New Bedford Guide Your Guide to New Bedford and South Coast, MA
The Veteran’s Transition House, with UMass Dartmouth, is assessing the needs of Veterans in Bristol County with this brief survey. The results of the survey will allow the Veteran’s Transition House to better serve the Veterans in our area.
In March of last year, Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray announced the Commonwealth’s action plan to prevent and end homelessness among our Veterans. Working towards this goal, the Veterans Transition House of New Bedford has contracted the UMass Dartmouth Urban Initiative to conduct a needs assessment of Bristol County Veterans. At the UMass Dartmouth Urban Initiative, we study urban issues in the SouthCoast. Our southcoastindicators.org/ SouthCoast Urban Indicators site contains data on homelessness in our area. Naturally, we approach this project with an eagerness to better understand the issue of Veterans homelessness and to inform the conversation around its solution.
The Urban Initiative and the Veterans Transition House agreed that data analysis is the best way to understand the scope of the challenges facing our Veteran community. Currently, we are surveying the community in order to gather data on the quality of life of our Veterans, as well as detailed demographic information. Our needs assessment is also open to members of our community who are involved in Veterans affairs, but may not be Veterans themselves. This will allow us to not only learn the needs of our Veterans, but gauge how well local service providers understand these needs.
To this end, we have made our survey available online. If you are a Veteran, or someone familiar with needs of Bristol County Veterans, please fill out the Bristol County Veterans Needs Assessment Survey. Completing the survey will only take five minutes of your time, but the information you provide will help us improve services for our Veterans. Please answer honestly and keep in mind that the survey is anonymous.
Early this year, we will begin analyzing the data collected from these surveys. Following that, we plan to publish a paper outlining our findings and make it available to the public. We hope that our research will move our community closer to solving the problem of homelessness among our Veterans.
If you would like more info or donate, please visit vetshouse.org/takeAction_donateNow.html
