Vet News: Vietnam Veterans of America Holds National Leadership & Education Conference This Week

(Washington, DC)--Vietnam Veterans of America will hold its biennial National Leadership & Education Conference in Tucson, July 19-23. Hundreds of Vietnam veteran leaders will come together at the El Conquistador Hotel to take part in seminars, meetings, and other activities, including the Saturday night Awards Banquet. VVA's affiliate organization, the Associates of Vietnam Veterans of America (AVVA), is cosponsoring the conference.

The first formal event of the conference will take place on Tuesday afternoon, July 19, at 2:00 p.m., when the VVA and AVVA national officers will lay a wreath at the entrance of the El Conquistador Hotel. The ceremony is open to the public.

The Opening Ceremonies will be held Wednesday morning, July 20. Lindsey Bier, a Ph.D. student in international and intercultural communications at the University of Tennessee, will give the Keynote Speech on her work on Vietnam veterans’ experiences before, during and after the war.

Following the Opening Ceremonies, VVA and AVVA leaders from across the country will take part in four-and-a-half days of activities, including more than two dozen seminars and workshops. The subjects range from the elements of leadership--parliamentary procedures, the duties of the officers and boards of directors--to updates on veterans healthcare, flag protocol, and many aspects of veterans’ advocacy issues.

Among the special guests at the Conference will be this year’s recipients of the VVA Excellence in the Arts and Excellence in the Sciences Awards, which will be presented at the Awards Banquet on Saturday evening, July 23: Vietnam veterans Henry Threadgill, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning jazz musician, and Charles Figley, the psychologist who has done pioneering work in recognizing and treating Post-traumatic Stress Disorder since the mid-1970s. For more information, including the complete agenda, go to https://vva.org/events/leadership-conference/

Vietnam Veterans of America is the nation’s only congressionally chartered veterans’ service organization dedicated to the needs of Vietnam-era veterans and their families. VVA’s founding principle is “Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.