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Veterans Advisory Committee Minutes August 27,2019 Page 2 Jackie Boland: Aloha and thank you for giving me a couple of minutes. I'm the community outreach Director for AARP and I'm actually over on Oahu. But we have an active team in East Hawai`i and in fact we have started a pilot over her on the east side of this island to grow our presence and relevance with our members and the entire 50+ population. With AARP as a membership organization for people 50 and older and we basically came about 60 years ago because our founder who was a retired teacher discovered one of her former teachers that was working for her basically living in a chicken coop because she couldn't afford to pay for healthcare and also a place to live. Since then we've done a lot of work on the health and financial security of older adults and their families. In the last year and a half AARP has started a Veterans, Military and Families initiative, recognizing that a large portion of our membership are veterans. So, we've designed some materials that we hope will be relevant to them. I wanted to tell you about them and offer out to you that we can provide you for free if you have any groups that would be interested in them. For those of you in Kona, I can mail you a packet. For those of you here we have an AARP Watchdog handbook and we've noticed that Veterans are being targeted with fraud recently. We've identified the most common types of fraud for Veterans are. We also have a presentation that goes with this fi anyone has a group that wants to hear a presentation on this. The other thing is, one in six Americans are caring for an older adult or disabled family member, we've developed this Military caregiving guide for Veterans, Servicemembers and their families. In Hawai`i, I don't know the Military side of it, but I will say that one in four people I Hawai'i over the age of 18 is caring for an older adult. I think we have a high ratio over here in the state. This caregiver guide was not developed with just the retiree in mind it was developed with the idea that caregivers would be potentially helping disabled combat veterans as well. One thing that we know, caregiving can be as devastating to the caregiver as getting almost any major disease. Most times caregivers end up getting because they are not caring for themselves and they're not building a strong enough support network. We do a lot around family caregiving. On September 19th we are sponsoring a caregiver conference in Kona. It's going to be an excellent event at the Sheraton. It's not specific to military but there's going to be lots of great information about relieving stress, the burden of care but also accessing services. There's a bunch of handouts that I have less experience with, but they are all about transitions for Veterans from active military to the private sector. A lot of states are working with veterans' organizations to help people re-career. I really wanted to offer out that we have these resources. We'll be trying to get them out through our channels but if you would like them, we'd love to offer them to you. We also have, because East Hawai`i (Hamakua Coast to Volcano) in our pilot area, we have extra dollars for some stuff this year. Outside of this if there are opportunities to sponsor or co- sponsor between now and the end of the year, I do have some resources that we can lend to that. Does anyone have questions? Lewis: You've been doing a good marketing, I've already in my weekly in VFW, which is another hat I wear, you have a link online. I don't know if you have for the caregiver guide but your doo for these and that's so helpful. There are many who will only want the