I started my position as the Nevada County Veterans Services Officer (CVSO) in September of 2018. When I sat in that empty office on that first day, I swore to myself that I would always advocate for the veterans in this community, bring the lessons I learned from past professions, and that we would continually focus on offering the best services possible to our veterans. Last year, your CVSO released its first annual “All Veterans Survey”, to the veterans of Nevada County and we received nearly 3,000 responses, which was used to develop our strategic plan for the 2021-2022 Fiscal Year.
Last year’s survey results led to significant changes, improvements, and better diversity on how we offer our services to our veterans. In the past year, your NCVSO has developed our online booking feature that allows for clients to schedule their own appointment with a member of our staff, apply for selected benefits through our county webpage, increased our efforts on outreaching to veterans, and the redesigning of our office and lobby areas to provide a more welcoming atmosphere for our clients. Last year’s survey also allowed us to set a goal of reducing veterans homelessness in our county to functional zero, based on the community’s over-whelming response to addressing this complicated issue.
In our continued effort to improve how we provide our services; we are once again creating a strategic plan that will help drive the focus of your Nevada County Veterans Services Office outreach programs and how we offer our services to our veterans. To develop the strongest plan possible, I am once again asking for Nevada County’s active duty military members and our veterans for their input in assisting with our efforts by participating via Survey Monkey or paper mail. The information that you provide will be used to develop our outreach strategy and what are the best options to provide services to our veterans.
This year’s survey will also provide us an opportunity to identify which areas you believe we improved and the areas that still need our focus. This is the opportunity for our veteran community to directly have input on how your CVSO operates and the areas that we focus on over the next year.
The information that is collected from this survey will also be shared with our local Veterans Service Organizations such as the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Vietnam Veterans of America, and more. Together, we plan to use this information to ensure that no veteran in Nevada County slips through the cracks because of our coordinated effort to offer over-lapping services.
Please take the survey by clicking on this link Take Survey or you can request a paper survey to be mailed directly to your home by calling 530-273-3396. The survey will close on March 11, 2022.
David West is the Nevada County Veterans Service Officer. Reach him at (530) 265-1446 or david.west@co.nevada.ca.us. The Nevada County Veteran’s Services Office, 988 McCourtney Rd, Grass Valley, CA, is open from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday.