Our Vision
The military and veteran community is served by a connected and supportive network of organizations working together to enrich their lives.
It’s more important now than ever that we work together to support the military and veteran community. We are committed to our mission of encouraging community, building strategic coalition, and fostering a data-driven understanding of the needs of the military and veteran community in Massachusetts.
Our guiding principles
We identify challenges affecting the veteran community.
We brainstorm solutions to alleviate these issues.
We develop a culture of continuous improvement and learning.
We leverage and build on existing resources.
We work to align organizations to allow for maximum impact.
We foster sustainable, mutually beneficial collaboration.
COLLABORATE.vet
In response to some of the core gaps and needs identified by participants, the Veterans Collaborative has developed several resources and tools to support efficiency and outreach over time. We gather these and launched our website in 2016 as an interactive hub for participants and others to access relevant information, resources, training, events, data, and learnings from summits and other initiatives. Pages on our site outlined below are always evolving and open to input.
COLLABORATE.vet gathers targeted and current local and virtual event listings, information, resource trackers, and directories relevant to various service areas and resource networks. You can directly update the shared calendar appearing throughout the site, as well as resource trackers whenever possible. Making contributions increases efficiency of outreach efforts and saves everyone in the network the energy of creating and maintaining various resource lists –– freeing up everyone’s time to focus on their individual missions and impact.
we are stronger together
We’ve facilitated 30 in person community summits in the Boston Metro area, laying the groundwork for the Veterans Collaborative over five years from January 2015 to January 2020. We pivoted quickly in March 2020, hosting more than 65 virtual collaboration summits to support service providers navigating changing needs and demand for services. We continue these summits monthly, creating space for connections, information- and resource-sharing, and increasing use of various shared resources and virtual platforms by service providers.
Collaborate with us!
Service providers and others who offer services or support to the military and veteran community in Massachusetts can join our monthly virtual collaboration summits––click here on the 1st Wednesday of the month at 3:30pm to join us via Zoom.
We create this space to share information and resources to support resiliency in our communities and align our efforts responding to the emerging and longstanding needs of service members, veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors.
We’ve been opening summits with introductions from new participants and updates from local, state, or federal agencies with something to share before offering a quick introduction to shared resources available and opening up the floor for any other service providers.
If you’re new to the collaborative, sign in to be notified about upcoming summits & connect yourself to the network directory.
Use the pages under the Collaborate tab to connect, access collaborative tools, and learn how to use and contribute to shared resources and the network directory. You can also access our shared slack. Slack is the digital workspace that powers our collaboration, bringing all the pieces and the people into one place so we can get things done. Connect on slack to collaborate within and across organizations, share events, resources, ideas, requests for help or brainstorming, and engage in discussions (all while freeing up everyone’s inboxes!).
Support our work!
We incorporated as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization in June 2020 to support our growth. Between 2021–2022, we distributed nearly $65,000 in $50 grocery store gift cards to empower providers in our network to fight food insecurity in the military and veteran community.
We are an all volunteer organization––your support will help us continue our mission. Donate now to help us build capacity and fund our food security initiative to get more grocery store gift cards out to service members, veterans, and families in need through our networks.