 I hope everybody's doing well. Obviously, this is a unique situation in 2020. This is the DAV's 2020 Voluntary Services Program virtual salute overview. I'm John Kleinings, the National Voluntary Services Director. I work very closely with the entire team, more specifically Ron Manor and Katie Deshler. We are responsible for all of DAV's transportation network, the DAV's VABS, that's VAE Voluntary Services Programs, local veterans assistance programs specific to DAV, the Jesse Bryan Memorial Youth Scholarship Program, which encourages young men and women to volunteer at their time. We recognize outstanding volunteers every year by awarding the George Sill Award. We also partner with the Garrison East Foundation and Boulder Crest Veterans Retreat to conduct mentoring retreats multiple times throughout the year. We also have a celebrity visit program and initiative that we send celebrities to hospitals to visit patients while they're undergoing care. In our two largest endeavors, there are adaptive sports programs. We co-host the, or excuse me, we co-present the National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic and the National Disabled Veterans Tea Tournament. Both of those events take place once a year. The Winter Sports Clinic takes place in Snowmass, Colorado, and the Tea Tournament takes place just south of Iowa City, Iowa. Here's the rest of the team. Elisa Brown is the Assistant to the Voluntary Services Director. She specifically handles events, scheduling for myself, Ron and Katie, as well as responsibility over the celebrity visits and the Jesse Brown Scholarship payments. Most of you are probably familiar with Kyne and Kenny. Her primary role is the DAV Transportation Network from start to finish. That's when we go to order our vehicles, she keys those requisitions. We then follow the delivery of those vehicles, the detailing of those vehicles, and pick up or shit into those vehicles to various spots across the entire country. Dylan Archibald is one of our newest employees. He specifically focuses on the LVAP program, Local Veterans Assistance Program. He ensures that all hours and reports are into our system so we can have better accountability for what DAV does in the local community. Shelby Butler is another new addition to the Voluntary Services team. She works very closely with Dylan as well as it relates to the Local Veterans Assistance Program and the importance of reaching out to everybody and getting those hours. Odie Hall has been with us for quite some time. Odie is primarily responsible for all DAV, DAVS chairpersons, representative positions, as well as handling all nominations as it relates to the Jesse Brown Memorial Youth Scholarship and the George Sill nominations. So our next person is Pam Hinting. Her primary responsibility is keeping our DAV transportation information up to date. That would include all the reporting as well as updating our HSC directories so we have a great point of contact for individuals when people request transportation to and from their medical appointments. And last but not least is Tina Wendorf, another new employee for a Voluntary Services program. Her primary point of contact her primary role, excuse me, is the Volunteer for Veterans.org initiative which we launched two years ago. We specifically work with local corporate and groups, local corporations and groups who are interested in volunteering for veterans and she is our primary person who handles that. This is the National Headquarters Voluntary Services team. Next we're going to talk about the Jesse Brown Memorial Scholarship Enhancements. Earlier this year, pre-COVID-19, we went through and did a total refresh of the Volunteer, excuse me, the Scholarship page. This includes, you can go to DAVscholarships.org or you can go to DAV.org, click on Volunteer and drop down in Jesse Brown Scholarship. This whole page was refreshed and is now automated as we can make it. It is very inviting and not just for potential people looking to apply but for people submitting applications on others' behalf. We will continue to refresh the images annually but DAV is very proud to award $75,000 a year of scholarships each and every year. As you can see, there's an apply now button and we have a video that we'll run each year. We'll replace that video with the top recipient. All deadlines are February 28th of the following year. So this year's application process is open as we speak and the deadline will end on February 28th, 2021. It's important that we talk about a couple things as it relates to the scholarship. Anybody who volunteers in the name of DAV under the age of 21 and accumulates 100 hours in their lifetime is eligible for this scholarship. I know we're in a unique situation right now where volunteerism and control violence such as the VA medical facilities have been put on hold. We do have some use that are volunteering in select locations that are capable of being involved with minimal exposure. But if you're a youth and you're volunteering in your community by claiming a veteran's memorial or a veteran's area in your town, a cemetery, helping a veteran neighbor in need, a veteran grandparent in need, a veteran mom and dad in need and you accumulate 100 hours through our local veterans assistance program, you're eligible for the scholarship. I would encourage you to get out and get involved and find any way that you can give back to a veteran in your community. Once you achieve these 100 hours, you could submit your application to be considered for the 2021 Jesse Brown Memorial Youth Scholarship. As you can see on the screen here, it's easy. You'll hit the apply now button and then you're going to go through an automated process, which we're going to take a