, and once they do that they find out, “Oh, I need to apply for my VA benefits” or “I might need some help finding housing” or “I want to get connected to social events and volunteerism.” That's what we track, how many veterans are actually connected to those categories of service, and then what the response time is by the organizations they're referred to, and the number of hours.

Our average return time is 39 hours, and those organizations that fall into the 96-hour category are the organizations that are then coached.

We do the number of connections made, the number of referrals made, and then also the demographic information, so area of service, gender, rank, skills and experience, and those kinds of things.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Do the veterans themselves actually have access to the data on their personal profile in order to track their progress?

[John W. Boerstler]

Absolutely. When a veteran is referred to a different organization you can actually see that.

If my organization, which provides employment services, makes a referral to one of your organizations that provides veteran benefit services, we can actually see that referral move along and progress through the status updates in the system, so that we know they're being.... Then it shows if whether a positive outcome was achieved, and we can actually see that happen, whereas before we were just firing off emails into the nebula of the Internet, not really knowing what happened to that veteran client.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Thank you very much. I appreciate your joining us today, sir.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Ms. Mathyssen.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you very much for joining us. I appreciate this quite significant amount of information.

I have some questions in regard to when you set up the organization. How did those 40 various individual organizations respond to this new approach? Were they receptive and were they on board?

How did the Department of Veterans Affairs react to this new delivery initiative?

[John W. Boerstler]

All three branches of VA, most importantly, the health administration, which we want all of our veterans to enrol in so they have access to good health care; the benefits administration to help execute that; and, God forbid, the cemetery administration, which most of us hope we don't need for quite a while....

But most importantly, the VA is here once a week and they enrol veterans directly into the health care administration and the benefits administration. They were one of our earliest partners. Also, the veterans centre, which delivers mental health care, comes in and they actually hold appointments in one of our closed rooms. So that's been a fantastic partnership.

To answer your first question, I think that having the VA on board and some of these larger NGOs and more institutional non-profits in the community that have been here for a long time really gave us the credibility to then invite and vet other organizations to then interact in the system.

I believe these organizations want to be held more accountable. Some of them haven't reacted extremely well. There are some that are to the right of the response time in hours, and to the right of the positive outcomes achievements, and they're being coached on that. But most of those organizations that are to the right of that 96-hour response time are volunteer-led, like Pets for Vets, for example, which is an organization that provides service dogs, or Team Red White & Blue, which basically gets veterans together and does physical fitness activities. Those are all volunteer-led, so that's why they're a bit slower. It's not their primary focus.