The Holistic Care of LGBTQ+ Veterans is the focus of the fifth annual Milwaukee VA Mental Health Summit, hosted by the Milwaukee VA Medical Center and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Friday, June 16, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The event will be held in the UWM Student Union, 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd.
Veterans of the U.S. military, their friends and family, community supporters and medical- and mental-health care providers are invited to attend the free, daylong event. The Holistic Care of LGBTQ+ veterans will feature a diverse array of workshops, breakout sessions, expert panelists and practitioners with experience serving the unique needs of this important but sometimes overlooked veteran community.
The event’s keynote speaker will be Christine Black, director of Military & Veteran Services at Marywood University in Pennsylvania. Black was deployed three times as a member of the U.S. Army, and she will speak on her experiences at the summit.
For more information, contact: Greg Walz-Chojnacki, (414) 229-4454, gwc@uwm.edu.
About the Milwaukee VA Medical Center
The Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center is located on 125 acres on the western edge of Milwaukee and part of VA Integrated Services Network 12 (VISN 12), which includes facilities in Iron Mountain, MI; Tomah and Madison, WI, and North Chicago, Hines, and Chicago. The Medical Center delivers primary, secondary, and tertiary medical care in 168 care acute operating beds and provides over 500,000 visits annually through an extensive outpatient program. The nursing home care unit of 113 beds offers geriatric programming and the 356 domiciliary beds are the locus of programs in Substance Abuse Rehabilitation, Psychiatric Rehabilitation and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder care.
About Christine Black
After dropping out after her first term of college, enlisting in the Army, and being deployed to Iraq, Christine Black went back to school and earned her bachelor’s degree in criminology from the University of Maryland. Two deployments later, she earned her J.D from the University of Colorado School of Law. Despite managing to pass the bar in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Ms. Black is now the Director of Military & Veteran Services at Marywood University in Pennsylvania. She also consults on LGBTQ+ issues in the veterans community, specifically, increasing access points for those communities.
About UWM
Recognized as one of the nation’s 115 top research universities, UW-Milwaukee provides a world-class education to 26,000 students from 89 countries on a budget of $667 million. Its 14 schools and colleges include Wisconsin’s only schools of architecture, freshwater sciences and public health, and it is a leading educator of nurses and teachers. UW-Milwaukee partners with leading companies to conduct joint research, offer student internships and serve as an economic engine for southeastern Wisconsin. The Princeton Review named UW-Milwaukee a 2017 “Best Midwestern” university based on overall academic excellence and student reviews, as well as a top “Green College.”