By: Bob Bertsch
For the past four years, our OneOp Network Literacy Team has been working to develop content and experiences that help empower you to work with others in building resilience and readiness in yourself, your family, your professional network, and your community.
We’ve facilitated webinars, learning experiences, and workshops, assembled a small community, and produced a podcast to find practices that make people feel more connected and empowered. Each of these projects have had an impact, but they’ve stood on their own. We believe that by connecting these projects and the projects to come in the future, we can make an even bigger impact.
That’s why we are launching “Practicing Connection.”
What is Practicing Connection?
Practicing Connection emphasizes the crucial skills and practices of connection and collaboration. Together, this work will be a multi-faceted, open-ended exploration of the personal and collective practices that empower us to work together to help each other, our families, and our communities improve our resilience and readiness in a rapidly changing world.
Practicing Connection brings these current projects together under a single name and graphic identity:
- The Practicing Connection podcast
- The Practicing Connection community
- @PracticingCxn on Twitter
- Building Resilience Together learning experience
It also provides a home for new, innovative content and experiences.
Practicing Connection and the Military Family Readiness System
We all face complex issues that can only be addressed by seeing the issue from multiple perspectives and joining in collaboration with others to identify solutions. The Department of Defense (DoD) recognizes military family readiness as a complex issue and has identified the Military Family Readiness System as a way to address the complexity. DoD defines the Military Family Readiness System as “the network of agencies, programs, services, and individuals, and the collaboration among them, that promotes the readiness and quality of life of service members and their families.”
About 75% of military families live off-installation, so even if you don’t see yourself as a service provider for military families, you are an important part of the community of care supporting military families and everyone else in your community.
Practicing Connection helps service providers become an effective part of the Military Family Readiness System by:
- Offering content and sharing practices that support building relationship skills such as trust and communication, which are necessary for effective collaboration with the Federal and non-Federal entities serving military families.
- Raising awareness of the role you can play in linking informal and formal networks to promote community well-being.
- Helping you understand how your well-being and the well-being of others scales up to the well-being of a community.
- Supporting you to do the individual work necessary to prepare yourself to address the varied composition, diversity, and demographics of military families.
We hope you’ll join us in Practicing Connection, as we explore practices to help us feel more connected, empowered, and inspired. Here are some ways to get started.
