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VVA
Missouri State Council 
Service Officer Program
FYE 9-30-10
FY 2010 proved to be yet another year of change for the VVA 317 Service Officer program.
Jerry Ross, who has volunteered his time at the Springfield, Missouri office with Chief Service Officer Wil Dailey, attended Service Officer training at the VVA National Headquarters in April and has received his accreditation. He joins the team to take over the Springfield office.
Wil Dailey put the good of the program ahead of his own personal life by moving to St. Louis, Missouri to take over that office. He has already increased the caseload and is looking forward to working with the VVA chapters around the St. Louis area. Wil continues his outreach with the National Native American Association.
Kansas City, Missouri Service Officer, Diana Kay Booth, has expanded our coverage by taking an office in the new VA clinic in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. This clinic is approximately forty miles northeast of Kansas City and she is drawing clients from all parts of rural northwestern Missouri. She currently works Mondays and Tuesdays in that office and spends the rest of the week in the Kansas City office.
Retired Service Officer Ron Adams has started coming in three days a week as a volunteer at the Kansas City office. Although he doesn't have his accreditation he can do a lot of the preliminary paperwork to get the claims process started. Ron along with new Service Officer Assistant, Ian Shoemaker have freed up a lot of time Kay spent on doing administrative tasks.
Ian is the future of our program. He is a Navy veteran currently in college on the GI Bill and after an appointment with Kay in the Excelsior Springs office decided he wanted to be a service officer. We hired him as Kay's assistant and would like to get him trained as a Service Officer as soon as possible. We think this is one way to attract more of the current veterans into our program and ensure that our program will continue.
The Kansas City and Springfield offices still receive a lot of help from volunteers and both have work studies from local colleges. As Wil gets to know the St. Louis area and gets involved with the local VVA chapters I'm sure that office will soon be staffed with volunteers. The Kansas City office also has signed up with AARP and their Senior Community Service Employment Program which provides part time staff people at no cost to us. This is a work training program for persons age 55 and over and it helps senior job seekers gain skills for full time employment.
While the majority of the veterans we represent are from the Vietnam era, we have more and more Korean veterans coming in. A lot of them never knew what benefits were available to them and now that the distribution of information is more widespread they are finding they should have applied a long time ago.
We still represent a few WWII veterans, including a retired two star general who served in WWII, Korea and Vietnam. The OEF/OIF veterans are slowly coming in and with the help of Veterans of Modern Warfare (VMW) Chapter 1 and our members who attend the groups at the VA spreading the word we should see increases in their numbers.
If you look at the numbers you'll find we filed 1564 claims last year. That is two claims per day, five days a week, per service officer. It breaks down to we spent $12.78 per client from the VVA Grant. Sounds like a good return on your money.
Every day people come into our offices and tell us they just found out about their VA benefits. Every day they call asking questions. They come to us for help even if another organization is representing them.
Every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year they look to us for help.
Thanks for allowing us to help them.
VVA
Missouri State Council
Service Officer Program
FYE 9-30-09
The VVA Chapter 317's Service Officer Program is in its third year of existence. Every year the program has received grant money from the VSF which enabled us to receive matching funds from the Missouri Veterans Commission and the Missouri Vietnam Veterans Foundation. With these funds we have been able to employ three full time VSOs, a part time Director and one part time assistant. We also have one VVA trained volunteer Service Coordinator and a number of volunteers who assist the service officers and our clients.
Chief Service Officer Wil Dailey, a long time VVA Service Officer, works out of the Veterans Center in Springfield, Missouri, which is housed in a building donated by Greene County, Missouri. Wil receives support from his Chapter 952, and we hope to train his #1 volunteer, Jerry Ross as a service officer next year. Wil does a lot of outreach with the Native American Community and the National Native American Association considers VVA as their official Service Officers.
