Thrive Together is a national project, funded by the Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust and supported by the Office of Veteran Affairs. In the South East Region, it is led by Veterans Outreach Support, based in Portsmouth. They have established 4 sub regions with each sub region having a delivery partner. Kent Arts and Wellbeing are the delivery partner for Kent.
Thrive Together aims to address perceived weaknesses in the current system to support veterans. The main concerns are
- While there are many organisations supporting veterans they are not well integrated and are often unaware of the range of support available, leading to complex support pathways and sub optimal levels of support.
- Not unsurprisingly a high proportion of veterans are unaware of the support available
- At the same time veterans often exhibit a reluctance to seek support and show a strong preference to receive support from veterans or organisations that are demonstrably veteran aware and friendly.
- There is a significant of lack of awareness of factors that ought to be taken into account when supporting veterans. Only 5% of veterans in Kent are registered and coded as veterans by their GPs.
The team at Kent Arts and Wellbeing consists of Major Tony Finch, REME recently retired as an SO 2 life skills and Ken Scott, founding director.
Together we are approaching Thrive Together in a multi stage approach which covers all 12 local authorities and Medway Unitary Authority.
We are
- Mapping all support activity for veterans across Kent and Medway. The first stage mapping is complete.
- Assessing all support organisations to establish level of governance, veteran awareness and friendliness, and willingness to collaborate in local networks. We expect to complete that activity in late spring
- Developing model website pages for local authorities, so that they have a readily adoptable route to become more veteran friendly. We expect to complete that by early February
- Developing veteran friendly information sheets for GPs to augment the RCGP information to help enable GPs to more actively support veterans. We are doing this with the Kent and Medway Integrated Care Board and hope to complete the activity by early March
- Following on from assessment we are identify training needs and developing appropriate training. We anticipate piloting the training in February.
- We would like to establish local networks in each of the 13 regions of Kent. This does not look realistic with current project timescales and resources. We are therefore aiming to create pilots in the 4 health authority areas of Kent and Medway between April and July 2026.
Ken Scott, Director and Kent lead for Thrive Together
