Local veterans had the opportunity Friday to take home a free tablet by participating in a skills assessment conducted by the Asheville Veterans Affairs Hospital.
The event took place from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at the Robert Carpenter Community Building, with digital navigators from the Charles George VA Medical Center guiding veterans through a digital assessment at a collection of computers set up in two rooms. Upon taking the assessments, participants were provided a laptop, tablet or smartphone while supplies lasted. Only North Carolina residents and VA-enrolled veterans could take the assessment.
According to Macon County Veterans Services Director Leigh Tabor, these kinds of events help fill gaps in digital literacy, especially in older and rural veteran populations, as the Department of Veterans Affairs continues a push toward an online-only format for benefits. By hosting the skills assessment, the navigators had the opportunity to determine which veterans were struggling with online literacy and schedule one-on-one meetings to help them learn how to better access online benefits.
The program was paid for with Digital Champion Grant funding from the N.C. Department of Information Technology.
The VA has been pushing for an all-online format for a couple years now and moved requests for travel pay online around a year ago. Tabor said the push has picked up especially under the current VA director, Douglas Collins.
Tabor believes Macon County is doing better than some of its neighboring counties at managing digital literacy among veterans, but there are two main roadblocks to address: access and literacy.
“Internet connectivity is the big one, just the fact that there is internet that’s accessible and reliable.” Tabor said. “But then you also get into the financial piece of it; some of these veterans can’t afford an extra bill. And then … the devices are, for an older person, they’re difficult. I mean sometimes they’re difficult for us to learn and navigate. So, it’s just something that’s completely out of their generation, where the kids now are learning it in school and even for school so it’s second nature. They’re very uncomfortable with it.”
Tabor said events like in one Friday help to bridge that gap, but to ensure veterans retain access to benefits more work will need to be done to both expand internet access for those who can afford it and to establish places where veterans without the willingness or ability to have their own internet can access internet and potentially assistance.
“That’s one of the things that has been discussed, a place where veterans can go,” she said. “They actually set one up in Asheville with the Veteran Healing Farm. It was used with grant money where they put in a really nice desktop with a couple of monitors. It’s an open area where veterans can go so they could either go there to do their homework, to fill a job application, they can go there and do a telehealth appointment.”