Support Program for Veterans' Families

The National Center on Family Homelessness (NCFH) will be designing and implementing a Support Program for Veterans' Families in California and Oregon. The vision of this project is to ensure the availability of high-quality, culturally relevant emotional health and family support services to families and children of veterans. In addition to offering comprehensive, community-based, direct services to veterans' families, this program will provide outreach to encourage families to access services, define and implement best practices, and offer ongoing training and technical assistance to service providers around issues such as family preservation, marital discord, post trauma responses (e.g., interpersonal violence, substance use, depression), homelessness prevention, and children's emotional needs. This Support Program will not only increase the availability of and access to community-based services, but also will support the quality of life of all family members.

To develop the Support Program for Veterans' Families, the National Center on Family Homelessness (NCFH) will be conducting an 8-month community engagement and planning process. Through this process, we will develop community-based and VA partnerships, and models for responding to the emotional needs of families and children of veterans. During this time, we will conduct a needs assessment and then, based on these findings, will design a service response that meets the needs of veterans' families and the providers who serve them.

During the planning period, NCFH will work with community-based providers, VA facilities, local Vet Centers, and veterans' families to conduct an environmental scan/needs assessment of the regions we plan to work in (e.g., California, Oregon). The goal will be to understand the needs of veterans' families, the context of service delivery, service gaps, capacity of existing programs, promising and best practices, systems integration issues, and barriers to implementation. This needs assessment will help us identify the network of provider agencies that can best offer comprehensive service to families of veterans, the nature of appropriate partnerships, best practices and innovative programs, and the training and technical assistance that will be necessary to support these activities.