Kay Booth works out of the VVA Chapter 317 offices in Kansas City, Missouri. Kay is the wife of a Vietnam Veteran and received her accreditation in December 08. She took over a position which already had hundreds of claims and has had a steady increase in clients since the first of the year. The increase was so large that we needed to hire a part time assistant, Jay Scarlett, to handle the appointments and research. Kay is also assisted by long time VVA Service Coordinator, Tom Weatherby. Tom volunteers his time working with clients developing "stressor letters" for PTSD claims. Kay is also assisted by numerous volunteers handling everything from answering phones to filing paperwork. Kay's outreach includes participating in local Veterans Employment and Benefit Fairs and many events at the Kansas City VA Med Center and Vet Center.
Our newest Service Officer is Mike Harp. Mike works out of a rented office in between the "Hill" and "Dogtown" areas of St. Louis. Mike's client load may not be as heavy as the others yet but he spends a large amount of time doing outreach at the St. Louis area VA Medical Centers. Mike also hand delivers all paperwork from the other service officers to the VARO and has made invaluable contacts while there. Hopefully in the future the VARO will have space where Mike can open a second office.
Part time Program Director and VVA 317 President, Randy Barnett oversees the personnel end of things and manages the VVA 317 offices. Volunteer and VVA 317 Treasurer Chuck Lear handles the finances and manages all the reports to our grantors.
We also receive voluntary help from the members of Veterans of Modern Warfare Chapter 1. They work closely with the newer veterans helping them negotiate their way through the VA system and the VA claims process.
Our hope for the near future is to increase the number of Service Officers to at least six. Once we have a second accredited service officer in Springfield, Wil Dailey would like to move to Columbia, Missouri where he could cover the Columbia/Jefferson City area. The two other new service officers would travel, one to cover the north part of the state and the second to cover the southeastern part.
We depend on the grant money and support we receive from VVA and the VSF to continue the important work we do for Vietnam, WWII, Korean, and Desert Storm Veterans. In addition, everyday more and more of the OEF/OIF Veterans are looking to us for assistance.
I started working for the Vietnam Veterans of America, as a paid employee, on October 1, 2007. It was planned that I was to work along side J.D. Wright to handle the 650-700 clients we were responsible for. Within a coupe of months, J.D. was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer and was unable to work after Christmas of that year. I had been working with J_D. about a year before being hired and was able to step in and accomplish a lot of the basics of the position. He had trained me on entering information into VIMS and doing intake interviews with new clients. With my extensive background in computers and programming, I was able to quickly pick up on the rest of the software, including forms and reports.
One of my first clients was months behind on his bills and had received a letter from his mortgage company that they would start foreclosure in January 2008_ We spoke to his mortgage company and told them that the veteran had applied for VA benefits and his claim was given to a DRO that specializes in hardship claims. The veteran went for a hearing and received part of his benefits in March 2008 which was able to catch him up on his mortgage payments. With some further evidence, he was awarded 100% Permanent and Total in May 2008.
Another veteran had been working with us for about four years and had a hearing in November 2007. Due to the evidence that he and J.D. Wright presented at that hearing, this veteran was awarded 100% in January 2008.
In January, I was frequently on the phone with our service officer located east of Springfield, MO. She was able to assist me with some particular problems that I hadn't run across before or claims that I did not know the status of. She traveled to Kansas City the second week of February to give me some one-on-one training for three days, then returned to her office. She took some files with her to represent a few of our veterans at
their hearings in St. Louis at the VARO. Unfortunately, she decided to resign a few days before their hearings and it was left to me to represent these veterans. I had absolutely no knowledge of these veterans' claim files or how to represent them, and she refused to return those files to us for over five weeks. I was left with no information and no one to represent these veterans.
During those three very stressful days, I was introduced to one of the Decision Review Officers, who spoke with me and assured me that she would show me how to research the veterans' files at the VARO and develop a plan to support these veterans. She has been an invaluable resource for me since that time. I have represented many veterans at their BVA Travel Board hearings and DRO hearings, both at the St. Louis Regional Office and
the one in Wichita, KS. She was able to provide me with positive feedback on how well I accomplished those tasks and I was able to learn quite a bit from the judges and DROs.
I have had extreme problems with the VARO in Wichita, KS. They will not provide any names or phone numbers for personnel that might be able to help me get the right information to them concerning my clients' claims. At a hearing in August, I was able to get one phone number and first name of an individual in the reception area. The most that he is able to provide me is the same information that I would get if I dialed the `800' number. This created a real problem when I was trying to find out how to get a very young Gulf War veteran the VA benefits that he was entitled to.
