The 2025 Veteran Suicide Report, Billion-Dollar Campaigns, and the Word “Community”

If you’ve ever been on a partner call with me, this image above isn’t new. Because it represents exactly what we are working to change. In fact — spoiler alert — we are going to flip this image on its head through the strategic way we increase access to opportunity and vital resources at the local level for those who have served our Nation.

This isn’t theory for me. So I invite you — grab a cup and sit with me for a moment.

The 2025 annual Veteran suicide report was just released, and we encourage you to read it. The numbers everyone will cite:

• Veteran suicide rate: 35.2 per 100,000

• Second leading cause of death for Veterans under 45

• 73% involve firearms

• Female Veterans continue to die by suicide at significantly higher rates than non-Veteran women

Some will say deaths declined slightly. But the rate increased. That distinction matters.

Billions in Research. Decades of Study. Where Is the Operational Shift?

Over the last 15 years, we have invested heavily in:

• Suicide research

• High profile brands and organizations

• Brain injury and invisible wound studies

• Predictive analytics

• Crisis lines

• National awareness campaigns

• Federal legislation

And yet: 39% of Veterans who died by suicide had no documented mental health or substance use diagnosis.

Nearly four out of ten never entered the systems we continue to fund.

This is not a messaging problem. It is an access problem — and for decades, funded research has reached the same conclusion.

We already know the drivers: Isolation. Disconnection. Barriers to care. Lack of coordinated local support. Untreated brain injury and mental health. Basic needs instability and lack of wrap around services at the community level.

The issue is implementation at the local level, or what I refer to as the "Glass Floor of Partnerships."

The Funding Landscape: Powerful Brands, Limited Structural Change

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been pledged toward reducing Veteran suicide.

Large national organizations — with $5M to $200M annual budgets — receive the majority of this funding. They have:

• Dedicated development teams

• Compliance staff

• Research departments

• Capacity to navigate 60+ page RFPs designed to keep people out

So, they meet the eligibility requirements, but here’s the harder question: Did the suicide rate drop in proportion to the investment?

How are we closing the referral loop? How are we measuring a life saved?

Awareness is not operational access.

Let’s Compare Numbers

Large national organizations:

• $5M+ annual budgets (3% of all nonprofits), multimillion dollar investments

• National media buys, high profile endorsement

• Paid clinical teams

• Full research infrastructure

• Majority are not Direct Service organizations

Community Veteran organizations:

• $25K–$500K budgets (88% of all nonprofits)

• Volunteer-driven

• Small development teams, no grant writers

• Deep trust with local Veterans

• First call when someone is in crisis

• More 76% of Direct Service organizations are under $100k annual budgets

And here’s the uncomfortable part: National organizations are recieving three quarters of all the charitable dollars, and grant-make only a tiny fraction of the dollars to community-led organizations.

A fraction, but not for long.

Because when we compare outcomes — reach, direct service, leadership capacity built, partnerships activated — our numbers aren't just comparable, they are better.

Efficiency matters. Proximity matters. Trust matters. Local community access is everything.

We’ve Said It Before — So Here It Is Again

Eligibility and systems of support are two different things.

Eligibility is paperwork, thresholds, and criteria. Systems of support are pathways.

They include eligibility — but they begin with local access.

They begin before someone fills out a form.

We, at Veterans Collaborative, focus on systems of support because that is how you operationalize prevention at the community level.

If you build a true local system, eligibility becomes navigable — not prohibitive.

That is a very different philosophy than the top down structure we have today, and one we have to change if we want the numbers to change.

The Word “Community” Has Become a Campaign Slogan

In the last five days, I have seen the word community used more than ever before on my feeds, as if the recent annual report said something new or different than what we've known the last 20 years.

It now sits next to “ecosystem” in nearly every keynote, announcement, and article.

But if they truly knew how to build community systems, they would have done it already and the numbers would be moving differently.

Community is not:

• Invite-only grant cycles

• Barriers to keep organizations out

• 67-page RFPs

• Control

• Donor centric partnerships

• High-profile events, symposiums, or trademarked phrases

• National strategies disconnected from state operations and local needs

The same high-profile individuals talking at us as if they know something we don’t — all while ignoring the local partners sitting in the room.

Community means:

• Local and state-level collaboration

• Wraparound service support

• Operationalizing policy and research through local and regional partnerships

• Access to all available compliant resources within a community

• Leadership development of emerging leaders

• Needs assessments of local organizations, like general operating support

• Structures that reduce administrative overhead

• Investment in organizations under $250K

And this is exactly what we are doing. Not talking about. Doing.

If you are not funding that community layer — you are funding scale. Those are not the same thing, and the numbers prove it.

Twenty-Four Years in the Nonprofit Sector Taught Me This

I’ve been in nonprofit and organizational development my entire career — relationship building, business development (fundraising), leadership, and effective programming.

