Share Your Stories of Advocacy from Memorial Day and the Congressional Recess

This weekend, legislators are once again home in their districts to observe the Memorial Day holiday alongside the men and women they represent. Many legislators will join VFW members and advocates who will gather to honor the brave American men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our nation, hoping to hear our concerns on the issues facing service members, veterans, and military families. If you seize the opportunity to advocate this week on behalf of our nation's veterans and want to share your story, we want to help spread the word on the VFW Capitol Hill blog.

For more than a century, VFW has helped to get passed into law virtually every significant quality-of-life legislation for service members, veterans and their families. VFW has also helped to defeat bad legislation that would reduce or eliminate those hard earned programs, which is why our sustained voice in Washington is only as strong as the voice of VFW members and all of our veterans’ advocates around the country.

Without your help and your grassroots action in communities from coast to coast, accomplishments like the Post-9/11 GI Bill, Agent Orange presumptions, veterans’ hiring preference, survivor benefits, advance health care appropriations and Family Caregiver benefits would not have been possible.

If you don't know where to begin, the VFW offers a variety of tools to help you reach out to your elected officials and discuss many of the most pressing national issues facing our service members, veterans, and their loved ones.

To army yourself with the latest VFW Legislative Priority Goals, click here.

To learn about key bills VFW is working to pass in Congress, click here.

To find contact information for your congressmen and senators, click here.

The VFW Capitol Hill blog brings together the efforts of the VFW Action Corps and the VFW National Legislative Service to provide updates in real time on veterans and military issues as they develop in Washington and around the nation. We hope that you will send us your stories and help us inspire members to reach out to their representatives and take action!

To send us your news, use the Blog Submission Form posted here, or simply email photos and stories directly to vfwac@vfw.org.

Thanks to Our Readers, VFW Blog Sets Traffic Record

In February -- the shortest month of the year -- the VFW Capitol Hill blog shattered its monthly traffic record with more than 11,000 visitors reading stories and posting comments. The staff of the VFW Washington office wants to thank our readers and supporters for joining the conversation.

We hope you have enjoyed receiving timely and accurate information directly from our office about our day-to-day work here in Washington, and we sincerely appreciate the kind of feedback we've received. Your feedback has helped to inform our decision-making on issues like proposed changes to military benefits and retirement compensation, veterans' health care, and unemployment.

Since Kansas City gave us our own blog, we've seen traffic continue to grow precipitously each month. We know the best is yet to come, which is why we hope you will continue to read and share our stories, and submit stories of your own. After all, members of Congress only listen to us because of the work the VFW does in their home districts.

This month, we received several submissions from advocates coming to Washington for the 2012 VFW Legislative Conference, which you can read on the blog now. We love receiving these kinds of personal stories, and we hope to host more content like this moving forward.

If you have stories or photos of your own veterans' advocacy work you would like us to consider, send them in an email to vfwac@vfw.org. If you want to know the kinds of information we're looking for, we will soon offer an easy "After Action Report" worksheet on the VFW in DC homepage where you simply have to fill in the blanks, and we'll take care of the rest. Once it's live, we'll also post it on this blog.

The voice of our 2 million members truly resonates in Washington. This is why veterans' employment legislation was the only American jobs bill signed into law last year. This is why Congressmen flood the hopper with bills on veterans' issues each election cycle. Let's show them what the VFW is capable of.

In the coming months, we plan to introduce some new interactive features on the blog, like interactive live webchats on veterans' issues and quick videos explaining bills critical to the VFW.

Thank you, again, for making our blog a success. Keep reading and we'll keep working to ensure veterans' issues are a top priority in Washington.