The Connective Tissue: What Statewide Military Family Coordination Looks Like

JESSICA BECKENDORF: [00:00:00] Hi, and welcome to Practicing Connection. I’m Jessica Beckendorf. Today, we’re talking about what it looks like when states step more directly into supporting military families, and how coordination, connection, and shared responsibility actually play out on the ground.

And I’m really glad to have two of my one-off colleagues joining me as guest co-host today. I have Kim Smith and Jenny Rae here. Kim Smith is the spouse employment program coordinator at OneOp, where she designs professional development for those serving military families with more than 25 years of experience in higher education and a focus on access and opportunity.

And Jenny Rae is an Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Arizona and the incoming principal investigator for the OneOp Military Spouse Employment Team. Her work focuses on military spouse employment, career continuity, and workforce mobility. And she brings both research expertise [00:01:00] and lived experience as a military spouse.

Kim, Jenny, welcome to your first time being here as a co-host.

KIM SMITH: Thanks, Jessica.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Hopefully not the last time, too.

KIM SMITH: Thanks, Jessica. I’m glad to be here and looking forward to this discussion.

JENNY REA: Thank you. It’s great to be part of this conversation as well.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Well, Kim, I’m gonna now turn it over to you as a co-host, to introduce our guest.

KIM SMITH: Thank you. Joining us today is Jennifer Holiday, the first military family liaison for the state of Alabama. A military spouse of more than 21 years. Jennifer brings firsthand experience navigating military life alongside her husband during multiple deployments and relocations while raising their three children.

Throughout her experience as a military family advocate, Jennifer has led and supported military spouse and family initiatives through roles with family readiness groups and community organizations. In her current role, she [00:02:00] works to strengthen quality of life for military families across Alabama and nationwide by advancing policies, building partnerships, and connecting communities.

Jennifer, we’re really glad you’re here. Thank you for joining us.

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: Thank you all for having me. I’m excited to be here, too. This is gonna be great.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, I’m so excited for this conversation. I will kick us off. So Jennifer, you’ve lived military life for over 21 years. Seven deployments, nine PCS moves, permanent change of station moves. Three kids. Before we talk about the work you do now, what did you learn from being on the receiving end of military family support systems that you carry into this role every day?

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: There’s a lot, but I think some of the key things are communication, which is, you know, I say it all the time, it is the base of all of our problems. If we could improve our communication, we would solve a lot. Relationships are key to strong support for anybody, but especially for the military community [00:03:00] where they’re constantly moving and changing, and having to develop new relationships.

So having that kind of strong introduction to a community, and even within a unit, is really key to having a successful experience. And just being curious. Always digging deeper and asking questions, and not always taking no for the final answer. Sometimes you have to, and I have done that too.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Kind of being able to advocate for yourself and your family. Yeah.

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: For yourself, advocate for your friends. Share your ideas, but also be willing to, you know, listen to and investigate other ideas. So I think communication, curiosity, and just using all of that to help build strong relationships is key.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Being on that receiving end of military family support systems though, it sounds like you had to do a lot of sort of investigating to kind of find them. Is that right?

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: That’s kind of one of those things that helps make military spouses so, I don’t wanna say necessarily unique, but well-trained.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah.

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: Resource navigation and [00:04:00] project management and all of the things that, especially, you know, back in the old days in the 1900s when we didn’t have all the tools and resources that we have now.

So navigation and finding even just resources and personal connections was a lot harder than it is now. It looks different. It’s still difficult. Just sometimes in different ways.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Mmhmm.

KIM SMITH: So Alabama created this military family liaison position before any other state. How did that happen? What was the problem someone was trying to solve? And why Alabama first?

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: Well, it’s a unique story. I’ll try to do it in a nutshell. It actually started from our lieutenant governor. His main two priorities the entire time he’s been in office, he’s finishing up his last term now, but he’s been focused on workforce development and the military broadly, but also specifically within military spouse employment.

Back in 2018, Alabama on its [00:05:00] own I mean, we were here, but I was not involved in any of this stuff. They actually passed a Military Family Jobs Opportunity Act in 2018, giving license reciprocity to military spouses almost across the board.

