VVA’s Financial Health

BY JACK McMANUS

After a year of COVID-19, VVA is alive and getting better. But we’re still in the midst of a long, slow recovery period. 

The Board of Directors recently approved VVA’s FY2022 Annual Operating Budget. This year’s budget has a drastically different focus from the Revised FY2021 Budget, in which we had shifted into the unknown and were on a survival basis as a result of the pandemic. 

The Finance Committee, under the leadership of its chair, Ned Foote, has worked for four months with the Accounting Department staff, directed by Janelle Andrews, to create a budget that adopts a full-speed-ahead approach to delivering our work plans throughout VVA’s many service programs and advocacy activities.

The most visible example of our new budget—reflecting a more stable financial reality—is the restoration of the printed and mailed edition of The VVA Veteran. Welcome back!

Within every cost center of this budget there are allocations to achieve tangible resumption and improvements with many of the projects and services that had been vastly reduced or curtailed by the financial uncertainties in last year’s lean and mean operating budget. 

Our BOD, committees, and our determined staff are all chomping at the bit to get actively back to work. That’s after a crappy year patiently maintaining, planning, and detailing some of these really significant projects.  

So what is the big difference between last year and this one in VVA’s financial outlook? The simple answer is a $3-4 million swing, on both the revenue and expense sides of the budget. 

In the next issue of The Veteran I will lay out the actual FY2021 financial performance in more detail. The major differences this year are the dramatic reopening of our Household Goods program and our other improved funding efforts. Two very important factors are the BOD’s leadership and VVA’s many aggressive cost-containment efforts. 

We are also blessed with a fabulous staff, a group of people who immediately started reacting to the constantly changing restrictions and limiting work requirements with new levels of flexibility, teamwork, and loyalty. 

We are now a smaller and leaner VVA than we were before this damned virus and economic crisis. VVA is still here and we’re still delivering every day.

We are projecting that we will remain a relevant veterans service organization going into the unknown future in a reasonably stable condition. 

Every new day seems to bring news of variant virus strains, so we’ll probably have more challenges. So what? Screw ’em, too. We’re VVA!

We remain in this fight, together. Get out of our damn way.

.

2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016
2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012
2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008
2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004
2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000