FORT HUACHUCA, Ariz. — The first-ever Civilian Casualty Assistance Program has been created here and will launch next week to fill the information void for supervisors, DOD civilians and next of kin who experience the death of a civilian employee.
While a casualty assistance program exists for when a service member passes away, no program existed for when a civilian employee or family member died. With this dilemma in mind, Col. John Ives, garrison commander, and Heidi Malarchik, former deputy to the garrison commander, created a workgroup to come up with a solution.
“The colonel saw that we did not have a civilian transition assistance unit, and he was baffled by that,” said Aneesha Avalos, workforce development specialist. “So, he wanted to make sure that we created something for the civilian side, to kind of mirror what we do for the military.”
When a member of the armed services passes away, the Casualty Assistance Report (CAR) outlines the protocol to follow. This 38-page document gives directions for what is to be done from the Soldier’s time of death through the first calendar year.
“If a service member dies, the next of kin is assigned an assistance person,” explained Erin Beam, chief, Directorate of Human Resources. “That person follows them through a 95-step checklist over the next year to make sure they are getting funeral honors, to make sure their paperwork is done, their benefits, their entitlements.
“This person is literally assigned to that next of kin,” she said, “to hold their hand through the transition until they complete all 95 steps of the CAR, and then they are passed off to the Survivor Outreach Services program.”
But for DOD civilians, there was no such list, and no such program. Until now.
Beam said the group realized they needed more than just one long checklist. In fact, she said, “they saw that they really needed three separate checklists.”
One of the checklists is specifically aimed at supervisors, and it details what is to be done when a civilian employee passes away. Beam said the document is meant to address “what does the unit need to do to help the [next of kin] from hour one, and through the next couple of weeks?”
The checklist covers such work-related items as notifying the chain of command and the Civilian Personnel Advisory Center, and collecting items such as ID card, government equipment or keys, but also deals with more personal items like setting up grief counseling and writing a condolence letter.
The second checklist is for a surviving family member and is meant to help them process things, from the time immediately after the death through the following months. It includes information on how to report a death, what notifications need to be made, what documents should be located, and even what types of bills will need to be paid.
The final, and most lengthy, document is one that can be filled out by anyone to put one’s affairs in order. This packet is filled with 20 pages of checklists that ensure one’s final wishes are known, and your estate can easily be managed.
“It’s a preparation checklist for all of our civilian employees to take home to their families,” Beam said. “It’s for you to tell your family, ‘Here is where I have bank accounts, here are my passwords for my social media accounts, this is what my life insurance policy says, here is where the car registration is,’ and all that.”
Another member of the work group, Rosalie Monge, manager, Transition Assistance Program, explained “there are still a lot of spouses out there that don’t even know what the name of their bank is. They don’t know what the account numbers are. They don’t know if they have life insurance, and if they do, with what company? And so, this preemptive checklist looks into all that, and they can put all that information in one place.”
The work group encourages everyone to create a binder or a file for all the information and documents.
“This is so that, if they do pass away, hopefully all of the information and documents can be in one spot,” Monge explained. “They’ll have the titles to the vehicles, Social Security cards, everything they are going to need, right at their fingertips, so that the surviving spouse can pick that up, and have something to go off of, and not feel so in the dark.”
Monge said the checklist is especially useful for adult children who have a parent who lives alone.
“Most adult children don’t know anything about their parent’s financial life as far as banking information, credit cards, debts, those sorts of things,” she said. “This is something for the parents to do, so they know that [their children] are as prepared as they can be.”
Once the three checklists are finalized, they will be available to the public on the Fort Huachuca Casualty Assistance Center webpage.
Beam said the information will be briefed to all new employees and retirees, and it will be provided to the entire workforce. It will be available in paper and electronic formats so everyone can access it.
“The goal is to get this in the hands of every civilian employee on the installation, so that they can start thinking about it and know what to do,” Monge said.
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Fort Huachuca is home to the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, the U.S. Army Network Enterprise Technology Command/9th Army Signal Command and more than 48 supported tenants representing a diverse, multiservice population. Our unique environment encompasses 946 square miles of restricted airspace and 2,500 square miles of protected electronic ranges, key components to the national defense mission.
Located in Cochise County, in southeast Arizona, about 15 miles north of the border with Mexico, Fort Huachuca is an Army installation with a rich frontier history. Established in 1877, the Fort was declared a national landmark in 1976.
We are the Army’s Home. Learn more at https://home.army.mil/huachuca/.
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