And since that time, we’ve added a few things that have covered just about everybody, on our own, in addition to all the interstate compacts that are out there. But because they had done that 2018 bill, they felt kind of good. But when DOD started pushing on family programs and license reciprocity, and making it a priority for states to sign onto those compacts, they very quickly realized, “Well, even though we already have our own internal, we really need to participate in this, and join these compacts.”

And so they started doing that pretty quickly. So Lieutenant Governor Ainsworth wanted to have a place to put all of this new information for the spouses, for the families. It started with the idea of having a webpage or website. I had worked, my husband being the Garrison commander at Redstone, I just, on my own, I had created a website for North Alabama resources [00:06:00] across our communities, and broken up by different categories.

I had worked with our government affairs lead at the Chamber of Commerce and didn’t know that he was on this Military Stability Foundation board. So when all of that was happening, after my husband retired, and they were having these discussions, and Mike said, “Hey, you know, we have this model website,” everybody got excited about it.

They reached out to me, and my first meeting, I didn’t know it was a job interview, but it was. And so they hired me and CeCe Gallagher, who was a military spouse at the time stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, to design this website, which was great. We survived doing that all through COVID without even getting on video.

We just, you know, put our heads down, got it done. But during that time, we were suggesting that there could be something more. We didn’t offer ideas on that. We just said it could be something more. And the Lieutenant Governor and the Military Stability Foundation said, “Oh, okay. We have an idea.”

And they came back to me and said, you know, “Lieutenant Governor wants a subject matter expert on the military family [00:07:00] and spouse items, quality of life, and we want you to do it. But no one else in the country’s doing it. There’s literally no one to follow.

You have to do it. There is no model. You have, you know, here’s your silver platter, but you have to figure it out.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: You have to create the mold.

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: Exactly. Exactly. And I love starting new things. So like, okay, let’s go. And so we did. That was six years ago this week, and I kind of just have realized that recently it’s been six years.

We launched it in early July, both the website and this position, only later to find out that a year after we launched, Washington state had created a similar position, and they’ve grown from there. I think we’ll talk about that later. But theirs had come up from a spouse Roundtable event/listening session type of thing.

Ours came, you know, just completely. My position is wholly unique and started that way. I love it. But it does offer its own challenges that way.

JENNY REA: It sounded like it was a great experience.

I just wanted to ask, in that process, so you were saying you were [00:08:00] working with CeCe Gallagher, and I’m sure other folks who were in that, like, council space, right? It made me just think about, so did you reach out to other military spouses, other people within the community to bring in those outside perspectives to broaden that resource list or anything of that sort?

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: Absolutely. Yeah. You know, CC was more connected at the national level, and I was more connected at kind of the local and Alabama level. And so although I had used a lot of those national resources, I had never really been engaged and involved with them. So it was great to be able to have the two of us coming at it from different perspectives to begin with.

And then we reached out to all the communities. We reached out to spouses. We reached out to the installations, just pretty much anybody and everybody we could think of. I like to say, I’ve kind of built a network of networks. And so I’ve kind of always done that with, for the FRGs, the family readiness groups and things within a unit, but I was never really engaged out in the broader community the way that [00:09:00] I was when we got to Redstone.

And so I actually had a lot of connections in our other communities that could help bring in and say, “Oh, you need to remember this.” And the Military Stability Foundation board and the commission that it’s connected to are all from different parts of the state and all around.

So we can reach out and say, “Hey, you know, what are some of the vetted resources for mental health awareness or education?” And reach out to the different state departments and say, you know, “What, what do you want to highlight?”

So it’s been pretty broad, and it’s ever-growing. I mean, it will never be complete. I am constantly looking. So anybody who has ideas or resources or whatever, I’m always – when I was in kindergarten, I didn’t speak a lot. I was not this! I didn’t talk a lot. And there was some concern, but my teachers were like, “No, no, no. She’s just a sponge. She’s soaking it all up.”

