Community leaders and advocates strategize on building healthier, more supportive environments for North Carolina veterans.
The Building Veteran-Healthy Communities project strives to enhance veteran mental health and well-being through local support and collaboration.
A wide-ranging project at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, Building Veteran-Healthy Communities (BVHC), is working with communities to better support the mental health of veterans and contribute to their overall sense of well-being.
Nearly 6,400 veterans died by suicide in 2021. With more than 700,000 veterans living in North Carolina and approximately 18 million across the United States, this crisis is making a profound impact on communities of all sizes.
Veteran well-being and suicide prevention are often addressed at the individual level from a clinical perspective. For example, at-risk veterans are often referred for clinical mental health services by their primary care provider. However, after an impromptu conversation at a workforce development conference between Vaughn Upshaw, DrPH, EdD, MPH – principal investigator of the BVHC project and chair of the Department of Public Health Leadership and Practice at the Gillings School – and Paul Crews, MPH, former director of the Durham Veterans Affairs Health Care System, the idea for BVHC was born. Their shared public health background led them to agree that efforts to improve veteran well-being and suicide prevention should focus on communities.
The big-picture goal of the BVHC project is to support community efforts to become healthier places for veterans to live, and the project is specifically designed to work alongside community-based organizations with the understanding that they know their community best. The approach involves building awareness among local organizations of the unique issues veterans face when re-entering civilian life and fostering collaborations between the organizations to better address those issues. The project is also developing interactive resources that will provide information and tools to strategically support these community efforts.
Learn more at healthyvets.unc.edu.
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