As the country mourned and celebrated Americans who have died in combat over the weekend, state lawmakers from around the country were working on a comprehensive plan to tackle some of the toughest problems facing veterans: suicide, homelessness, access to mental health care and medical care, and access to jobs.

A group of 26 state lawmakers across 11 states is planning to introduce a so-called Veterans Bill of Rights before their respective legislative sessions end or early next session. The impetus, organizers say, is the federal government’s failure to improve the way the country treats and supports people who’ve served in the military — even in the wake of a 2014 scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs that revealed massive wait times for veterans at VA campuses across the country, false record keeping, and lapses in care.

“When you have seven people so far this year who have committed suicide on a VA campus, you know there’s a problem,” former West Virginia State Sen. Richard Ojeda, a veteran himself, told The Intercept.

Ojeda, who ran for Congress in 2018 and then launched a short-lived presidential campaign, is now a senior adviser to Future Majority, a nonprofit Democratic strategy organization. Ojeda, Future Majority, and Future Now, a state-level political organizing group that developed the model policy for the veterans’ legislation, are working with the lawmakers to ramp up support for the bill and will travel to the 11 states to campaign for the bill over the next several months.

The lawmakers who’ve so far committed to introduce the legislation in their respective statehouses represent districts in South Carolina, Montana, New Hampshire, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Arizona, and Texas. The groups are actively recruiting lawmakers from additional states and hope that others will sign on as the bill gains momentum.

There is typically bipartisan consensus over veterans issues, though the lawmakers planning to introduce the legislation are overwhelmingly Democrats.

“We believe strongly that the way you move federal policy is by moving state policy,” said Future Now co-founder Daniel Squadron. “When you look at the interest for this in red, blue, and purple states, that is a great mandate for the federal government to do something.”

Over the last couple of years, Congress has weighed measures that would address veterans’ issues, but none have taken direct aim at the problems covered by the Veterans Bill of Rights. Last year, President Donald Trump signed two such measures into law — one that would provide tax benefits to the spouses of service members, and another that would ensure that the VA reimburses veterans for missing or underpaid installments in housing benefits. Other bills, introduced by both Republican and Democratic members of Congress, have floundered in committees.

The state-level legislation was built around a common question Future Now heard from Democratic lawmakers across the country, Squadron told The Intercept: “‘What can we do for vets?’” The bill the group designed in response is aimed at helping veterans access college degrees, jobs, health care, and housing “through proven, low-cost programs and law changes” inspired by conversations with state lawmakers across the country.

The measure would target microloans and technical assistance to veteran-owned businesses, use labor force data to direct veterans to in-demand job fields, and ensure that state licensing boards take veterans’ military training and experience into account.