He was rated at 80% coming out of the army in December 2007. About a year later, I received information that the VA determined he was unable to handle his own benefits. He was living with his parents and my DRO contact in St. Louis suggested that I have the veteran and his father sign a statement that the veteran's father was willing to become the veteran's fiduciary.
It took another six months before the veteran finally started receiving his benefits and our office did not receive a copy of the paperwork which awarded the veteran his benefits with his father being the fiduciary. It has been extremely difficult to find out exactly what the Kansas VARO needs in order to complete a claim properly. There is also no way to contact them if we need to reschedule a hearing due to the veteran being in the hospital, etc.
Despite the upheaval that has happened in the last year, the Kansas City office has managed to get 47 veterans their 100% disability compensation. While not all of these veterans are at the Permanent and Total rating, this office has almost averaged one 100% rating per week. I believe that says a lot considering all of the extra training that I was accomplishing while trying to handle all of our clients. Most of that training was done on my own time, without pay, because it needed to be accomplished in order to represent these veterans to the best of my ability.
Another one of our veterans came to us because no other organization would take his claim. We've worked with him for over six years, sending additional evidence on numerous occasions. Phone calls were made to be sure his disability check went to his new address on time. We finally received word in August that he received his 100% Permanent and Total at the end of July, which enabled him to get a new, reliable vehicle for his wheelchair.
Steve Wente was my administrative assistant from January through September and was an asset when talking to the veterans on the phone to determine what their questions were so that I could find answers to those questions. Unfortunately, without participating in a service officer training course, he wasn't able to assist me with the actual claims paperwork and limited my effectiveness with the hundreds of claims that our office is responsible for. Without the support needed to handle the hundreds of claims that the Kansas City office requires, I still feel that I was able to accomplish quite a lot.
Hopefully, the program will be more efficient this next year as we have a volunteer that wants to assist us in getting all of our files electronically stored for ease of access and record keeping.
Laura Sallee
Veterans Service Officer
Vietnam Veterans of America
This year we lost Service Officer JD Wright after a short fight with lung cancer.
VVA
Missouri State Council
Service Officer Program
FYE 9-30-06
The VVA Missouri State Council Service Representative program is well into its fifth year of operation. The Vietnam Veterans Assistance Fund has provided a grant that provides funds that have enabled the Missouri State Council to employ three full time accredited Veteran Service Representatives (VSR).
There are three fully functioning Veterans Service Representative offices throughout Missouri; they are located in Springfield, Summersville, and Kansas City. Each VSR has an office equipped with the latest VIMS programs that is used to track claim progress and the amounts of benefits. A unique VA system One-VPN is modern technology at its best. It is used to link VVA’s office computer to the VA Regional Office through a secure Virtual network. This is especially useful where our offices are great distances from the VA Regional Office. This system allows bidirectional communication at any time with the VVA and VA on a specific claim.
With the grant from the Vietnam Veterans Assistance Fund we have continued to get matching funds from the Missouri Vietnam Veterans Foundation and the Missouri Veterans Commission. The grant funds are only used to pay wages for the Veteran Service Representatives, travel expenses, office expenses, and equipment and supplies. We are fortunate that office space has been donated and is not an expense.
Community outreach includes speaking engagements, participation at veterans benefit fairs, homeless standowns, and various events where veterans may participate in large numbers. Benefit fairs continue to draw disabled veterans from local communities to learn about their possible VA benefits. The Springfield Office has received publicity by the local Vietnam veterans sponsoring a stock car with VVA contact information. Kansas City in its urban environment attracts a significant number of walk-in veterans who may not have otherwise been served. The Summersville office is in a rural area where other Veteran Organizations do not provide service.
Our three Veteran Service Representatives have been able to increase the amount of claims for disabled veterans each year. This year over $9 million in tax free dollars have been awarded to disabled veterans in Missouri as a result of the strong efforts by our Veterans Service Representatives. They continue to do outreach in their communities and to do even more in the next fiscal year.
