The Lab | OPM x VEO: Community Veterans Engagement Boards (CVEBS) Project
CVEBs Conversation: Partial Transcript
Aaron Stienstra (AS): So I’ll start by saying today I’m speaking with Ana Monroe she’s a service designer and human innovation fellow at the lab the Office of Personnel Management. She and I are both on the Insight & Design Team at the Veterans Experience Office (VEO) in the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). And we’re going to be speaking about a project that we worked on together around community engagement at V.A. So Hello Ana.
Ana Monroe (AM): Hi! Live from New York!
Context
AS: [So,] I’d like to just set up some of the context around the project. Like what you know as as you learned about it initially what was the context for this for this project. Like sort of the community side but also from the veteran’s experience office.
AM: I think that taking the first part of that question from the community side… VA took what I think of as the San Diego model, which is the model of community engagement with the veterans, that came out of a grassroots evolution in the San Diego Metropolitan area and scaled across the country very quickly. They scaled it from a single community veterans engagement board in San Diego to over 100 [ in one calendar year].
And so at a certain point VEO had to say, so what are what are they all doing, where are they all emotionally and functionally, and what do they all need. And so it came the mandate came heavily from the VEO side and it was mostly around figuring out.
AS: Do you know what was the genesis of that particular set up in San Diego and why was that interesting to the Veterans Experience Office?
AM: In my understanding, the origins of that were completely organic and grassroots…The three heads of the V.A. administrations, that is, Veterans Healthcare, Veterans Benefits and National Cemeteries,… self-selected 20 years ago started getting together and talking about their their problems and the issues they’re facing and to start trying to coordinate kind of services and efforts…
At the same time they brought in VSO the veteran service organizations and representatives from other veteran groups. There are many and created this this symbiotic relationship. Organically where there is very little sort of ego where like “We own this. We own that VHA does” [and] the VSOs do that other thing and it was more like well we want to care for veterans and we realize that we live in a networked society. But it was very very grassroots. There was no there was no kind of prescription for this.
AS: And then why do you think that the Insight & Design Team was asked to work on this with various people at the Veterans Experience Office once they established this this need? Why was our team asked to work on it with them?
AM: I think that we were asked to work with them because by default designers are what I call translators or sort of connecting personality. In traditional industries a lot of times designers are the ones who talked to the business people and the engineers and we were kind of code switch very naturally because we talk a lot through drawings, renderings, illustrations, inspiration boards. We are we have more tools than just words to get people on board so that even if we don’t understand the jargon or we don’t understand the particular nuances of someone’s speech, because we have these other tools where we’re able to communicate across lines…
Yeah and I think that the core strength of designers and you can laugh at this if you want public to a certain extent we are weirdos to everyone. Like even when you and I were in those rooms with people the way we dress the way we interact the world the fact that I say totally a lot. It sets us apart in a non-threatening way which means people get out of their silos because we are not we are not really competing with anyone because we’re just sort of in a different place.
AS: Ok so let’s move to the process part of this…so when we started this project what was your thinking about this approach and how did you estimate you know that the process would go like?
AM: Well so I think that this requires a little bit of background and maybe a meta statement about how you and I work, which is…I’m a skeptic. So when I was first asked this project I looked at it and how well this seems like a lot of work. And I was skeptical that we would be able to find any cohesion a these groups because I do believe that you know the human experience is is a beautiful depthless myriad of individual interpretations, physical and mental realities, emotional nuances….and it was like “Oh well I don’t really know if we’re going to be able to find something that can be systematized across these groups.” But, that being said, you’re much more kind of optimistic than I am. And I think that that that really worked out well for us because we had these two these two approaches. And I was willing to try.
Because to me this effort of community veterans engagement at the levels of V.A. administrations all the way down to the individual veterans who are on these boards and to the local and national veterans service organizations is really compelling.
So I would say I went into this project with a large dose of skepticism which is native to me but a willingness and a desire to engage because…I couldn’t know for sure that we would not find something that could be systematized at all or did not find any patterns. So if I had any doubt at all in the possible outcome could be positive for a single veteran, or for a group of veterans, or for a subset of veterans, then it’s worth it to try.
Challenge & Project Set Up
AS: What was your understanding of like what the core challenge was that we were going out to look at?
AM: I actually love this core challenge because the core challenge very literally was like, “Go to these boards and ask them, like…What’s up with you?” and… that was the whole thing. And there’s nothing I love more than having like a lot of creative freedom. So was like “Yeah, OK, I can I can go to these boards and ask what’s up with you!”
Literally, after this these year long drive to set these boards up, which was taken on and completed by VEO in a great way, they really did need to know like what is the current state of the boards and where do they want to go. And a lot of the boards really like “We are now a board- Where do we want to go?” They need some help sort of doing that future thinking, so that was that that was the approach.
AS: You know we figured out that the way that we would do this was to go out and do workshops with different different sites across the country…do you know or do you recall like how those sites were selected and how many? Why [did we choose] to do 5 versus you know 6 or 7.
