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Strategic Objective
Enhance VA’s Partnerships with Federal, State, Private Sector, Academic Affiliates, Veteran Service Organizations and Non-Profit Organizations
Strategic Objective
Overview
Summary:
While VA is not the sole provider of benefits, services, and resources to Veterans and eligible beneficiaries, we hold ourselves accountable for each Veteran’s success, no matter who provides assistance. To provide Veterans and eligible beneficiaries an integrated, coordinated, personalized portfolio of benefits and services efficiently and effectively, we must improve our communication, coordination, and relationships with our partners in other Federal agencies; state, tribal, and local governments; VSOs; MSOs; academic affiliates; unions; nonprofits; and private industry. We must develop a partnership culture that entails trust, transparency, mutual benefit, responsibility, productivity, and accountability. Increased public-private partnership opportunities empower staff with effective tools and resources for collaborations, and allow for building open innovation platforms.
Strategies:
VA will leverage responsible and productive partnership opportunities that can supplement VA services and help fill urgent or emerging gaps in services. We will pursue opportunities for partnering with organizations that can best provide what we cannot or should not.
VA will establish a partnership award program to acknowledge and recognize successful partnerships in various organizational and service categories.
VA will foster stronger collaboration and information exchange with across the spectrum of care, benefits and services providers.
Read Less...Progress Update
Final Assessment: VA, in consultation with the Office of Management and Budget, determined that performance toward this objective is making noteworthy progress.
Achievements: VA established the MyVA Strategic Partnerships (SP) Team in order to leverage resources external to the VA on an effective and consistent basis, at all levels of the Department, to improve the Veteran experience while enhancing productivity and efficiency. The SP Team formed an internal workgroup with more than 25 representatives from across the Department. The workgroup met weekly to share best practices, new proposals, problem solve challenges and bring individual Administrations and Staff Offices together for updates. The SP Team published VA Directive 0008 on May 29, 2015, that provides fundamental guidance for exploring, establishing, managing, and evaluating public-private partnerships for all employees.[1] The SP Team began creating a toolkit with needed resources to better equip and empower staff. The toolkit includes a departmental approved Memorandum of Agreement template, SP training course, internal website, non-profit due diligence worksheet draft, and several others in development - to standardize, streamline, and simplify the partnership process. In September 2015, the SP Team launched a SP 101 Training Course for all employees to build and increase their knowledge and awareness of relevant partnership information, strategies, and capabilities. The SP Team is beta-testing a relational database that will manage, track, and provide performance reports on external engagement activities and partnerships, expected to launch in summer FY 2016.[2] The SP Team has engaged regularly in meetings and discussions with external stakeholders leading to the formation of new and expanded partnerships – including the Summer of Service campaign where VA set a goal to serve 15,000 Veterans and family members from Memorial Day until Labor Day FY 2015. Through these new, expanded, and reenergized partnerships this goal was exceeded by 182 percent, thereby serving over 42,322 Veterans and family members.
In addition, VA is strengthening services to Veterans in local communities by partnering with private sector organizations in order to build networks of local Veteran support through MyVA Communities. MyVA Communities is currently working to train employers in the hiring and support of Veterans, holding employment summits, and learning resource hubs. They will continue to develop and partner with stakeholders and have set a goal of establishing
100 MyVA Communities by December 2016. They also set a goal to, “Reduce the average duration (weeks) of unemployment for Veterans within the first fifteen (15) months of separation by 20 percent in all metropolitan areas targeted for MyVA Communities.” Address key economic growth areas and targeted at-risk Veteran populations across the country through community development efforts.”
VA executed 17 active public-private partnerships including those with Bob Woodruff, LinkedIn, and Coursera. Twenty-eight additional local and national partnerships are currently in development, including partnerships that involve joint outreach and advocacy efforts, hiring/training commitments, enhancements to the VA’s Veterans Employment Center, entrepreneurship cultivation, accelerated learning programs, cooperation with local communities, and other employment-related initiatives.
Challenges: None identified
[1] http://www1.va.gov/vapubs/viewPublication.asp?Pub_ID=803&FType=2
[2] http://www.va.gov/opa/myva/docs/myva_integrated_plan.pdf
