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Another year has passed and the Veterans can say we had another successful year. With all the things we have accomplished we can only look forward to 2008 with anticipation of doing more than we did last year. This committee is determined to being an active part of the community we live in. Doing the things we do at the VA Hospital in Salisbury with the Specialized In Patient Unit, to working with the VA Volunteer Services in other areas of the VA Hospital. We have also started working closely with our brothers and sisters from the Veterans Committee of UAW Local 5287 in High Point. They started their Veterans Committee in 2007 and we have taken them under our wing to work with us at the VA Hospital as well and we look forward to doing more combined in Salisbury in the coming year.
In 2007 we also continued our support of Operation Stand Down in Nashville Tennessee. This organization works year round with homeless Veterans. In 2004 the Region 8 Veterans Council adopted OSD Nashville as one of our official groups we support throughout the year. Our Veterans Committee has been fortunate to be able to send people to Nashville each year to help with the set up and running of the three day stand down, and it has been told to us that without the Region 8 Veterans coming down to help they don’t know how they would be able to get the work done that needs to be completed to get ready to accept the Veterans on Friday.
In 2007 we also started our work with Operation Stand Down Greensboro. This group was in their third year of holding a one day stand down. They were more than happy to have us on board with our experience at working a three day stand down in Nashville. They have opened up to us and allowed us to set on the board that makes all the decisions for how the stand down should operate. This coming year we will take a more hands on approach to this by starting our monthly meetings with OSD Greensboro in January to start planning the 2008 Stand Down in Greensboro, to be held in September. We have decided that this year we will provide a toiletry kit to each of the homeless Veterans that comes through the one day event. We will start taking donations for this in February and in that newsletter we will have a list of items needed and a picture of one of the toiletry bags. We will have to put together 200 of these kits to be successful and I know we will.
The Veterans stayed busy in 2007 helping out wherever we could. We did a clean up day for the Methodist Church in Cleveland, participated in Faith Fourth of July parade, Cleveland Christmas parade, and also were in attendance at the Veterans Day events at the VA Hospital. We helped out with the Christmas party for the patients in the VA Hospital and held our second annual Christmas Dinner/Party for our guys in the SIPU. In June at the Region 8 Veterans Council meeting, I was elected as the Vice Chairman of the Region 8 Council; this was a great honor for someone from a committee only three years old. This coming year we hope to continue with these events and participate in others as well. We will be hosting the formation meeting of the NC UAW Veterans Council in January. This will give us another outlet to get more UAW Veterans working in North Carolina. We hope to have a more active role in the Ride of Pride truck in May, but we have hoped to do that for three years now.
As always the Veterans Committee believes in full disclosure of what we have going on because without the help of the membership we cannot be successful. We have very little funds to work with in 08. We wiped out our accounts to help at the VA for Christmas. We will be holding fundraisers in the coming months. Also there are three events as of now that we will be asking the membership to send members to. First will be the Region 8 Veterans Council meeting in June, we will ask for four members to go. In August we will ask for four as well to attend the National Veterans Conference in Black Lake. In October is OSD Nashville and we will drop from six in the past to four this year, so as to get an extra member to Black Lake for training. All the work we do at OSD Greensboro we do on our own time and our own expense. We may ask the members for assistance when we approach the September stand down, that will be determined at a later date.
I am very proud of this committee and the hard and dedicated work of the members of it. We are successful because we work as a team; we try to get as many members training as possible and the ones who have had the opportunity for training shares what they have learned with the rest of the committee. Since the inception of this committee we have had seven members to receive training at the National Veterans Conference in Black Lake Michigan. We hope to continue getting members training this coming year sending new active members of the Veterans Committee in August for the training. This week long training is the reason we are doing the work we do at the VA Hospital, from classes on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at Black Lake we wanted to get involved in the PTSD ward and help out and that is what we have done when we adopted the SIPU (SPECIALIZED IN PATIENT UNIT).
We want to thank the membership for your support of the Veterans Committee. Without Veterans there is no freedom, and without freedom there is no Union. Thank a Veteran today.
In Solidarity, Kevin D Barnett Chairman Veterans Committee
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VETERANS
COMMITTEE 2007 WRAP UP