Community Involvement
Direct community involvement is a VFW priority, extending beyond the realm of veterans helping fellow veterans.
Annually, VFW and the Men's and Ladies Auxiliaries donate more than 13 million volunteer hours of community service. VFW members mentor youth groups, help in community food kitchens, volunteer in blood drives, and visit hospitalized veterans. Others help veterans file compensation claims.
VFW's Community Service programs are designed to encourage community service and increase civic pride, which ultimately enhances education, improves the environment, and ensures the availability of health services for veterans.
VFW's Citizenship Education program is designed to stimulate interest in America's history and traditions and to promote citizenship, civic responsibility, and patriotism.
VFW's Youth Scholarship programs provide more than $3.5 million in scholarships to our nation's youth. They include Voice of Democracy, Patriot's Pen youth essay contest, and Scout of the Year.
The VFW's partnership with the Boy Scouts of America includes sponsoring more than 1,200 Scouting units with 40,000 members across the nation.
VFW's Safety Program encourages VFW Posts and Auxiliaries to conduct programs in home, auto, and bicycle safety, as well as programs dealing with drug awareness and substance abuse.
The VFW National Home for Children is a community development in a family-like environment that is home to orphaned or single parent children of VFW or Ladies Auxiliary members. The home, which was established in 1925 on 160 acres (0.65 km2) in Eaton Rapids, Michigan, emphasizes the values of education, good work habits, and sound moral character.
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Famous quotes containing the words community and/or involvement:
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)
“In the planning and designing of new communities, housing projects, and urban renewal, the planners both public and private, need to give explicit consideration to the kind of world that is being created for the children who will be growing up in these settings. Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children with persons both older and younger than themselves.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)