One veteran, a dozen front doors: what states are learning about coordinating veteran services

Last month Civic Roundtable co-founder Austin Boral joined OpenGov's Noah Golding to explore where veteran services coordination breaks down and what it takes to fix it.

We began our conversation with a poll asking: How many organizations does a veteran in your state typically touch to get connected to benefits?

About two-thirds of the room was "unsure."

That uncertainty says a lot. Even the people closest to the work have a hard time seeing the whole path a veteran takes to receiving benefits. If the professionals serving veterans can't map the journey, the veteran walking it certainly can't.

From the veteran’s perspective, the end goal is to get answers and assistance. Frustrations arise when the many agencies involved ask them to tell the same story, answer the same question and fill out the same paperwork over and over again. 

From the state veterans agency to the county VSO, all of the agencies that touch a veteran’s journey to benefits are staffed by people who care, but each has its own intake process, its own records, its own terminology, and its own version of the veteran's story. That is where people fall through, and it isn't a failure of effort. The system is genuinely hard to navigate.

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The four places coordination breaks

Across our work with federal, state, and local veterans services partners, four failure points came up nearly everywhere:

• Referrals: A veteran gets sent to a partner, but the provider can’t track whether the handoff actually happened.

• Guidance: Policies change and programs update, and those updates travel through email, SharePoint, Google Drive, and text, and outdated versions keep circulating. Layer on turnover at the VSOs and nonprofits doing the work, and the front line is often operating on last year's rules.

• Visibility: Multiple organizations serve the same person or work the same program, and each sees only its own slice. Not knowing what a neighboring county is doing creates missed opportunities.

• Reporting: Leaders are asked for real-time answers, but it takes time and manual effort to assemble the underlying data and satisfy grant deadlines.

There’s no shortage of effort or intent. The problem is the absence of shared infrastructure.

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Lessons from a connected ecosystem: what states are actually doing

New Jersey

Through the Bringing Veterans Home Initiative, the Department of Community Affairs teamed with the Department of Veterans Affairs to align counties, nonprofits, housing providers, and local partners on one goal: reach functional zero in veterans homelessness in the state.

Roundtable became the engine powering coordination across state agencies and partners, creating a space for shared resources, updates, peer-to-peer questions, technical assistance, and statewide visibility across the network. In July 2026 the state announced it had permanently housed more than 2,500 veterans and reached its milestone of functional zero.

Colorado

Colorado's challenge is structural. State law requires all 64 counties to appoint a veterans service officer so that veterans are served on a uniform basis — but those officers are appointed and paid by their counties, not the state. The Division of Veterans Affairs owns the mandate for consistency and county capacity ranges from a full county department to a single part-time officer covering hundreds of square miles.

So CDVA didn't need a system of record. It needed a channel. Within 30 days, Roundtable mapped the ecosystem and connected the state's VSO network, streamlining communications to 900+ stakeholders and standing up secure workspaces now used by more than 90% of Colorado's VSOs, with 230+ resources shared.

What stood out to Director Bruce Cowan's team wasn't the speed — it was that counties stopped behaving like an audience: they post questions, answer each other, and find out what a comparable county is doing about the same problem. 

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OpenGov & Civic Roundtable: two approaches to a connected veterans services ecosystem

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The takeaway

We opened by asking how many organizations a veteran touches, and most of the room couldn't say. The states making progress aren't the ones with a better answer to that question — they're the ones that built the connective layer that makes finding answers easy. 

For states looking to improve veterans services, you don't need to replace the systems veterans depend on. Simply connecting the people providing the services helps ensure that a veteran doesn't have to tell their story at a dozen doors. 

Watch the full recording of the webinar.