Statement of Heather French, Miss America 2000, before the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs, HUD, and Independent Agencies of the Committee on Appropriations United States House of Representatives. The Honorable James T. Walsh, Chairman. Washington, DC.

Chairman Walsh, I thank you for the opportunity to present my views here today. On any given night there are the equivalent of 17 infantry divisions on the streets of this great nation with no place to call home. These are men and women who served our nation during its greatest times of need and now live without shelter or food or medical care. They are the once young men and women now aging we sent abroad to defend our country, but cast aside upon their return. They are our country’s forgotten heroes --those who at one time may have been awarded a Medal of Honor or Purple Heart.

Today as Miss America 2000 I serve as a national role model and advocate for our homeless veterans. I care about our veterans because, first and foremost beyond the crown, I am the daughter of a disabled Vietnam veteran whose struggles have changed my life forever. I had my first experience with the plight of our veterans when my father began taking me to the VA Medical Center with him at the age of four. At that time appointment at the VA was an all day event. They used to have a light board from the number 1 to 1,000 and it always seemed my father received number 999!

I would wait in the VA lobby for hours waiting for my father’s turn to receive treatment. During that time I was able to hear the most intriguing stories of trauma and victory from the veterans that surrounded me. That was the first time I learned to listen…not just with my ears but also with my heart. Through the eyes of my father, I have seen challenges that face our nation’s homeless veterans everyday: the pain of psychological trauma, especially Post Traumatic stress disorder resulting from perils of war; the struggle to overcome drug and alcohol addiction; the heartache of rejection from potential employers, landlords, neighbors, friends and sometimes even family.

As the first Miss America of the new millennium I have chosen to do so as a bold spokesperson and advocate for our nation’s homeless veterans. I have dedicated, not just my year of service, but also my life to creating unprecedented awareness surrounding this issue. I will travel over 20,000 miles each month speaking to as many citizens as I possibly can about the needs of these brave men and women. And I will continue to do so and ask the news media to join me in a partnership that informs and educates young and old alike because I believe their stories deserve to be heard. The story of our veterans is one of ultimate sacrifice, the greatest of love stories, because these soldiers were once willing to lay down their lives for our nation.

Since becoming Miss America in mid-September, 1999 I have been visiting homeless veteran programs all over the nation from VA programs, to community-based nonprofit organizations, and Stand Downs that are community events pulled together by many organizations and government agencies for outreach to veterans. I have been able to hear countless personal stories of veterans and observe first hand different community-based programs serving the needs of these forgotten heroes.

Homeless veterans want to be able to regain personal pride by taking personal responsibility to remove the barriers that have prevented their transition to productive citizenship. In order to do this they need access to substance abuse recovery and mental health programs, affordable housing, and employment opportunities.

During my travels I have seen first hand programs that are helping in a significant and meaningful way to reconstruct lives and reunite families. Every visit connects me with successful stories from the streets, men and women who were formerly homeless now with careers, a reconnected family, a home, and a new outlook on life. These veterans are now able to live a part of the “American Dream” that they were promised but were denied for so long.

It is very clear to me that it takes a network of partnerships to be able to provide a full range of services to homeless veterans. No one entity can provide this complex set of requirements without developing relationships with others in the community.

Community-based nonprofit organizations are most often the coordinator of services because they house the veterans during their transition. These community-based organizations must orchestrate a complex set of funding and service delivery streams with multiple agencies in which each one plays a key critical role.

There are a wide variety of Federal funds that veteran service providers are eligible for in the course of serving homeless veterans. The challenge is in accessing them. Many veteran specific providers lose several years before being able to position themselves to successfully compete and receive ANY federal, state or local agency funds.

The current prevailing public policy of devolution increases likelihood that Federal dollars are ultimately allocated through a ranking process subject to local viewpoints. At the local level the common perception is that veterans are taken care of by the VA. Some are, yet most are not. These perceptions can be a barrier to homeless veterans service providers' access to funds. It is a reality that must be reckoned with in order to compete successfully.

When a local group is forced into priority recommendations that choose between needy men, women, and/or their children, it is a challenge to argue for displacing the funding for women and children in favor of a man (who’s a veteran the “VA is taking care of” anyway!). Sometimes a homeless veteran has his family still together, and obviously some homeless veterans are women, but these conditions are the exceptions.

Consistently at nearly $1 billion annually, the biggest piece of funding currently on the table is available from targeted HUD funds through the Super NOFA for Supportive Housing Programs (SHP). Only 3% of these grants are awarded to veteran specific programs. Three percent, when a quarter of the homeless are veterans. Any other help HUD grants give to veterans is purely by chance, and we have no information on whether the rest of the money reaches veterans.

