Mediation and advocacy approaches for homeless veterans across three organizations

¶ … Individual Programmatic Assessment based on Literature Review of Mediation and Advocacy within a human service agency. The human service agency that the paper will be based on is the "HOMELESS VETERANS." This paper explores the existing integration of mediation and advocacy that each of the three organizations - Department of Veteran Affairs, National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and the Volunteers of America - provide for homeless veterans. The paper concludes by discussing whether advocacy or mediation may be more appropriate for this (homeless veterans) specific population.

The three organizations featured in this essay are the Department of Veteran Affairs, National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and the Volunteers of America. Each features its own blend of advocacy and mediation.

Department of Veteran Affairs

This DVA provide information on housing assistance, job training, and education to help homeless veteran's secure safe, stable housing, and achieve self-sufficiency. Additionally, this organization has taken decisive action to end Veteran Homelessness by 2015 and is working with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to obtain that goal.

The president of the organization has stated:

President Obama and I are personally committed to ending homelessness among Veterans within the next five years. I learned long ago that there are never any absolutes in life, and a goal of zero homeless Veterans sure sounds like an absolute. But unless we set ambitious targets for ourselves, we would not be giving this our very best efforts. No one who has served this Nation as a Veteran should ever be living on the street. (Homeless Veterans at the VA)

The DVA in short is primarily focused on advocacy. It is active, urgently promoting its agenda which seeks to end homelessness and make its clients more self-sufficient. This Department is a government-run military veteran benefit system that administers veterans' benefits for veterans, their families, and survivors. Ways of ending veteran homelessness include providing homeless veterans with disability compensation, pension, education, home loans, life insurance, vocational, rehabilitation, survivors' benefits, medical benefits, and burial benefits. (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; Benefits: Linkshttp://www.va.gov/landing_vba.htm). The mission of the Department of Veterans Affairs, in short, is to end homelessness of veterans by 2015. Its medium is advocacy. Mediation does not come into its language.

Conclusion

Each of these three organizations -- the Department of Veteran Affairs, National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and the Volunteers of America - advertise themselves as advocates for ending veteran homelessness. Since their stance is active and, consequently, subjective they cannot afford to adopt the objective pose of mediation. Their job is to end homelessness by any practical means that lies at their disposal. This is their agenda. Mediation would be irrelevant and even detrimental to their agenda. In this case, therefore, it seems to me that pure advocacy is the best route for these organizations to take. Mediation would only destruct their goals.