This is great news for SoCal Veterans and their local communities.
Vets Corps USA has expended from sewing and assembly to silk screening and graphics development, and soon to paper printing. Vets Corps USA is a non-profit program that provides vocational training for veterans who are patients from the Veterans Administration hospitals in Los Angeles. Previously, the program was known as VIPER (Veterans Industry Program for Employment Reintegration) sewing and assembling medical kits for deploying military units and Green Vets LA sewing cloth shopping bags as part of an effort to clean the environment. We decided to re-flag at Vets Corps when we expanded into graphics.
Our expansion was made possible by a grant from the prestigious Annenberg Foundation providing a t-shirt silk screen press and an offset printing press as well as grant money to cover supplies and veteran labor. We have also acquired an embroidery set.
The Vets Corps team is excited by this addition as previously, we focused our work therapy efforts around manual labor (sewing and assembly), and the addition of the printing equipment allows us to add art therapy and creative graphics therapy into our program to print on t-shirts and bags produced in our sewing program. To round out the effort, Vets Corps has developed a leadership program for military trained personnel to apply their leadership skills to the industrial environment.
Watch for our inaugural run of t-shirts, the proceeds of which go to the veterans themselves and to buy equipment for the program. We plan to offer silk screening and printing to companies wanting to purchase services from veterans. Our offset press offering will include business cards, catalogues, flyers, books and calendars.
www.vetscorpsusa.org
