VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 27, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Veterans Transition Network (VTN), a vitally important charity relied on by many former Canadian military servicemen and servicewomen for mental healthcare, today announced that it has successfully completed laying the groundwork to help yet another organization overseas adapt VTN’s successful and sustainable model of psychological support.
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VTN said the foreign organization it aided is the International Association for Support of Ukraine (IASU).
(IASU is not the first organization from another part of the globe to request VTN’s help. According to VTN officials, Veterans departments & organizations in Australia, the U.S., and Israel have also sought guidance on previous occasions from the innovation-driven nonprofit.)
“Earlier this month we met in Ukraine’s capital city, Kiev, with cabinet ministers and psychologist groups to outline a pilot project in which mental-health professionals from our two countries will jointly develop sustainable care programs aimed at making Ukrainian military veterans more emotionally resilient,” said Dace Marsh, VTN Development Director.
“We are very excited to be involved as Ukraine develops their standards for veteran-focused psychological care,” he added.
Marsh indicated that, while in Kiev, the delegation also shared insights regarding how and why the VTN model works so well for Canadian veterans.
Impressed by VTN’s Success Record
IASU officials said they turned to the donor-supported Canadian charity for advice and assistance because they were impressed by VTN’s university-developed model where Veterans and Psychologists work together to assist Veterans – a track-record earned despite needing to raise funds from its supporters to shoulder most of the burden (Marsh acknowledged Parliament’s recent authorization of over $5.6 billion for veterans’ services, but noted that no support has of yet been pledged to existing services like the VTN).
According to their website, the VTN is the only Canadian charity delivering mental-health services to veterans in seven provinces, coast to coast. To date, the lives of more than 700 troubled veterans have been improved by the care – and hope – offered through the VTN’s innovative programs.
Strife-torn Ukraine is home to over 300,000 men and women who are fresh from the frontlines within the last 3 years. Since the last conflict Ukraine was involved in was in 1989, there are no official resources to cope with the flood of new Veterans, and most turn to charities like the IASU.
IASU (https://www.facebook.com/iasu.ua/) provides emergency medical treatment and rehabilitation, housing, schooling, and other services for veterans and refugees. Vital IASU efforts are currently focused on those whose lives have been turned upside down from the fighting that has raged between Ukrainian loyalists and Russian-backed separatists for the last three years.
For more information about VTN, its history, philosophy of care, and current plans, visit the charity’s website at https://vtncanada.org.