Veterans

Hello Everyone

I am the new CCVSA director and wanted to say hi, and to enlist your assistance in connecting our Veteran Community (Veterans, Family Members, Supporters). The intent is to have a better informed and engaged Veteran community, so I appreciate you bearing with me on this message.

I’ve attached a “VSA Business Card” with our contact information and some basic information on services we provide and contact information.  Please share this liberally throughout your professional and personal networks.  I would especially appreciate if the contacts from the city, towns and villages would send this out with this message, to your distribution lists.  With over 5000 Veterans in Cayuga County, there is a good chance that if you aren’t a Veteran, you are connected to one or someone else who is.   It would also be great if you posted the first page of this in your areas for people who don’t use electronic media.

We especially want to ensure all Veterans are encouraged to contact us if they have (or potentially have) a service connected disability, so that their case can be submitted, reviewed or updated if necessary.  We are not the Veterans Administration (VA), but we work with Veterans to navigate the VA system.  VA Disability Compensation | Veterans Affairs

We also want to encourage Veterans to see if they are eligible for VA Healthcare Eligibility For VA Health Care | Veterans Affairs which would include using the local clinic, VA Medical Center in Syracuse and local providers through the Community Care Home (va.gov) program and no or low cost.

We’d like to start an e-mail list to send out updates on Veteran related topics.  Anyone interested in being on this e-mail distribution just needs to send a message to veterans@cayugacounty.us indicating that they want to receive correspondence from us. 

We also have a Facebook page that will include some of the same information Cayuga County Veterans Service Agency | Facebook so Like/Follow our page for updates.

We want to highlight Veteran owned/operated businesses and those who support Veterans through programs like Veterans Return the Favor Program | Cayuga County, NY.   If you have or know of a business, please let us know.

Please let us know if you are interested in helping us help Veterans.  Disabled American Veterans (DAV) is looking for volunteers to Drive a Vehicle - DAV .  We also have some volunteer opportunities and paid positions driving Veterans to the Syracuse VA medical center.  If you want to donate to help Veterans, we can also answers questions about that.

Anyone who wants to help transitioning Veterans who are considering moving to the Cayuga County area can sign up for ETS Sponsorship Program

Businesses who are interested in hiring transitioning Veterans can participate in the Career Skills Program :: U.S. Army Installation Management Command that pays the servicemember/employee during their training period at a business.  There is also the U.S. Army Partnership for Youth Success (armypays.com) where businesses agree to interview servicemembers for available positions

We want to encourage Veterans to seek positive outlets and plug into a community.  One organization that helps to that end is team Red, White & Blue Home - Team RWB.

On page 2 of the “business card” is an acrostic of VETERAN.  These are attributes we associate with Veterans, and we want to encourage Veterans to live up to them.

Our goal is to improve information flow within the Cayuga County Area Veteran community and subsequently help make a positive impact for the entire community.

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, complaints, etc, about anything Veteran or Servicemember related; please feel free to reach out to us at the VSA.

Wanted to keep this message shorter but as you can see there are many resources for Veterans.  I wanted to take this opportunity highlight some key ones but there are many more with information on our website https://www.cayugacounty.us/318/

Thank you for your time, and appreciate your support.

Kevin Swab

Lindsey Wilkinson

Angelo Ervolina

Jennifer Wilder