When the Robin Hood Foundation and the City of New York approached IVMF in October 2013 with a question about how to fix the fragmented, twisted maze of services available to veterans, the answer was not a new program. It was a new model. IVMF built AmericaServes on the premise that organizations serving veterans and their families were already doing their core work well. What they lacked was the bandwidth, tools, and trust to coordinate with peer organizations. Over the next six years, AmericaServes built that connective tissue in communities across the country and demonstrated, at scale, that coordinated care delivers better outcomes than collaboration alone.
The first network, NYServes-NYC, launched in January 2015 with sixteen providers and a single coordination center acting as a backbone, triaging needs and routing them to the partners best positioned to meet them. The model spread quickly. By the summer of 2019, AmericaServes operated seventeen networks across nine states and Washington D.C., supported by more than 1,084 providers and a shared technology platform built with Unite Us. Together, these networks served more than 43,000 unique clients and addressed more than 106,000 distinct service requests. Across these networks, 76% of requests were resolved favorably, and the typical client could expect to be matched to a suitable provider for their needs in less than a day
