The GI Go Fund Helps Veterans Secure Employment

Jack Fanous, Executive Director of the GI Go Fund and Co-Chair of New Jersey My VA, discusses how the GI Go Fund is working with veterans to ensure their military experience is appropriately reflected on their resumes to help them become employed.

9/25/17 #2077

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"Welcome to a series we've been doing for a while now. It's an important one. It's called Help for Our Heroes, we're producing here on location at the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey. We just had an important panel discussion with some experts, advocates, and people who are in the field of helping veterans everyday. And once again we're joined by our good friend Jack Fanous, who is Executive Director of GI Go Fund, and Co-Chair of the New Jersey... of the New Jersey MyVA. By the way, go back to the GI Go Fund for a second. New Jersey MyVA, what is it? So the Department of Veterans Affairs, about a year and a half ago, in response to some of the scandals that they were having, decided that they wanted to have a community initiative, that they wanted almost, an oversight. My organizations are nonprofits, as to what they're functions are, and how they can get resources out to the community. And they asked me to co-chair this board that is comprised of some of the people that were part of this panel discussion to discuss you know, what are some of the issues that veterans are facing? Where is the lack in coverage? Where is the lack in delivering services? And what can the VA do better? GI Go Fund, doing great work. What is it? So GI Go was founded eleven years ago, after one of my best friends was killed in Iraq. And we focus primarily on helping veterans find jobs. I mean we do a lot of work in housing, and homelessness, mental health, and some of the issues that a lot of the stories get focused on. But my number one goal was to help veterans find longstanding employment, good careers, because ultimately I believe that you won't really care if the VA is providing good or bad services if you're getting healthcare from your private employer. You're not gonna really think about homelessness if you have a house to... if you have a job to pay your mortgage. So ultimately if I can help someone find a job, I alleviate the majority of the other problems. Because the other problems are vast, and when trying to figure out how to fix the VA, or when trying to figure out how to handle some of these other things, it's a really long discussion. I mean if I can just find someone a job that's making 72,000 dollars a year, that stuff goes a way for mileage. Well let me ask you about that. Because one of the things that we talked about in our roundtable discussion here at..."