I am honored to accept the role of Chapter President and I thank you all for your support of our organization and all Veterans. For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve been very active in Veteran issues for the past 18 years. Over the years I’ve been the Commander of VFW Post 1, been involved in transition issues for veterans, suicide prvention and I most recently served as the board president for the Rocky Mountain Fisher House.
In looking forward in serving with PVA, I look back to my early days with VFW Post 1 in 2002 At that time, Post 1 faced quite a few challenges (including financial) and I along with a couple of other leaders (none of us had ever been very active with the Post or any Veteran organization before) started taking steps to focus our efforts on two things – supporting our members and connecting with others in the community so we could help all Veterans. That effort proved to be very successful with Post 1 becoming the example in creating a new image of a Post and what it could be – not just a smoky bar with folks drinking at 10am. In doing so, this also created collaboration with many other organizations serving Colorado’s Veteran community.
I see us doing the same thing with the entire Mountain States Chapter of PVA. First and foremost, we will continue to support our members and their families as well as those who take such great care of us. As someone who joined the old board in 2018, I know we were not the most organized in taking these goals on. My commitment to you all is to change this and we’ve already started doing a few things.
This Fall, we started this effort by saying thank you to the staff of the SCI-D clinic by providing them with a box lunch and a note of thanks from our chapter. We started this in August and in October three other Veteran Organizations (Legion Posts 206 and 5280 and VFW 2461) joined us in providing lunch other parts of the VA. Last month, we expanded this effort to two more clinics around the area. Next month we plan to provide lunches to the CBOC in Montrose (Thank you MSCPV Member Erin Cavit) as well as clinics in Wyoming and Montana – most likely in partnership with other VSOs.
Thank you all for expressing your support for me with your votes. I have big shoes to fill in looking at the men and women who came before me, including our past chapter President – Alan Jones. He is my former Company Commander and when he saw me with a cane and I explained that I had MS, he put his finger in my chest and said “You need to get involved with PVA – they can help you.” Well sir, they did. And I hope to be of help to all of you and all those coming after us.