During the veterans benefits fair held Saturday at the El Paso Community College Administrative Services Center, Jeri Elena Mark, right, service officer for Chapter 187 of Disabled American Veterans, hands a pamphlet to Anna Bone as Army veteran Bobby J. Bone signs a petition. Photo by Heather Wilburn.

Fair provides veterans easy access to benefits information

Heather Wilburn

Special to The Monitor

By the halfway point of the veterans’ benefits fair held Saturday, about 750 veterans and family members had come through the doors of the El Paso Community College Administration Services Center in search of information, and organizers expected at least 250 more.

The event is so popular with area veterans because it provides them with a “one-stop shop” that makes it as easy as possible for veterans to find out about the benefits offered to them by several agencies, said Jan Rader, director of the Texas Veterans Land Board Communications Center and Outreach Marketing.

“The purpose for our being here is really the core of our program,” she said. “We want to be able to reach out into the veteran community around the state and try to get in touch with as many veterans as we can to let them know about their benefits.”

The Texas Veterans Land Board and the Texas Veterans Commission, the event’s co-sponsors, offer benefits for veterans that are “over and above” what the Department of Veterans Affairs offers, Rader said, but many veterans don’t know that.

“They don’t know there are two separate sets of programs,” she said. “They don’t know what their benefits are, they don’t know who to talk to [and] they don’t know where to go. A lot of times, they’ve had a bad experience because they’ve gotten on the phone and they’ve started calling around and they get bounced from one office to the next.”

To remedy this problem, the fair’s organizers sought to bring together several agencies in one place.

“We thought what we should do is ... get together as many people as we can who represent state agencies, federal agencies – anything that offers a benefit to a veteran – and put them in one place at one time and let the veterans come and have someone to talk to face to face,” Rader said.

The agencies at Saturday’s fair, one of about a dozen held across the state this year, included the Land Board and Texas Veterans Commission, VA, Social Security Administration, Small Business Admini-stration, veterans’ service organizations, realtors and mortgage lenders. 

Having the agencies in one place made it easier for Marine Corps veteran Samuel Benavidez to find the information he was looking for.

“I wanted to find out about the refinancing on homes through the Land Board,” he said. “It’s definitely easier to do something when everybody’s in one place.”

Sebastian Fernandez, another Marine Corps veteran, agreed.

“It’s convenient,” he said. “I came just to see the different benefits that are out there – I think there are a lot that I don’t know about.”

It’s common for veterans to be unsure of the benefits to which they’re entitled, Rader said.

“As people come in, they seem to be curious: ‘What have you got? What’s inside those doors?’” she said. “And when they come out, so many times they will … make a point of stopping back out here and saying, ‘Thank you for being here … we had no idea about fill in the blank.’”

According to Zaimis Brooks, one of those blanks is often the El Paso Veterans Center. A lot of veterans don’t know what it is or what it does, or even that it’s around, she said.

“We’re here so we can pass on information to our veterans,” Brooks said. “We do all kinds of services: readjustment counseling for veterans who were in combat, and their spouses and children, bereavement counseling for widows. We also help them apply for benefits.”

In addition, the center provides vocational counseling and community education.

“Any service that we can not provide, we’ll inform the veterans where to go for it,” Brooks said, noting that it’s important for veterans to learn about their benefits.

Rader agreed that it’s important that the veterans came out to learn about the benefits “they so richly deserve,” regardless of which services they were investigating.

“You know, it doesn’t matter what it was that they took home with them, they got something of value by coming here today,” she noted. “Our whole intent at the Veterans Land Board is to be able to repay Texas veterans for their service to our country, and we feel like the best way we can do that, as a state agency, is to first of all provide the best veterans’ benefits in the state and, second of all, be sure our veterans know about them. … We want them to please be sure to take advantage of them, because they’ve earned them.”