And that’s typically what I do, is just kind of bring it all in and then try to help share it out as best I can.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I just wanted to point out that I’ve seen many [00:10:00] initiatives get started with the idea of, “Oh, well, what we need is a website that will kind of contain, like, we need a resource site, or we need a resources repository or whatever that is.”

And a lot of times, it’ll start to get built. Maybe it’ll get finished. I really think it’s cool that it was recognized that more was needed, that the website was just sort of like a thing that could be useful, but that actually someone was needed to coordinate and not just coordinate the website, but to coordinate some of the actual relationship building and stuff.

So that’s one of the things I noticed.

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: Yeah, it’s really cool. I am a designer by nature, words and visuals and everything, which is what kind of brought me to that website design part. But I can’t stand just like a list of links. It had to be more engaging than that. It needed a person behind it, and now I’m at a point where I’m like, “Okay, now it needs to be more interactive.”

So we’re constantly [00:11:00] trying to evolve it broadly what we’re offering.

KIM SMITH: So, the title military family liaison for the state of Alabama. It’s pretty broad. If you had to describe your actual day-to-day job to someone who had never heard of it, what would you say? I

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: It’s different every day. Every single day is different, which I love. That’s great for me, personally. But, I am constantly in research mode. I am very curious by nature. And so, I’m always kind of keeping an eye out for new resources, new connections. LinkedIn is a great place for me to spend a lot of time because people share on their more on the professional side.

And so when someone’s moving, that’s, you know, that’s a life change. And so they may mention that. They may mention where they’re going. But it’s a great way to connect, whether they’re job seekers or not, I find them on there a lot. So spending a lot of time, engaging that way on social media and things, and really a lot of email, a lot of outreach.

I’m [00:12:00] constantly kind of, behind a screen, whether it’s doing, you know, virtual meetings and things. So I do try to meet with people in person as much as possible, whether it’s here locally in the Huntsville area or when I travel to other places, trying to you know, kind of get that human connection in person.

But having the video is also great because I’ve managed to speak with so many more people that way than I would have if we couldn’t do this. So, it’s really been great to get some of that connection with individuals, but also with a lot of the organizations, like you guys, and being able to, you know, say, “Hey, here’s, what we’re doing,” Or, “Here’s a question, problem, concern,” whatever, and be able to share out with you guys too, since I am really a party of one in this mission.

Getting the word out is sometimes a little bit harder. So trying to connect with people who can also help us just, you know, amplify what’s going on.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: That’s great.

JENNY REA: So Alabama does have a strong National Guard and Reserve presence. But most of us know that with guard and reserve [00:13:00] families, they often live in communities where their neighbors may or may not have any frame of reference of what a military family is, what military life kind of involves. With that being said, there’s also a lack of installation family support nearby.

So how does that change what coordination and collaboration have to look like for both service providers and also that local community support system?

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: It’s a great question because people tend to think, you know, military broadly and don’t always remember that the Guard and Reserve forces are part-time. So it’s a very different experience for the spouses, the families, and the service members between full-time service and part-time service.

A lot of the time for our Guard and Reserve families, they’re spread out. They’re all over. They may be through different states even, not just like our Alabama National Guard. We have a lot of people that don’t live in Alabama, but are serving here. And so it’s very disjointed a lot of the [00:14:00] time.

Not necessarily by design, but that’s just kind of the nature of that expansive beast. So for people who are providing a service or even just, you know, trying to support within the community, it’s really important to try to think outside the box, try to connect with those communities and find out what they need firsthand, not just kind of guessing at what they need.

But then using that to build something maybe a little bit more flexible. Something that could be supportive to someone individually on a case-by-case basis. But then if there is a guard activation or deployment and the whole unit is gonna be engaged, then you can kind of level up to support, and kind of wrap your arms around that whole group instead of just the onesies and twosies that are maybe coming and going, that kind of thing.

One of the good examples for this kind of broadly is childcare. A lot of the time those part-time service member families, the Guard and Reserve, they are in the community. Their families are there locally. They’re not as spread out as the active duty folks.