HUD awards for the Continuum of Care grants:

The distribution system for these McKinney Act funds follow a devolution policy that organizes priorities for allocation of formula share dollars at a local level within a continuum of care. The Continuum of Care prescribes a planning process built on a community-by-community model. Within each community, a planning process takes place in which advocates and service providers describe the problem, access the current resources available, and decide what needs to be done using the “targeted” McKinney programs, which total $1.2 billion annually. Overall federal funding to assist the poor is about $215 billion annually and is not synchronized with targeted homeless assistance funds. So, these funds need to be accessed differently.

Until such time as a homeless veteran provider is able to convince the organizations that make up the local continuum of care that it is in THEIR best interest to juggle their dollars in a way to allow a veteran provider to the table, a veteran specific program typically gets ranked out of the money (if it even got ranked in the continuum at all). Veteran service providers tell me, it takes several years of analysis, networking, program/funding design, and negotiations to be able to show that giving a high priority to a relatively small piece of HUD Supportive Housing Programs dollars for a veteran provider is in the community's best interest. A veteran provider can access support service money and a clinical care system (the Department of Veterans Affairs) available for veterans only. This leverages resources that can off-load the community care system of the veterans currently occupying beds and free up capacity that then becomes available for women, children and other special needs population. At one level, this is the market economy operating at its best…but it is complicated, to say the least.

The veteran community-based organization system faces a capacity gap around managing this complexity in order to respond successfully to the distribution system for accessing funds and then if awarded the resources to pay for management and financial reporting systems to properly service those funds.

The point here is to underscore the complexities involved in successfully responding to the streams of funding available and necessary to combine together adequate budgets in a sufficiently broad geographic area to put on a reasonable array of services for homeless veterans. Most community-based organizations throughout the country struggle to respond to this system of distribution of federal funds.

Some Solutions

In 1990, seven homeless veteran service providers established the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans (NCHV) to educate America’s people about the extraordinarily high percentage of veterans among the homeless. These seven providers are considered to be true original warriors for the cause. All former military men, they were concerned that people did not understand the unique reasons why veterans become homeless and the fact that these men and women who defended America’s freedom were being dramatically under-served in a time of personal crisis. In the years since its founding, NCHV’s membership has grown to 241 in 43 states and the District of Columbia.

I urge this committee to consider finding ways to get capacity building services into the hands of the community-based care provider group attempting to serve veterans. It is squarely within the mission of NCHV to help formulate this capacity. While NCHV has been doing this, it’s been done in a limited way without the benefit of any federal funds. I ask you to consider doing the following:

• Allocate $750,000 FY 2001 and each year thereafter through FYE 2006 to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans to build capacity of the veteran service provider network. The goal would be to significantly increase access to the federal funding streams already appropriated and to enhance the efficiency of utilization for those currently accessing these streams.
• Give the Department of Veteran Affairs discretionary grant making authority (as most other Federal agencies already possess) under the Homeless Veterans Program office so that when new and innovative proposals surface the VA could sponsor their initiation. If the activity demonstrates value, Veterans Health Administration (VHA) could put the activity into its base-funding budget or seek other long term program funding.
• Homeless veteran service providers are concerned about funds Congress has encouraged VHA to set aside for Homeless Veterans are at risk of being converted to other uses. Per Diem and allocated homeless program dollars can be re-allocated if subjected to VERA modeling. Please defend these dollars by making certain they are designated as special purpose funds for a minimum of three years so value and results of work can be shown.
• Encourage a HUD regional approach for a veteran’s continuum of care that would facilitate cutting across consolidated plan boundaries and follow at least the VAMC catchment areas and where appropriate VISN wide catchment areas. • Remove caps on National Direct AmeriCorps Programs to facilitate these valuable human resources as a tool for more homeless veteran service providers.
• Encourage a National VISTA program for homeless veteran service providers to help build capacity and resources for agencies serving homeless veterans across the nation.

As my year of service continues I will share my personal encounters with these forgotten heroes that I have met. I have seen in their faces the face of my own father and I can tell you that the most beautiful faces in this nation are not those whose heads are adorned with crowns but those who have borne the battle…our veterans.

Looking in the eyes of men and women who were once decorated with medals only now to be replaced with broken spirits I encourage this committee to implement policy changes that will finally end homelessness among veterans.

Thank you for allowing me to be a witness here today and for your commitment to all our nation’s veterans.

Education:
University of Cincinnati
Pursuing Master’s Degree in Fashion Design Illustration
Bachelor’s Degree in Fashion Design
Recipient of more than $80,000 in Miss America Scholarships

Ambition:
To complete a Master’s degree. Also to complete fashion illustration textbook for college-level design students. To pursue a career as a designer of women’s career wear.

Platform:
The Forgotten Heroes: Honoring Our Nation’s Homeless Veterans that will finally end homelessness among veterans.

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