look at here real quickly. But we want to make sure that we note on this screen that it indicates that a document about volunteering means to me must be submitted in order to complete the application or the nomination process. So we want to make sure that everybody knows what all they're going to need before they start entering their information in an effort to apply for the scholarship. And again, worth noting the scholarship deadline ends on February 28th of the following year. Obviously, there are quite a few things that are going to be required, but we did some really neat stuff here. Obviously, the red asterisks are things that are required, so we're going to need the volunteer's name, date of birth, their address and phone number. We added some radio buttons to make it a little bit easier if you're self-nominating or you're nominating your grandchild or a neighbor that you know for this very worthy scholarship. It's going to ask you for specific information. Months or years that you volunteered, just put in a number of months, put in a number of years. Again, the radio button is there for you. If the nominee has volunteered in the past and you select the other button, an additional box will appear and it's going to ask for some of your activities, club that you're involved. If you're a member of the FFA or you're a member of the National Honor Society or you're doing something in your community, you run track and you maintain a 4.0, but this is a good opportunity for you to put in some of that additional information. We just don't look at what the students are doing in the community. We want to look at what they're doing overall for individuals to volunteer their time and continue to maintain a great GPA and be involved in other activities, maybe at their church or taking care of kids in an orphan, but transitioning through adoption agencies or something like that. We want to know all that because that really paints a big picture of the overall nominee. Obviously, if we ask certain questions, how your volunteering impacts veterans and patients? What do you do about morale with other veterans or other volunteers? Are you bringing more folks into the fold of volunteering? These boxes four and five are the opportunity for you to do this or four specifically. Five talks about bringing new volunteers into the fold. We hope that you're so energized with volunteering that you want to tell all your friends about it. This is one of DAB's best kept secret or scholarship program. This year, we only received 47 nominations for the scholarship out of over 200 VA facilities, 52 DAB departments across the country. We do feel that getting involved in the community is something that is worthwhile and contagious. So to see kids bring more people into the fold is very cool. We also have a different on boxes six and seven, some different areas for you to add additional commentary as it relates to what the youth is doing in their community. So please fill those out. If it doesn't apply, you can skip through it because it's not a required box. But please keep in mind as much information as you can give us makes it a easier process or excuse me more difficult process for our committees to go through and screen all these but they really enjoy it and they find it to be very worthwhile. Again, we have multiple areas for you to attach files. So if you choose to attach some pictures of your volunteering, obviously your essay is required in order to finalize this process. Anything that you feel is additional supporting documentation, please feel free to add that. But note that what you see on the screen is all that you have. So there are three, six, seven opportunities for you to attach additional information. Once it's done, you hit submit. It's really that easy. It can take as little as 30 minutes to submit something if you've already written your essay. So we're encouraging and asking each and every one of you to continue to talk about the scholarship program and encourage people to get involved and volunteer their time. And for those of you who still have a problem dealing with stuff on the computer, you can contact us. We do have a paper application and it mirrors exactly what is online. We're really pushing people to use the internet format because it's easier for us to download everything. It's a lot more legible sometimes. But if you do need it, please feel free to reach out to us. We will send you a paper form. But at all costs, we're asking people to please submit them electronically. That's a very neat process and it helps our committee when they go through to read these applications and nominations very much easier and much cleaner. Talking about volunteerforbetters.org, our newest product at DAB is placed out for outward involvement into the community. We did some cleaning up of this as well, trying to make it a little bit easier, remove some stuff. But it's imperative that we continue to talk about this platform. I personally believe that this is the new DAB transportation network. It's easy to get the younger generation involved. I would encourage people to go through and build profiles in volunteer for veterans. If you're a veteran who has a need, please build a profile. What we're finding is we have more volunteers than we have veterans who have needs. If we can get more veterans in there, we can work to achieve helping more veterans in the community. This is also a great platform that Tina uses daily to engage major corporations to let them know of volunteer needs in their areas. We're reached out to you by a lot of large entities who are interested in giving back to veterans. This is the direction we're trying to take them because it's very clean, streamlined. We get everybody's