Sheriff asks Carson City to mobilize for veterans

Founding father Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Carson City Sheriff Ken Furlong has identified a problem in the state capital, and he has proposed a way to solve it, taking Franklin’s advice to heart.

“There are a ton of veterans in this town that no one knows they’re here,” Furlong told a panel of community members Thursday afternoon at the Carson City Sheriff’s Office, making specific note of the problem of homelessness among Carson City’s veteran population.

“Veterans should not be homeless,” Furlong said. “But it’s a repetitive problem we often hear.”

The panel consisted of veterans and veteran organization leaders, veteran support personnel, and myself, representative from the local media.

Furlong’s purpose in calling together the panel was to take the first steps in creating a local community network in Carson City that makes finding and accessing needed services easier for military veterans.

Noting the absence of a Veterans Administration presence in Carson City, Furlong said the biggest problem for veterans here is the fragmentation of services, which makes finding the right one for a veteran’s needs difficult.

“We’re not well connected in Carson City,” Furlong said. “It’s a sad state that we are in a city where the mayor is a veteran, the city manager is a veteran, and the sheriff is a veteran, and we don’t know where to go for services.”

But using the State of Nevada’s Green Zone Initiative, part of the Governor’s Interagency Council on Veterans Affairs, as a model for implementing a centralized network of service providers, Furlong hopes to change all of that.

He has proposed making Carson City a green zone for veterans.

“I have this vision of an Internet link on the Carson City government web site,” he said, “that takes you to a hub or wheel that has the answers.”

It would essentially be a launching pad tool, linking veterans directly with the support services they seek.

Furlong used a spoked wheel to illustrate what he envisions for the veteran community.

The individual spokes represent the service providers, who Furlong referred to as community stakeholders, and the hub of the wheel is the green zone of the network, helping it to turn and move.

Furlong noted that in Carson City, the spokes are already in place, and services available to veterans in the capital city are adequate.

There are veteran resources for employment, education, housing and health care that already exist, and service providers who deliver them.

But the problem is connecting them all onto the same wheel to better serve veterans.

“We don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” said panel member Liz Watson, Community Outreach Coordinator for the Nevada Department of Veterans Services.

The members are in place for a structure, Furlong said, but they need to be connected by a proper and strong foundation that holds them together.

“A wise man once told me to have a strong foundation before you step out onto it,” Furlong said.

Simplifying service access is the goal of the Green Zone Initiative, helping veterans navigate the complex web of help available to them. But getting stakeholders together and on the same page is the key, Furlong said.

The sheriff knows the value of good communication in coordinating tactics. He said the stakeholders need a way to better communicate with each other in delivering services to veterans and referring them to others.

When a team of officers is on different radio frequencies, coordinating tactics is virtually impossible. But when officers key in on the same frequency, communication is fluid and execution is more precise.

That is the Green Zone Initiative in a nutshell.

It is about getting the members of a veteran’s support team on the same radio frequency, so that communication is improved and service delivery smoother, more precise for the veteran.

Think of it as central dispatch for a team of first-responders. All calls for help go through dispatch, which delegates the calls to the responders in the field.

In similar fashion, Furlong’s idea would have all veterans’ needs flow through a central hub where communication is shared among service providers to accomplish the goal of helping veterans meet their needs.

What the initiative is not is more government, Furlong said. Rather, it’s the same government pooling its resources together with community stakeholders to improve service delivery for veterans.

Furlong assured Wednesday’s panel that both the mayor and the city manager are fully on board with this concept.

“I’m asking government to endorse a link to services,” he said. “We need to reach out and get all of the stakeholders in this community together.”

Military veterans have a hard enough time amalgamating back into civilian life, Furlong said, and we owe it to them to make their lives a little bit easier.

“Veterans struggle with services, and I’m sympathetic to that,” he said. “I think we can create a door that opens veterans to the world.”