Services for Military and Veterans' Communities Affected by Disabilities

EASTER SEALS SUPPORTS VETERANS AND MILITARY FAMILIES 

The systems to assist service members and veterans with disabilities and their families during military deployments, injury or illness, medical rehabilitation and community integration are over-stressed, underfunded and face a plethora of organizational barriers.

Easter Seals is leveraging, integrating and building community capacity through federal, state and local resources to meet specific needs through information, services, supports and community resources. Easter Seals affiliates have launched a number of different programs to help meet these needs.

With generous funding from the McCormick Foundation, Easter Seals has launched a community reintegration program, Community OneSource, as part of the Foundation’s Welcome Back Veterans Initiative to provide information, resources, and direct supports as well as establish an infrastructure that provides community leadership that responds directly to the needs of wounded veterans and their families as they reintegrate back into their home communities throughout greater Chicagoland. For more information about Community OneSource, please call 312.726.6200.

Easter Seals Iowa is providing veterans and their families throughout the state with in-home assistance including vocational rehabilitation assessments, recommendations for home modification and accessibility, medicine management, Web-based community engagement and traumatic brain injury rehabilitation.

Easter Seals New Hampshire is operating an innovative initiative, called Veterans Count, that works in partnership with federal, state and local resources. Together, public and private organizations are forging connections where they haven’t existed before to connect veterans and their families to services that meet their medical, social, emotional and financial needs. Solutions are family-focused and address unique struggles of military families during deployment, upon returning home and continuously throughout community reintegration.

Job Training and Employment
Nationwide there are over 24 million veterans, with more than 700,000 unemployed in any given month.  Adding to these numbers are the 1.6 million service members returning home from deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Many with newly acquired disabilities are facing significant occupational barriers as they reintegrate back into their home communities.

With more than 59 Easter Seals affiliates providing workforce development services in 140 centers in 39 states, major corporate sponsors are exploring strategies with Easters Seals Headquarters to hire veterans with disabilities throughout their organizations nationwide. Easter Seals affiliates across the country are piloting projects that facilitate employment for veterans with disabilities through a variety of models.

The McCormick Foundation has helped to underwrite Easter Seals’ Operation Employ Veterans, a year-long program that supports the Foundation’s Operation Healing Freedom campaign, providing training to employers on effective methods to recruit, employ, and retain wounded veterans across the Chicagoland area. Area corporations including CVS Caremark, Dominick’s and NICOR will participate in the project. For more information about Operation Employ Veterans, please call 312.726.6200 or Contact Us.

EASTER SEALS: http://www.easterseals.com

Easter Seals in Indianapolis, Ind., and Great Falls, Mont., provide vocational evaluations and assessments as well as job placement for veterans with disabilities. Easter Seals Southern Nevada provides a comprehensive array of services to veterans, through contracts with the local Department of Veterans Affairs. These services include vocational evaluations, computer training, job training, independent living evaluations, occupational therapy, and other related services.

Easter Seals East Georgia provides vocational evaluations, computer training, and job training skills, such as fork lift certification to veterans. They also are providing services to homeless veterans.

Adult Day Services
Nationwide, there are more than 6 million veterans 65 years of age or older, creating an ever more critical need for direct services as they approach the end of their lives. Most Easter Seals adult day service centers have contracts with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to provide adult day services to older veterans and veterans with disabilities, specifically younger veterans with significant injuries. Adult day services are one of several long-term care benefits that veterans are entitled to under the Millennium Healthcare Act. Adult day services are a critical service for veterans and help to provide both therapeutic and social benefits for both older veterans and younger veterans with disabilities. 

At the national level, Easter Seals has worked with the VA’s Central Office to improve contracting processes for adult day services and have consulted on revisions of the adult day services contracting guidelines. We also are working to educate the adult day industry as a whole about how to become better service providers to veterans and a better contracting partner to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Easter Seals Greater Washington-Baltimore Region offers adult day services to veterans at its Hagerstown and Baltimore, Md., facilities as well as a newly built intergenerational facility delivering targeted services in Silver Spring, in close proximity to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington, D.C.