As Russia's war on Ukraine continues, an American nonprofit is helping Ukraine support its veterans.
America’s Warrior Partnership is leveraging the model it uses to assist veterans in the United States to help Ukraine reintegrate its veterans back into civilian life, said AWP Co-Founder and Chief of Programs and Initiatives Cheree Tham.
“Ukrainians as a whole are united, they are one family,” she said. “They are recognizing as a whole that [the veteran] population is going to contribute back into society and the civilian sector and they bring so much to their community, as do our veterans.”
According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, at least 38,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been injured, with 57,000 suffering severe amputations, as a result of the ongoing conflict. Like the United States, Ukraine is actively facing the challenge of reintegrating its injured service members back into civilian life, Tham said.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Veterans, the equivalent of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, began in 2014. Four years later, representatives from the U.S., Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom were invited to a summit in Kyiv to meet and share their best practices about how their governmental entities support veterans.
Tham participated in that summit, which was almost immediately followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and then Russia's invasion.
“We have continued to advise Ukraine on how to support their veterans, sharing some of the things we do, sharing some of the hurdles that we have to try to help them not have those same hurdles,” she continued.
America’s Warrior Partnership’s mission is to prevent veteran suicide through a number of initiatives across the United States. It uses a four-step plan to connect, educate, advocate and collaborate with veterans, their families, caregivers and the communities that support them.
“The model is to find the veterans in the community, build a relationship with them, find the direct service providers in that community to build that relationship with them,” Tham said.
Feedback on the model found that veterans knew about the resources in their communities but not nationally. That led to the creation of the AWP Network, which pushes national resources to the local level. AWP’s Corporate Veteran Initiative implements the same model, except within the business world.
Tham said the ultimate goal is to improve the quality of life for veterans and to end veteran suicide by empowering local communities to serve them proactively and holistically before a crisis occurs - the same goal that Ukraine has for its veterans.
“It had gotten to a point where our ability to be able to help them with that met the threshold where we needed to do what’s called a community assessment,” she said.
The assessments involve identifying demographics and the programs and services veterans are utilizing, Tham said. The community assessment in Ukraine looked at several communities where they were interested in implementing the AWP model.
AWP recently teamed with Metinvest, a group of steel and mining companies that operates in the U.S. and Ukraine, to help transition thousands of its employees from the battlefield back to the civilian sector.
“They are in the middle of a war and when it's over, they are going to be ready to embrace their veterans,” Tham said.
To learn more about America’s Warrior Partnership, visit here.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.