information in. Once you build the profile and you do the activity in this process, you automatically get credit for your LVAP hours into our system. Again, there's been several updates made to this product. If you log in or have it logged in a while, it asks that you go back and take a look at it. Continue to check and find out if there's needs in your areas. Anytime a new occurrence pops up, you should receive an email that tells you, hey, there's a new opportunity within the radius in which you have selected on your profile. Hopefully, we'll get more veterans to help us build their profiles and put their needs in. Now, these are basic needs. We're not doing major construction or major renovations to individuals' homes. We're looking at doing tasks that are sensible tasks. Mowing grass may be fixing some boards on a deck. We have a lot of chapters and a lot of departments and a lot of individuals who go out and build ramps because they have aluminum ramps that they can set up or they build wooden ramps which are very noble processes. The picture on here on the far right is a group volunteering at a farm specifically for veterans who want to become veteran farmers. This is another tool for youth to get involved. Please visit volunteerforveterans.org, build a profile, let us know of some things that can be done to make your life a little bit easier because maybe you have an injury or a condition that prevents you from mowing your grass or getting up on a ladder and cleaning out your gutters. Heck, maybe you have a light bulb that needs to be changed and you can't reach it because you have a neck injury or something like that. Check it out volunteerforveterans.org. Again, here's some great links with some short training videos that will help you understand how to register, how to add an opportunity, how to complete an opportunity, search for opportunities. We did a nice little fun video that we've shown quite a few times. A lot of people have called us and asked us for it. Ron and I doing some stuff to make it a little fun and entertaining with the cat and falling off the ladder, so on and so forth. But check those out. They're out there for you. These links, this will be posted on the members only portal and we'll have opportunities for you to go back and get this. Use it to your content. Maybe you could take this to your local chapters and show this to everybody. If you're the volunteer liaison for the chapter or you're the department, LVAP person, whatever your title is, please go out and share these opportunities, volunteer opportunities and resources that DAVs put a lot of time and money in. You know, there are a lot of veterans who need help. If you have any questions or any time there's a concern or something's going on, you don't understand it, reach out to us at DAVs at DAV.org or give us a call. We're here to help you and I hope that you find us as helpful as we want to be. The importance of reporting. All monthly reports for VAVS, which are the Form 50, the HSC forms the Form 40 and the LVAP Form 460 are due on the 5th of each month. So an example of that is January's reports are due on February 5th. It's imperative that you get us to report as soon as possible. The importance of reporting in a timely manner affects a variety of things. The approval for your transportation network vehicles at the end of the year when you ask. If hours aren't reported and we don't have those, it is difficult for us to justify allowing the department or a chapter to apply for a grant for assistance to purchase the vehicles. All of the hours that DAV donates throughout the year are countless contributed services. So it's imperative that we accurately report these hours to Congress and watchdog groups who are constantly asking what DAV does. For those of you who are very active in the organization, you'll hear the commander at the mid-winter conference and the national convention and all of the mark, the national adjunct, the executive director, Barry Jezanowski, and Randy Reiss report of all of these hours. LVAP is another essential program. It allows us to be involved in the community and it makes a great name for DAV and those who are looking for assistance and raises awareness for our work activities and mission. So it's important that you report your hours to us in a timely manner. Unreported or untimely reporting causes a delay in processing of all of our programs, more specifically the DAV transportation network. We, at the end of the year, we have to go through and we have to close out the year and then we're looking at all of the applications, all of the grant requests for vehicles, and if we go and look at reports and we see that a multitude of hours are missing or miles or veterans aren't being transported, it does not bode well for justifying allowing a grant for a new vehicle. It's a very substantial purchase and the charitable service trust is glad to do that, but we need to make sure that reporting is done in a timely manner. That goes back to AFRs and everything that you have to do in order to keep your chapter in your department in good standing. Obviously, transportation network hours are based on the VA's fiscal year, so you have September 1 to October 30. So once, excuse me, October 1 to September 30, I got that backwards, forgive me. So it's important that if you're an HSC or a VAVS rep for depth and you're helping to report those hours, get those to us as quick as possible. It helps us shut out our year and it helps us ensure that our reports are accurate. Something new this year is the LVAP program used to be done on a calendar year, but in a better effort to align what we do as an organization, we decided to shift that to a membership year. So from now on, from July 