GIVING BACK: Veterans Coalition for Vaccination
BlogDecember 01, 2021
Each issue, the editorial staff of Military Embedded Systems will highlight a different charitable organization that benefits the military, veterans, and their families. We are honored to cover the technology that protects those who protect us every day.
This issue we are highlighting the recently formed Veterans Coalition for Vaccination (VCV), an effort driven by seven existing veteran organizations with the goal of enabling veterans to help other veterans obtain their COVID-19 vaccination.
The impetus for VCV – spearheaded by Team Rubicon cofounder Jake Wood – came in early 2020 at the very beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in the U.S., when Team Rubicon veteran volunteers stepped in to aid food banks and pantries when those services were curtailed for fear of contagion.
Volunteers from veterans’ charities Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America, Team RWB, The Mission Continues, The Wounded Warrior Project, Student Veterans of America, and the Travis Manion Foundation joined the Team Rubicon groups to assist in critical community health-care efforts, including a drive-through testing site and a 250-bed federal medical station.
Once vaccines became available across the U.S., the VCV’s veteran team members began to focus on aiding with vaccination efforts in all 50 states. VCV team members have been able to leverage their unique skills, expertise, and experience forged in military service to solve complex logistical and operational challenges of vaccination distribution.
Team Rubicon’s Wood stated recently: “We’ve supported hundreds of sites across the country, doing the simple things like site setup and teardown, patient registration, optimizing patient flow. It’s been a modern-day medical wartime effort to get doses into the arms of Americans.”
During the pandemic alone, Team Rubicon says that its teams of VCV volunteers have so far helped nearly 10 million people around the U.S., whether with pandemic-related aid or obtaining vaccinations.
For additional information on and to donate to VCV, visit https://teamrubiconusa.org/vcv.
