Practical advice on how best to serve veterans, service members, and their families in your community, including effective ways to develop new outreach partnerships and collaborations. Whether you work in a public library, an academic library, a school library, or any other type of library, you are likely to encounter members of the veteran and military communities. This book is a starting point to help librarians, library administrators, and all library employees understand how veterans, service members, and their families can be different from other patrons, recognize important elements of military and veteran culture, and identify strategies for effectively serving the veteran and military communities. In this book, you find tips to help you determine the size and the needs of the veteran and military communities in your local area. You'll learn about some common information requests and information-seeking behavior of veterans and service members. You'll discover how to take the needs and also the unique strengths of the veteran and military communities into account when developing library outreach efforts, programs, services, and collections. And you'll gain insights to help you harness the knowledge, strengths, and experiences of the veteran and military communities in order to help them fulfill their potential as an asset to the library and to the community.

Practical advice on how best to serve veterans, service members, and their families in your community, including effective ways to develop new outreach partnerships and collaborations. Whether you work in a public library, an academic library, a school library, or any other type of library, you are likely to encounter members of the veteran and military communities. This book is a starting point to help librarians, library administrators, and all library employees understand how veterans, service members, and their families can be different from other patrons, recognize important elements of military and veteran culture, and identify strategies for effectively serving the veteran and military communities. In this book, you find tips to help you determine the size and the needs of the veteran and military communities in your local area. You'll learn about some common information requests and information-seeking behavior of veterans and service members. You'll discover how to take the needs and also the unique strengths of the veteran and military communities into account when developing library outreach efforts, programs, services, and collections. And you'll gain insights to help you harness the knowledge, strengths, and experiences of the veteran and military communities in order to help them fulfill their potential as an asset to the library and to the community.

Philanthropy for veterans, military servicemembers, and their families is a comparatively new and fast-growing branch of American charitable giving. Alas, there is little good information available to help donors act wisely. This book fills that gap. It was created as a how-to manual for philanthropists who want to make a difference with individuals who have served their nation, particularly during the period since the 9/11 attacks. Packed with profiles of the most promising people and groups and strategies, plus essential data, this is a timely new tool for donors. It is the first product of the new veterans program of The Philanthropy Roundtable, which is now available to advise, free of charge, any donors looking to make a difference in this field.

Every veteran has a story. You just have to listen to it. It can be surprising how difficult it is...and also how easy...for a veteran to be able to tell their story. The impacts of combat, deployments, or even just military experience in general are felt long after a veteran leaves the service. The guns do not always go silent when a veteran leaves the military...neither should the veteran. When combat veteran and retired Army Noncommissioned Officer Duane France retired, he knew he wanted to continue to serve his fellow veterans. As a grandson, nephew, and son of combat veterans, he grew up knowing the impact of combat and military service on veterans and their families, and as a leader with five combat and operational deployments, he saw the same things happening in the service members of his generation. After starting to work as a clinical mental health counselor exclusively for veterans and their spouses, Duane started to write his observations and experiences on his blog, Head Space and Timing, located at www.veteranmentalhealth.com. This book is a collection of 52 articles designed to help veterans, those who support them, and those who care for them to understand the military experience and to change the way they think about veteran mental health.

Approximately 4 million U.S. service members took part in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Shortly after troops started returning from their deployments, some active-duty service members and veterans began experiencing mental health problems. Given the stressors associated with war, it is not surprising that some service members developed such mental health conditions as posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and substance use disorder. Subsequent epidemiologic studies conducted on military and veteran populations that served in the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq provided scientific evidence that those who fought were in fact being diagnosed with mental illnesses and experiencing mental healthâ€"related outcomesâ€"in particular, suicideâ€"at a higher rate than the general population. This report provides a comprehensive assessment of the quality, capacity, and access to mental health care services for veterans who served in the Armed Forces in Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation New Dawn. It includes an analysis of not only the quality and capacity of mental health care services within the Department of Veterans Affairs, but also barriers faced by patients in utilizing those services.

The former VA secretary describes his fight to save veteran health care from partisan politics and how his efforts were ultimately derailed by a small group of unelected officials appointed by the Trump White House. Known in health care circles for his ability to turn around ailing hospitals, Dr. David Shulkin was originally brought into government by President Obama to save the beleaguered Department of Veterans Affairs. When President Trump appointed him as secretary of the VA, Shulkin was as shocked as anyone. Yet this surprise was trivial compared to what Shulkin encountered as secretary: a team of political appointees devoted to stopping anyone -- including the secretary himself -- who stood in the way of privatizing the agency and implementing their political agenda. In this uninhibited memoir, Shulkin opens up about why the government has long struggled to provide good medical care to military veterans and the plan he had to solve these problems. This is a book about the commitment we make to the men and women who risk their lives fighting for our country, how the VA was finally beginning to live up to it, and why the new administration may now be taking us in the wrong direction.