1 to June 30 is when your hours are going to be counted for for LVAP. So going forward, July 1 of 2020 through June 30, 2021, when we get to the National Convention, we'll recognize the top LVAP division winners as such, please get those hours into us no later than July 15. Every year we have a crunch on people sending a lot of them at the literary last minute. It's difficult and tough for us to keep up with, but we're glad to do it. But we're asking and imploring you to please submit those hours by July 15. In 2019, through our LVAP program, we did a little more than 2.3 million hours and had almost 90, a little over 9100 volunteers. At this point in time, we'd like to recognize the 2019 LVAP winners, which were announced at our mid-winter conference in February, but Division 1, Virginia achieved nearly 400,000 hours. They're rock stars in the country. They're doing a great job, keep up the great work. Virginia, Oklahoma, Division 2, they've become a repeat offender here. They're doing a great job. They're doing wonderful things, very innovative. They've hit nearly 250,000 hours. South Carolina Division 3, great job. South Carolina, a little over 113,000 hours. Division 4, Nebraska, again, great job. Nebraska a little over 61,000 hours and Division 5, North Dakota with nearly 70,000 hours. Great job to all of you guys. You did a great work. Please keep note of the Division change, or excuse me, the change in reporting for LVAP. I have talked to some of you. If you change divisions, through membership, you're going to change divisions in our LVAP. Everything is going to align based off what's in the membership system going forward. Next on the agenda is our new monthly reporting forms. Each and every one of you should receive the notice back in May of the new forms. They're all in an Excel spreadsheet and they're designed to implement it to our new CRM that's scheduled to go live in a few months. We ask you to use these forms, send them to us in electronic format. If you did not get the forms, feel free to email us at DABS at DAV.org. We'll get those forms back out to you. We do have a webinar scheduled to take place on September 23rd from 2 to 3.30 Eastern time. We'll be seeing out a registration email a month prior and a follow-up reminder two weeks and one week prior to the webinar. For those of you who are involved in this process, we'll ask that you please sign up for the webinar, take advantage of that opportunity, ask all the questions that you have. The next few slides we're going to talk about are going to go through some of those changes and I'm going to hit some of those points so you're going to hear this again in September, but it's of utmost importance that you utilize these forms in an effort to prevent errors and allow for more accuracy in the reporting. So the LVAP form, Form 60, we've gone through and changed it. I want to first make it very clear there's a lot of information asked for on here. However, all fields are required except middle name, email, phone number, and date of birth. If the volunteer desires to give us all that, the more information the better. That way we can update the record. Those items, again, middle name, email, phone, and date of birth are not required, but if the volunteer would like to share that information, we ask that you get that information and share it with us. You see the link here on this slide. You can download the form, do what you need to do. The biggest point of concern here is to tell us what activity that volunteer has done, whether that's chapter service officer work, maybe it's a forget-me-not drive, a department service officer work, those benefit protection team leaders in your grassroots legislative initiatives, homeless stand downs, local veterans assistance program, maybe you have a national guard demobilization that's taking place, or you're providing direct veterans assistance, please make sure you put the job description to what you've done that is of the utmost importance. The form 50, which is for VAVS monthly reporting, again, I'm going to say this every slide, all fields are required except middle name, email, phone number, and date of birth. You don't have to give us that, but the more information we get, the better off for making sure we put the right information for the right person. If the volunteer chooses to give us that information, please ensure that we get it. If they don't want to give it to us, that is absolutely fine. We just need a name and again, the job description. What have they done? Please select that. If they were doing VAVS hours for DAV in a facility, we need to know that they're going to be credited to DAV. The same for the DAV auxiliary, please put the job description of what type of volunteering they're doing and who those hours are to be credited to so we can put them into our new CRM or our new process that we use today called DAV 360. This is the HSC reporting form, form 40. Again, as you see, there's a link to this form. Again, I want to say it, all fields are required except for middle name, email, phone number, and date of birth. Again, if the volunteer likes to give us that information, we'll take that information. We can update it into our CRM as it comes in on a monthly basis. Again, it's imperative that you put your job description, whether you're doing transportation network. Maybe you're not doing transportation network, but you're doing something for the transportation program. Hospital service coordinator hours that are being done where hospital service coordinator is not being paid. Transportation network non-driver hours, if you're doing something to help the HSC in their capacity, it's imperative that you put down what you're doing on this form so we can make