It’s more important now than ever that we work together to support the military and veteran community. We are committed to our mission of encouraging community, building strategic coalition, and fostering a data-driven understanding of the needs of the military and veteran community in Massachusetts.

Our guiding principles

COLLABORATE.vet

In response to some of the core gaps and needs identified by participants, the Veterans Collaborative has developed several resources and tools to support efficiency and outreach over time. We gathered these and launched our website in 2016 as an interactive hub for participants and others to access relevant information, resources, training, events, data, and learnings from summits and other initiatives. Pages on our site outlined below are always evolving and open to input.

COLLABORATE.vet includes targeted and current local and virtual event listings, information, resource trackers, and directories relevant to local areas and broader resource networks. You can submit events to the calendar appearing throughout the site, as well as resource trackers whenever possible. Making contributions increases efficiency of outreach efforts and saves everyone in the network the energy of creating and maintaining various resource lists –– freeing up everyone’s time to focus on their individual missions and impact.

We Are Stronger Together

We’ve facilitated 30 in person community summits in the Boston Metro area, laying the groundwork for the Veterans Collaborative over five years from January 2015 to January 2020. We pivoted quickly in March 2020, hosting more than 65 virtual collaboration summits to support service providers navigating changing needs and demand for services. We continue these summits monthly, creating space for connections, information- and resource-sharing, and increasing use of various shared resources and virtual platforms by service providers.

Summits are a space to share information and resources to support resiliency in our communities and align our efforts responding to the emerging and longstanding needs of service members, veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors. We’ve been opening our virtual collaboration summits with introductions from new participants and updates from local, state, or federal agencies with something to share before offering a quick introduction to the collaborative’s resources and opening the floor for any other service providers.

If you’re new to the collaborative, sign in to be notified about upcoming summits & connect yourself to the network directory.

Use the pages under the Collaborate tab to connect, access collaborative tools, and learn how to use and contribute to shared resources and the network directory. You can also access our shared slack. Slack is the digital workspace that powers our collaboration, bringing all the pieces and the people into one place so we can get things done. Connect on slack to collaborate within and across organizations, share events, resources, ideas, requests for help or brainstorming, and engage in discussions (while freeing up everyone’s inboxes)!