About three months after her announcement on social media, state Representative Michelle Salzman will help cut the ribbon Friday morning on a new military and veteran resource center in Santa Rosa County.
The new VetCV Mission Next Center, the first of its kind in the state, will be located on the Pensacola State College Milton campus.
It’s a free, one-stop hub that supports veterans, active-duty service members, and their families in Santa Rosa County.
Salzman said the idea is to create a collaborative care network to serve this segment of the population.
“Currently, if you want some sort of support as a veteran, active-duty military or family member, you would go to a segmented organization, whether it be the veteran resource officer that the state funds at the county level, or it's your local Am Vets or your American Legion,” Salzman began. “You know, we have over 100 veteran nonprofits in this area alone that are actively engaged with veteran and military families, but none that bring us together and say, here's where everybody can operate from in a place that's collaborative, not competitive.”
According to Salzman, the new center is designed to supplement, not to compete with or duplicate the case management offered by local Veterans Services offices. It will offer in-person guidance through Patriot Navigators who will help identify needs and connect people with a variety of resources such as career preparation, job placement, financial assistance and housing referrals.
“So if you're a spouse and you come in there and you say, my husband is a veteran and he needs a wheelchair ramp,” said Salzman, offering an example.
In this case, she says the veteran services officer may be able to point the veteran’s family in the right direction of a nonprofit that can help. But the two part-time Patriot Navigators at the Mission Next Center will be able to take a deeper dive with the trusted partner or nonprofit that provides those benefits, by calling and connecting them directly with the family member of the veteran.
“Then follow up and say, ‘Hey, did you get your wheelchair ramp? How do you feel about your service?’ So, the idea is to create a collaborative care model where we have that one-stop shop that you can call," Salzman said. "Maybe you want to attend a Defenders of Freedom golf tournament, and you don't know when those are, well, we'll have the Defenders of Freedom phone number. We'll call them and say, ‘hey, we have these people that want to participate.’”
Friday marks the official opening of the Mission Next Center, with PSC President Ed Meadows providing a dedicated space (in building 4200) on the Milton campus.
“We have an entire building with a conference room, event space, many office spaces, storage, outside venue space; that was all donated by the college,” Salzman said. “They're going to cover the cost of the building, power, electricity, telephones, cable, all the things. Internet will all be covered by the college. All they want us to do is make sure we have people there that are giving the resources and that we're letting veterans come in and utilize that space.”
Beyond the building, Salzman said the mothership of the Mission Next Center is VetCV, which will oversee operations.
This is where Niels Andersen comes in. Andersen is CEO and founder of VetCV and founder and chairman of the VetCV Foundation. The Mission Next Center is an initiative under the nonprofit foundation.
VetCV is based on MedCV, software that Andersen and his team built for health systems around the country to recruit physicians. The site helped doctors manage and track all their credentials and certifications.
“We took that platform and repurposed it for veterans and their families and active military so that you can store all your military records, your health records, and anything else that's important in one secure environment,” Andersen said. “We call it the Vault, the VetTCV vault. So now you can have all the things that are important to you in one place, so you can always retrieve them and never lose them.”
VetCV Vault website and app are always available. The Mission Next Center is really VetCV in person.
“A lot of what we have learned, and what we continue to learn, is that people need people,” he said, noting the importance of eye contact and our body language. “You can call somebody and we're going to be there, or you can come into the Mission Next Center. And I think that caring and that community service, every single one of our partners that are going to participate in this feel the same way.”
Although the Mission Next Center is not clinical, the organization can also help address the mental health of Veterans.
“If they need someone that they can talk to and just trust for a minute, then we can show that we really do care, we can help them, and we can get them in touch with Lakeview Center or Baptist or West Florida or Sacred Heart or Banyan Health or anyone else or counselors that are in our network,” said Andersen.”
Rep. Salzman said she got the idea for the Mission Next center after visiting a similar facility in Central Florida four years ago. After working through a few different versions and different partners, she says they’ve finally established a model that works in two essential ways.
“One, we can sustain it quite easily,” she stated, adding that current funding models and contributions from PSC cover most operational costs. “And two, we can replicate it throughout the state of Florida, which is what the Florida Department of Veterans Affairs wants to do, as well as what the Mission Next organization would like to do.”
Replication of the VetCV Mission Next centers is already on the table locally, with PSC President Meadows looking to establish locations at his Century and Warrington campuses.
The ribbon-cutting on the first Milton military and veteran resource center will be held on Friday morning from 9:30 to noon in Building 4200.
The VetCV Foundation is hosting a fundraiser Saturday evening featuring Navy Veteran and motivational speaker Rudy Ruettiger, whose life story inspired the motion picture, "Rudy," and Capt. Chaundra Newman, Commanding Officer of NAS Pensacola. The dinner will be held at the Pensacola Yacht Club beginning at 5:30 p.m.