sure we put it for the right breakdown of all of these different opportunities that DAV is trying to track for the volunteer program. Again, we appreciate your willingness to use this form and help us clean up our process to make sure we have accurate data. But as always, please log into the webinar schedule that will take place on September 23rd and participate and ask your questions. Again, there are some things that are not required, but if a volunteer would like to give us that information, we'd like to get it. Educating and promoting our programs, the voluntary services program, DAV's programs, it's important that you work with your local leaders. Obviously, we get calls every day. I need help recruiting drivers, and we did that. We understand the difficult process, but on the ground, on our website we have a recruitment tool. If you start working with your local VA leaders there and trying to establish a process, communicate, work with them, talk with them, tell them what you're wanting to do. They want those volunteer drivers, they want more volunteers, because that creates better access to healthcare services that the VA is promising the men and women who have worn a uniform. So contact your local news stations, let them know what's going on, tell them, hey, this is our program, this is what we do. All of this stuff is a resource on DAV.org. Pull it up, share it, fill in the blank, you can send it to the local media, and if you need help, contact us. We'll share that stuff with you, get you where you need to be, and tell you what are some of the best practices. Volunteering is a worthwhile endeavor, and we encourage everybody to look at donating one day a month. If you can commit to one day a month and you find out you have more availability, you're likely to bring more folks in, you'll start volunteering more, and you'll find it to be the most rewarding thing that you've ever done. Talked about the volunteer or driver recruitment. So there's a couple of great things that are up here. So the Department of Oklahoma, who I talked about on the LVAP, has started a program called the Drive a Hero program. They worked very closely with all VA hospitals in Oklahoma, the directors of the facilities, and they get a one-day recruitment and all-boarding process with volunteers. Took a lot of legwork, but they did it and they've had huge success. So that's one opportunity, reach out to them. I'm sure they'll be glad to share that success with you. We've had some success in Minnesota with talking to local news agencies. We did a drive right along, and within the week they had, there was 67 new volunteer drivers. We did it in Minnesota. We've done it in Portland. There's a YouTube video on this link that you can check out and see the story and see how that unfolded and what it does as far as calling people in to become a volunteer driver. To be a driver, all you have to do is possess a valid driver's license, be insurable, and be over the age of 21. So calling all folks to consider becoming a driver, excuse me, also have to pass a basic visible. Please consider becoming a volunteer driver. It is a worthwhile endeavor. To honor DAV Century of Service, we kicked off the 100 Dax of Honor campaign. We've seen stuff coming in through DAV social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We're asking any initiative out there that's being done to honor veterans and honor DAV to be shared with us. So if you're doing something to, you know, veterans from the war, you're cleaning up a veteran's house, we had a piece of the World Trade Center bought in to be casted for the Centennial Belt. All those things are acts of honor. Anything that can be done out there to help improve the life of a veteran or raise awareness for veterans, please share that with us through our social media. You can do that on Facebook and LinkedIn at DAV or Twitter at DAV HQ and Instagram. If you can't do it that way, send us an email with what you did and maybe a link to what's done and we'll share that with our communication staff and get that posted. Please continue to help promote this. We're hoping to wrap up 2020 with more than 100 acts of honor to honor DAV Century of Service. The Adaptive Sports Program, which we talked about, the 2020 events, the Winter Sports Month and T-Tournament will cancel due to COVID-19 and we're looking forward to returning in 2021. The Winter Sports Clinic is scheduled to take place March 28th through April 2nd. 2021 is Stomast, Colorado and the T-Tournament is scheduled to take place September 12th through the 17th of 2021 in Iowa City, Iowa. If you're interested in becoming a sponsor or would like to donate to these events, please reach out to us at 888-480-6786, press option five, or shoot us an email at VABS at DAV.org or send an email to Ron, myself or Katie and we'll get that information where we need it to be and we appreciate the support of all VAB entities, chapters, departments, auxiliary units, juniors. You guys really have stepped up and helped us make both of these events a success and we appreciate and couldn't do this without you. That concludes the voluntary services presentation. I hope you find this information informative. Again, it will be available to you to use at your discretion. If there's anything that we can do to help you out, reach out to us at DAV.org or give us a call again at 888-480-6786 or email us directly. All of our email addresses and phone numbers are at the very front of this slide for each individual. Again, thank you for everything that you do. Keep up the great work and we look forward to getting through this. We will get through this together and we look forward to 2021 and continuing on this 101 years of service. Thank you everybody.