The US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) program awards grants to “selected private non-profit organizations and consumer cooperatives that will assist very low-income Veteran families residing in or transitioning to permanent housing.”
According to the SSVF’s fiscal year 2021 annual report, the program “has served a cumulative total of 732,042 Veterans” and distributes hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
As part of the regulations governing the program, rule 38 CFR 62.36(c)(2) mandates that SSVF grantees “must provide each participant with a satisfaction survey […] within 30 days of such participant’s pending exit from the grantee’s program.” Those surveys, which (at least in recent years) have been conducted by a contractor, can be completed online or over the phone. They include a series of questions about the services the participant received, and their degree of satisfaction with those services.
In October 2022, the Data Liberation Project filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the VA for data records corresponding to those satisfaction surveys. In July 2023, the department provided a set of Excel files with anonymized response-level data for surveys conducted March 2016 through September 2022 (with the exception of October 2020 – September 2021, i.e., fiscal year 20211), corresponding to nearly 40,000 survey responses. The VA also provided a series of PDF reports containing analyses of the survey responses. The reports go back to 2015, although the content and formatting vary by year.
The Data Liberation Project is sharing all of those records with the public. You can access them via Google Drive and/or via GitHub.
To learn more, visit our main documentation for the data.
According to an email from the VA, “SSVF did not have an active customer service program during FY 21, and therefore there is no data report to share.” (Clarification added September 22, 2023.) ↩︎