As many of you are aware, a Colorado based veterans advocate by the name of Rick Duncan was recently exposed as a fraud by members of an organization he helped found, the Colorado Veterans Alliance. Although Rick had a profile on ivaw.org, he actually wasn't a member of IVAW and had never submitted a member application OR proof of service. Rick's real name is Richard Glen Strandlof, and his IVAW website profile was approved in February of 2008. How or why his profile was approved is still a mystery, but the most likely scenario is that he called national office repeatedly saying his paperwork had been lost, and that one of the three national staff members who were approving online profiles at that point gave in and approved his profile despite not being able to find his member application, much less his proof of service. Since creating his profile, Richard logged in on 8 separate occasions, the most recent being on April 20th, 2009. His profile was taken down the same day the story broke in the local media in Colorado thanks to some alert members who contacted the national office. Had we followed our own internal policies, Rick

This points to us the clear need to go through each of our member records and make sure that all members who have an online profile have submitted proof of service. Additionally, national board members and staff are in discussions right now about revising our policy on proof of service and who's considered a member of IVAW. Currently, to get on our membership roles, all one needs to do is fill out an application and submit it to the national office. We currently have about 1,700 members in our database, and of those about 30% have not submitted any sort of proof of service. When you don't submit proof of service, you're considered a "pending" member which means you can't vote, can't help form a chapter, won't be called with media requests, can't create an online profile, don't receive a new member packet/t-shirt, and won't receive any sort of travel scholarships to IVAW events.

There's clearly a lot of things we can do to rectify this situation. The national office needs to maintain better records and cleanup our existing records and we're in the process of doing that. We also need to do some initial follow up with unconfirmed members. Local chapters should take advantage of the new member google spreadsheet which is updated weekly by our membership coordinator, Toby Hartbarger, and make sure they're contacting all new members in their area and encouraging unconfirmed members to send in proof of service. If you're a chapter leader or are interested in helping with this, please contact Toby at toby@ivaw.org or (267) 901-1557 to get added to the google spreadsheet, or to have this info sent to you in another form.