Matched roles
What might fit
Answer a few things on the right and this list reorders. Nothing here requires you to be employed.
On the list
Roles marked Internal sit inside a project you can be placed into directly. Roles marked External are existing programs and organizations — you would go to them.
Definition
A safe place is somewhere you can walk in without a diagnosis, a referral, or a reason
That is the whole standard. Everything below is measured against it. The closest thing that already exists at national scale is the Vet Center — community-based, records kept separate from the hospital system, no enrollment required, staffed heavily by veterans, open outside clinic hours. A safe-place network should be built on that pattern rather than beside it.
Design rule
This directory names program types, not locations. Contact details are deliberately absent — a wrong number in a crisis tool is worse than no number. Local verification is a queue task with a named verifier and a date.
Veterans Crisis Line Dial 988, then press 1 Free, confidential, 24 hours. You do not need to be enrolled in VA care.
Why this framework starts at separation
The risk is front-loaded, and it is not evenly spread across the year
An analysis covering all United States military personnel from 2001 to 2011 — 3,795,823 service members — established the pattern. VA's own literature review states that risk was nearly three times higher immediately following separation than for active duty service members. Later work found the peak falls between six and twelve months out, then declines only modestly. In the first year after separation, 15.1% of veterans reported suicidal ideation, with depression the strongest predictor.
Risk is higher for those who served fewer than two years, and for those who left on other-than-honorable, general, disability, or misconduct discharges — which is to say, often the people least likely to feel entitled to walk into a VA building.
This is the argument for the framework. The intervention window is narrow, it opens the day someone separates, and identity loss is the mechanism it has to address. Not unemployment. Identity.
What the framework does with that
- Contact starts before separation, not after. A mission assignment should exist on day one of civilian life, the way the next posting always did.
- Discharge status does not gate entry. The people at highest risk are disproportionately the ones a status-gated program would turn away.
- The first year gets density. Weekly contact through month twelve, then tapering — matched to where the risk actually sits rather than spread evenly.
- Substance support is built in, not referred out. More than one in ten veterans has a diagnosed substance use disorder, and 63% of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans with an SUD diagnosis also met criteria for PTSD. Splitting those into two programs splits the person.
Before building anything
What already exists, and where the gap actually is
Most of the components are already funded and running. The gap is not services. The gap is that nothing owns the veteran's purpose — every program owns a problem, and purpose is not a problem.
Veteran Readiness and Employment — Chapter 31
38 U.S.C. §§3100–3122 · 38 CFR Part 21 · up to 48 months
Five tracks: Reemployment, Rapid Access to Employment, Self-Employment, Long-Term Services, and Independent Living. The Self-Employment track funds business-plan development, startup supplies and equipment, and initial inventory. Independent Living is capped at 24 months with limited new entrants.
Vet Centers
Established 1979 · P.L. 96-22 · Readjustment Counseling Service
Confidential records held separately from VHA, no VHA enrollment required, non-traditional hours, heavily veteran-staffed. Roughly 232 community centers and about 80 mobile units. Reporting since a 2021 restructuring documents counselor shortages and delays.
Compensated Work Therapy and Supported Employment
VA
Clinically supported paid work designed as a bridge. Where employment is part of the plan, the evidence favors Individual Placement and Support: across 28 randomized trials, competitive employment reached 55% against 25% for controls, and a meta-analysis of 17 trials found participants 2.4 times more likely to be employed. Fidelity matters — major deviations from the core principles reduce the effect.
Housing and stability
HUD-VASH · VA peer support · Solid Start · Whole Health
Housing vouchers with case management, credentialed peer specialists whose lived experience is the qualification, structured outreach in the first year, and a care model organized around what matters to the veteran rather than the presenting diagnosis.
If Social Security disability is part of your picture
LINTEL · two separate doors
These are not one question. SSDI is insurance you paid for through work, and your VA compensation does not reduce it by a single dollar. SSI is needs-based, and your VA compensation counts against it dollar for dollar after the first $20 — roughly $1,014 a month of VA compensation zeroes out the federal SSI payment entirely. LINTEL has a separate veteran entrance for each. Walking through a general door produces a number that is wrong for you.
Business ownership
SBA VetCert · 13 CFR Part 128 · 31 outreach centers
Certification moved from VA to SBA effective January 1, 2023, and self-certification ended after December 22, 2024. The government-wide contracting goal is at least 3%, and VA's Vets First program sets aside at least 7% of VA contracts. Boots to Business is delivered free inside the DoD transition program.
Honest about the evidence
The risk data is strong. The program data is not.
The transition-window findings rest on population-scale analysis and are solid. The continued-service organizations this framework borrows from — disaster response teams, service platoons, athletic communities — report their outcomes largely through internal impact surveys. Rigorous external evaluation is thin.
That is an argument for building the evaluation into the framework from day one rather than an argument against the model. A modest matched-comparison design would make this the best-evidenced program in a field that mostly does not have one.
Full evidence base