Rocky Boy Veteran Center rebrands, expanding

After years of slow but steady expansion, the Rocky Boy Veterans Center is now the Great Plains Veterans Service Center, having rebranded earlier this week and opened its fourth branch office, in Scobey, Monday.

Center Director Chauncey Parker said the rebrand is something the non-profit has been thinking about for more than a year but the idea really picked up steam in November of last year with the arrival of Communication Specialist Becky Lewis, and he's excited both for the new name and the new location.

The then-Rocky Boy Veterans Center began life as a single location in 2015 under a Veterans Business grant, providing transportation and direct assistance services to Native American veterans in the Rocky Boy area after Parker and fellow veteran John Gardipee partnered with the local American Legion post to serve the area's veterans and eventually setting up the center.

Parker said that, shortly after their creation, veterans from farther and farther outside their coverage area began asking about the services, particularly transportation services, which prompted the organization to expand their coverage area until their first satellite offices started going up in late 2020, first in Fort Belknap, then Browning, then Big Timber and now in Scobey.

These offices provide transportation services to veterans in the area, including non-Native veterans, something Parker said there was clearly a need for.

He said their direct assistance services have expanded more slowly, being available in the Fort Belknap area as well as the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, but not in their other areas of expansion.

He said, at this point, direct assistance is still focused on helping Native veterans, but if non-Native veterans ask them for help they will provide it.

Parker said upon setting up these new offices it became clear that their name, Rocky Boy Veterans Center, was causing some confusion, as many assumed the center only served Rocky Boy veterans, hampering their efforts to help veterans, Native and otherwise, outside the Rocky Boy area.

"Right from the start, there was a misconception that any services we provide is just for Rocky Boy veterans, so that was an issue," he said.

He said the Scobey location's opening Monday went very well, and he's thrilled to start get help to people in the area.

"Being able to provide these services to our fellow veterans is something we're happy to be able to do," he said.

During the ceremony Monday, Parker said they are eager to work with anyone who wants to help them, or get help serving veterans in the area.

"We are proud to be able to support our veterans here in the northeast part of Montana and we welcome all partnerships in order to serve those veterans," he said.

The recent expansion isn't the end of the center's work, however. Parker said the center is seeking more funding, and if they get what they are hoping for they could start expanding throughout the entire state.

He said the money they're applying for does necessitate they use it for operations in rural areas, but that was more or less the plan anyway, as urban centers like Great Falls tend to already have more veteran services than the rural areas they would be expanding into.

Much like their more recent expansions, transportation services would become available before direct assistance services make it to those areas.

He said they found in the past that expanding direct assistance services too quickly tends to spread them too thin, and if they want to maintain the quality of their services they need to be careful and take things slower than they do when it comes to transportation, though they do hope to eventually cover the state as well.

As for when they will expand next in the short-term, Parker said, that is still up in the air, but their transportation manager Thomas Lewis is looking at specific locations.

He said that, when he and Gardipee started this venture seven years ago, he had no idea the organization was going to expand this far or even be able to provide services outside of Rocky Boy.

Looking back on those early days, he said, the biggest hurdles for the organization was just getting their foundation set and the whole thing up an running.

Aside from the grants they get from the federal government, he said, the center is not affiliated with any government local, state or national, so they had to set things up independently.

"To do it all ourselves was a huge challenge for sure," he said.

Other than those initial hurdles, Parker said, the COVID-19 pandemic was a huge challenge as well.

He said many people on the staff caught the virus at one point or another, but they all recovered fortunately.

However, he said, they did lose a some veterans.

"Some of them were pretty surprising and hard to take." Parker said.

Despite those hardships, he said, being a veteran-led and Native American-led veteran service organization and seeing so much success and excitement for their services has been incredible, especially in a state with the third-highest veteran population per capita.