The role of the office is to accomplish a couple of things. It's to be a key focal point for our stakeholder community to be able to reach out and to better understand the needs of our women veterans, of our LGBTQ veterans. As Ms. Meunier noted before, we don't collect information on LGBTQ veterans specifically. It's not part of something that's included in information or on an application form or things of that nature. One of the avenues the office uses is to make sure that they're in contact with stakeholder groups and communities that support LGBTQ2 veterans.
For example, I know that you will have Mr. Ross here in the second hour. We consult with him and his group, Rainbow Veterans, regularly from a stakeholder point of view to understand whether or not there are any challenges that the LGBTQ community may be facing with Veterans Affairs and any adjustments that we might be able to make on that front.
That's one element of it. Internally it helps us too in working with various areas, including Ms. Meunier's for applications on disability benefits, but we also have a lot of other programs. We have programs that work on education and training and programs that work on career transitions. We want to make sure that for our women veterans and for our LGBTQ veterans they're also serving them well. They work with those various areas to make sure that the programs that are in place are supportive and able to be flexible enough to vary in terms of the needs of veterans who may have different requirements, frankly, from our programming.
So it plays an external function in terms of interfacing with various communities, but it also plays a function within the department of making sure that the programs and policies and the operations help to take into consideration any needs that may be different from different communities of veterans.