QUESTION
What are the outreach efforts for Cold War veterans by the New York City Department of Veterans Services?
0:27:26
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160 sec
The New York City Department of Veterans Services employs various communication methods to reach out to Cold War veterans.
- A weekly newsletter is emailed to approximately 10,000 subscribers, including information on benefits and events.
- Their presence at community events is increased to engage with veterans who may not be digitally connected.
- The Mission VetCheck program offers wellness check calls to veterans citywide.
- New initiatives include text messaging for event alerts and distribution of letters to community boards and senior center directors to disseminate agency information.
Robert Holden
0:27:26
What particular outreach did you DBS do to co war veterans of this peacetime era.
James Hendon
0:27:33
I'm gonna pass it to to CASK, to to answer, but I I got to underscore, we're trying our best to make our folks feel like you're no different from your brothers who did deploy.
0:27:43
For us, it's you took the oath.
0:27:44
We put hands on you.
0:27:45
We love you.
0:27:46
I wanna say that, but I'm gonna defer to Cass.
0:27:48
On the comms.
Sandra Alvarez
0:27:49
Thank you, commissioner, and good morning, Jerr Holden, and members of the committee.
0:27:52
We're very fortunate to have 2 veterans on our communications team.
0:27:58
So they engage the community with a sense of cultural competency, and perspective of those who served, which we appreciate.
0:28:08
And so we have a few key pillars that we make sure our communications around.
0:28:14
Number 1 is our weekly newsletter.
0:28:16
It's sent out via email.
0:28:17
We've got about 10,000 subscribers on that newsletter list right now.
0:28:21
That's a content rich communication.
0:28:24
It changes weekly.
0:28:26
It's got information about various benefits and events happening throughout the city.
0:28:31
We also try to amp up our presence at community events because we know some of our Cold War veterans and certainly older generations Maybe they're not all digitally connected.
0:28:42
So we try to have it on the ground presence and do outreach at public engagement events, which is another reason why we've added that metric to the agency's mayor's management report.
0:28:52
It's a public engagement metric that we're now reporting on.
0:28:56
And then we also have a campaign going called Mission VetCheck.
0:29:01
It's a program that we started actually during the pandemic, but we relaunched it again last year, and that is a phone call campaign where we leverage volunteers to make wellness check calls to our veterans across the city and, of course, Cold War veterans are included in that group.
0:29:18
So that's some phone contact that we try to make every every week.
0:29:23
And then we've also used text messaging.
0:29:25
That's something that we just introduced last year through the agency.
0:29:30
That's text messaging.
0:29:31
That's about the events that we have going on.
0:29:34
We them about our quarterly engagement sessions, which we've just started hosting last quarter of this year.
0:29:40
And then in the beginning of this year, we also rolled out letters to the community boards, the council members, and to the senior center directors to just disseminate information about DBS basic information about the agency so that folks know that we exist.
0:29:57
They have our our basic website information, phone number, etcetera.
0:30:01
So that's been a useful tool for us.
0:30:02
So those are the different sort of ways that we engage the community.
Robert Holden
0:30:06
Alright.