Getting to Yes

Summary: Veteran Voices in Research showcases the value of Veteran collaborators across recent history, and how their experiences, values, and expertise improve the quality, relevance, and impact of VA research. This issue, "Getting to Yes," follows a Veteran who helped inform a VA study-and then set out to turn its findings into change on the ground.

Paul Berry, left, with Gary Cunha, Suicide Prevention Coordinator at the Durham VA.

According to Paul Berry, a retired Marine Corps sergeant major, he can "sell anything to anybody"- a skill he honed as a high-level military recruiter. These days he's selling cooperation: As director of strategic partnerships at the Charlotte-based nonprofit Veterans Bridge Home, he helps run a network, NCServes, that links Veterans across the Carolinas to housing, jobs, and other community support.

For years, though, his sales pitch would occasionally hit a wall: Outside his network, the larger system was built on point-to-point referrals, a fragile chain of handoffs that often dead-ended at one overwhelmed office. "You're just a little nonprofit," is how he remembers the old posture. "What do you know?" Then he and his colleagues helped produce something that changed the conversation: evidence.

The evidence came in the form of a peer-reviewed study led by Dr. Leslie Hausmann, a researcher and associate director of VA's Center for Healthcare Evaluation, Research, and Promotion (CHERP). Berry himself had helped inform the study as both an information resource and an advisor on what to do with its findings. The team examined how VA medical centers partner with networks like Veterans Bridge Home to meet Veterans' everyday social needs, and it found that the more closely the two sides worked together, the more likely a Veteran was to connect with the help they'd been referred to-and Veterans served at once by both VA and a community partner did better still. Berry had known this for years-and now a VA team had applied both quantitative and qualitative methods to prove it true.

Having this evidence in hand has made Berry a better salesman. "It's my elevator pitch," he said, drawn from the study and other evidence-based work-and the study is what lends him the most credibility, a document that says clearly: "This isn't people just making stuff up down here in North Carolina."

In the fall of 2024, not long after the study was published, Berry attended a regional outreach event where he met Dr. Genevieve Embree, deputy chief of the Office of Public Health/Epidemiology at the Durham VA. When Dr. Embree asked him how NCServes worked, he pulled up Dr. Hausmann's paper and showed her. "That . . . was exactly what she needed to have," he said. "She said, 'Why are we not doing this? Why are we not connecting to community partners?'"

The idea found a champion in Durham VA director Dr. Alyshia Smith, who leads a system serving 80,000 Veterans across 27 North Carolina counties. "I go to a lot of meetings where she's present," said Berry, "and she always ends with: 'How do we get to yes? How do we best serve Veterans and their families?'"

Getting to yes, Berry said, begins when people stop making excuses and start clearing barriers. In a system as vast as VA health care, these barriers are real: for example,, wariness about adopting another shared-technology platform, or honest concerns about VA appearing to endorse a single nonprofit. Despite these obstacles, progress is already visible: Of roughly 100 Durham social workers trained to refer Veterans to community partners, Berry said, about 20 became enthusiastic early adopters. The approach is spreading beyond Durham to communities like Salisbury and Asheville, where partners lean on his network for housing. Conversations have also begun about bringing this model to Fayetteville, home of Fort Bragg. Berry's own work has grown alongside it: He is the data-and-relationships partner with the University of North Carolina's Healthy Veterans Community Project, built on the NC Serves model, and he co-chaired the North Carolina Institute of Medicine's Veterans Health Task Force.

Ultimately, he said, he wants to work himself out of the middle. Once more people like Dr. Embree are carrying the findings to their peers inside VA, he won't need to kick into salesman mode. "If she's on a call with the other public health folks, she can share Dr. Hausmann's research paper, and Paul Berry doesn't need to be in a nonprofit in the background because the credibility comes . . . from their own discipline."

In the meantime, there's plenty to keep him busy. "This is what gets me up in the morning," he said. "I know we're on the right track."

The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States government.