But the spark for Veterans Collaborative and our model came from my time as a grantmaker, 7 years in long-term disaster recovery. Not relief, but recovery.

During this time, I programmed hundreds of millions of dollars into communities decimated by natural and man-made disasters across this country and around the world.

My time as a grantmaker is also where I became an expert in IRS compliance and fiscal sponsorship, building pathways to action when something we needed simply didn’t exist. When a system gap showed up, we didn’t wait for permission. We built the bridge. (More on that later.)

Our national organizations were and are vital for relief, but not for community recovery because their profile overshadowed the local community. When the cameras left and the national organizations moved on, we rebuilt what was unseen yet vital to recovery and the people who needed it most:

• Housing systems

• Case management pipelines

• Food access networks

• Mental health navigation pathways

• Legal support systems

• Local government partnerships

• Community coalitions and networks of care

That work is slow. Relational. Unseen. And it is the only thing that holds.

I knew early on this structure — this way of building systems from the ground up — was essential to our Veteran and military community and the challenges we are working to solve.

Solutions, including suicide prevention, are not built in headlines with big mics, big rooms, and big announcements.

It is local. It is local. It is local.

But the majority of organizations doing long-term system work at the community level — as research consistently shows — are operating without sustained investment.

They are often left out of resource networks because decision-makers do not fully understand the nonprofit landscape. And in many cases, we are unintentionally building barriers into the very systems meant to help.

Here are just a few examples:

• Requiring audits for organizations under $1M in revenue (when $1.5M is generally the IRS threshold-- this goes for states too). Let me be clear: requiring one for organizations under $500K demonstrates one of three things — Funder-directed risk protection prioritized over the communities being served, a lack of understanding of nonprofit finance realities and proportional compliance standards, or a lack of confidence in the ability to properly review and interpret financial statements. If you require one of these as a funder for program grants under $25k, let me help you.

• Subjectively filtering programs. For example: “There are five service dog organizations within 20 miles, so we’ll only list one.” Why? List them all. Access should not be artificially narrowed. Veterans deserve choice.

• Attempting to be the singular “hub” in a way that elevates brand over access. This is a significant issue in our sector. When visibility, or someone's ego or latest tech, becomes more important than navigation, the system breaks.

• Scarcity mentality from leaders who understand business growth models but not nonprofit ecosystems. Nonprofits are not competitors in a market share battle. They are nodes in a support network.

• Public misreporting of nonprofit data because leaders do not understand nonprofit classifications, reporting thresholds, or revenue structures — and then using that flawed data to shape policy conversations.

• A “prove it to me” posture instead of proactively assessing and identifying need. Prevention requires curiosity and humility, not gatekeeping.

• Lack of Veteran cultural competency. Just because someone served — or serves those who served — does not automatically mean they understand the lived experience of the typical Veteran navigating transition, benefits, pride, stigma, or isolation where they live. I about fell out of my chair when a Veteran recently testified on the Hill that Veterans are abusing systems and need to “do the work” and seek mental health support before eligibility of benefits. That mindset reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what is happening on the ground. (More on that later.)

• Controlled entry into networks that should be open pathways. When inclusion is curated instead of structured, we create silos — not systems. There is a national network that requires you to gross $250k before being listed in their resources, so that means they are only sharing a tiny fraction of service organizations.

If we are serious about prevention, we must stop mistaking control for coordination. Access must expand, not contract. That is what true infrastructure looks like.

Access over ego. Systems over spotlight. Inclusion over control.

Because prevention does not scale through branding. It stabilizes through structure and pathways to support— built locally, from the ground up so our community has what they need, when they need it, where they live.

A Direct Challenge

Take a look at your feed, following the recent report. Look at the ads and articles circulating right now — and then go check their websites.

See which one actually references local community access as the missing key — and then follow the investment.

See which national conferences are creating real access for emerging leaders or new community organizations to speak… or even to have a booth.

See who is operationalizing locally — not just announcing nationally.

If organizations are truly championing community, you should be able to measure it in simple ways:

• Their grant programs

• The percentage of dollars going to organizations under $100K

• Increased local and state partnerships

• Engagement with diverse community organizations

• Reduced barriers to entry

You don’t need a press release to see it. You can see it in the structure. Check it out- decide for yourself.

Community is not a catchphrase to us.

And when you build it correctly — even with a fraction of the dollars these national organizations have — the numbers speak for themselves.

This is the work. Systems. Access. Local infrastructure. Leadership development. Operational pathways that are filling gaps and actually reaching people.

We are serious about reducing and stopping Veteran suicide. We are funding and building at the layer where prevention actually lives. Join us!

#FiscalSponsorship #RADAR #MissionForward #Veterans Interstate Network #HeadsUp #EndHunger #VeteranSupport #VeteranSuicidePrevention #SystemsChange #CommunityInfrastructure #WraparoundServices #LocalImpact with Veterans Collaborative.

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