AM: …We chose those specific boards because they represented a very broad interpretation of types of places in the United States. So San Diego it was the original board we went there…We went to Pittsburgh because it’s kind of a Rust Belt industrial city [with] lots of veterans [and a] very strong veteran population. We went to Pensacola, Florida, [which] is a surprisingly remote place…Des Moines because it is literally in the middle of the country, and New Orleans because New Orleans is just different from everywhere. There’s nowhere like New Orleans. It’s in a lot of ways an outlier. So we chose these places as…a way to get, very broadly, a cross section of veterans and gauge forces that might exist across the country
Project Workshops
AS: For these different workshops like how were they structured, and what did we do?
AM: The first day was very sort of current state-y. It’s very like “OK you know what’s up with you” And then the second day was broadly future state. And in that we used a bunch of the tools that our team developed and that were developed before all of us came on to help people see where they were.
AS: And so those tools that you talked about you know two of them for sure were the veterans journey map and there was a blank version of a journey map.
AM: One thing about the use of the tools I remember [is that in] Pensacola it was particularly interesting because what they found [through mapping their services on the blank journey map was that] almost all of their services were… very clustered in the years immediately following disengagement in the military. So relatively young veterans…in their 20s or 30s.
And [their services] were almost entirely reactive. So they reacted to a crisis point or a need. There were no point where [their services were] preventative. And I remember the room sort of [looking at that map and] being like “Oh! Well, that can’t be right.”
AS: Yeah we found that out in San Diego as well, even though they were more mature. By looking at the map and seeing sort of what was already there, these different people that don’t work in V.A. or aren’t part of V.A. could see like “Oh I see that’s what that’s what he is doing, but this is a gap that we feel that you don’t have accounted for here…” and then that [gap can] end.
Learnings
AS: What were some…big learnings from across the different workshops?
AM: I think [one thing that] was really valuable about that experience from our [VA] side was what I said at the top of this talk, which is every community veterans board is a reflection of a very distinct community that is different from the other communities. In V.A., we do have a sort of monolithic approach where because there’s a heavy bias toward a systemization [in] such a large organization. And unfortunately you just can’t do that [in community organization]. And so while I was definitely surprised [by] workshop day or days, I was really happy…[that] people learned that it is more about the community calling the shots than what VA can offer.
AM: [Another big learning] I had is how effective it can be when the directors of the administration’s legitimately and in good faith come together with veterans from the community. That is a force multiplier. That was far beyond what I got.
[A third learning] came out of it came out of Pensacola where we had a heavy representation from the county level. And how useful it can be when counties especially in rural areas like Pensacola have the veteran’s best interest at heart. And how what a huge sort of limit it is on their ability to be effective when they don’t talk to the V.A. administrations because they were essentially constructing work arounds for all of these problems that veterans were encountering or coming up against. And if the systems had been able to be a little bit more finely integrated I think that they wouldn’t have to stress out so much. And when they met each other things kind of there I think that they were a little bit like OK you are a person. This is not like adversarial.
AS: And what did you learn from veterans during these workshops?
AM: You know veterans are biased towards action, because the military is biased towards action. One of the things that I learned was how to talk about patience with…how do you make change across a timeline of process as opposed to a single instance event? So you know in the military you go get training you get training and then you’re trained. But when you’re trying to make change when you’re trying to make change at a system level across multiple individuals all of them with different spheres different values different strengths and weaknesses, it really does have to be a negotiation especially when you’re talking about multiple systems coming together. And so one of the things I learned about with veterans is you know driving towards the goal of helping other veterans is a core value. However that drive does need to be kind of paced out and mitigated across time.
I want to make sure we capture some of the things that happened after the synthesis…what were some of the takeaways? What came after that, in the next few weeks and months?
The hypothesis that we had going in each Community is its own individual entity with us through the weaknesses, biases, fears, hopes, and they’re all sort of overlapping, but they’re not the same, so there was a huge diversity of Interest amongst in the data that we collected.
[Additionally], I created qualitative data visualizations out of [the data]. We found points of commonality, and I was severely scared that there would be no points of commonality and it would all just be random and nothing buildable would happen. But there was lots of points of commonality and definitely points of greater and lesser interest. I’ll use New Orleans as an example. New Orleans’ statements were so heavily weighed on their care for thier community history, that it literally broke the layout.
So what that tells us is that, if VA wants to pilot a program based on community history, for whatever reason, the they should probably pilot that program in New Orleans as your outlier in terms of positive. [But] there were almost no mentions of community history in Des Moines…so, if you’re going to pilot a program that deals with community history, maybe you also pilot in Des Moines as your other outlier. So we really were able to map places for VA to pilot interventions based on that community’s wants and needs.
I think the best thing from the I&D side, non-Veteran side was the fact that truth is a space, and not a single point. We can get around [truth] or near it, but…the veterans truth is not a single thing.
AS: If you bring it back to the original challenge of how do we make this next generation Community Veteran Engagement Boards, do you think [the project] could be effective?
I think it could from the VEO side, if the storybook is read? But…it’s really hard to collect data and then build on it. That can be really daunting, but yeah, sure it could. Not from you and I, because we don’t have the power or position to do so, but other people could.
AS: Thanks, Ana
AM: Thank you, Aaron!