[00:15:00] So they may have fairly steady childcare through the week. They’re good. They’ve got full-time childcare. They’ve got their seats. But then what happens if the service member has to pull duty, or goes for weekend or two weeks of training, and the stay-at-home spouse, the one that’s working at home, works the swing shift, maybe as a nurse that has to go in in the middle of the night, those kinds of things.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Or on the weekend.

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: Or the weekend. Absolutely. The weekend is really kind of the biggest impact. Childcare’s not often offered on a weekend. So where can the communities kind of pull together and figure out how to develop resources that can help support that? Some of that’s coming from the spouse community itself right now.

That’s a really big problem. But it’s a good example of where active duty folks are often looking for childcare and can’t get in, because they’re not there locally already established, but the ones that are established are still looking for alternative care because they need it in a different way at a different time.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, I think you’re kind of leading in this [00:16:00] direction. But I’m curious about how, you know, one of the frameworks that comes up in military family systems work is shared responsibility. That idea that there’s no single agency or program or level of government that can meet a military family’s needs on their own.

So what does shared responsibility, and I think you’ve been going down this path and starting to explain it, especially in the last question we asked, but what does shared responsibility look like when it’s actually working, versus when it’s just sort of a phrase that people are using like, “We need to pull together. We need to, collaborate more.”

I think it’s a really easy thing to say, and I do think people’s hearts are in the right place and they want to do it. It’s never a simple answer as a simple thing to do. So yeah, what does shared responsibility look like when it’s working well?

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: It comes down to action, collaborative action, if you want to call it that. One of the things I talk about a lot is the military community really loves and appreciates it when people say thank you. That’s great. But they get a [00:17:00] deeper sense of belonging if there’s actually action behind it.

And not just a Veterans Day parade, that’s great. We have a fabulous one here in Huntsville that’s wonderful. But doing things, an employer having a policy where if they hire a military, an active duty spouse or even a guard reserve spouse, because sometimes service members are activated and they go into deployment mode, or have to PCS, that there’s a policy at the place where you work that sees you.

It’s, you know, being seen and heard, but also understood and having some kind of action being taken that’s waving the flag, saying thank you.

That’s wonderful, and always appreciate it, but it doesn’t necessarily wrap your arms around the families the way that it feels like it does.

And once you start as a community or service provider, start actually engaging in that. I have seen so many times where it’s just, it makes such a huge difference, not just for that service member or family or even unit, but for the people who are the action or creating the [00:18:00] policy.

And it just continues to kind of, I guess, for lack of a better term, pay it forward. And it just continues to grow and expand. I’ll tell you, probably that sense of, not just welcome, but belonging, a lot of the time can significantly improve somebody’s mental health state.

They come in, they’re exhausted. They’ve, you know, moved three times across three different states across the country to completely different places. And then you walk in, and you don’t know what’s what. You don’t know who to go to. If you find that person, or you see that resource, or you interview with an employer that says, “Oh, I can help with that.”

I’ve seen so many times, not just me but many times, where it just is kind of an instant switch. I tell people all the time, you know, “Don’t base your new place on your old place, right? Give it a chance.”

And so the more that the community can offer that chance upfront as much as possible, the quicker they will settle into the new place, be a part of the community.

I mean, I’m not sure if everybody’s aware of this, but [00:19:00] 70% of the military, the active duty military community, also lives in your community. They’re not living on the installations. You know, here at Redstone, it’s even a bigger number because we don’t have a lot of housing.

But, the military community is your community. They’re already there. It’s just getting engaged, and sometimes they don’t know how to do that. They need the help of the community to reach out and say, “Hey, come on in and hang out with us.”

JENNY REA: I love that, Jennifer. I just want to peek in really quick because that hit home really well for me, just with how many moves. We recently just PCSd to Newburn and it’s like, “Holy cow, we’re starting all over and it’s exhausting.” And so that really hit home, for me. And I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, like, “Grow where you’re planted.”

And it’s like, “I will. I can. I know I can, but, like, I need the soil that is strong to also hold me up to get there.”

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: Yes. The community is that foundation, the fertilizer [00:20:00] to, you know, help you grow. And yes, bloom where you’re planted, grow where you are. Those things have been a long, long, long, long history in the military spouse community especially. And it’s kind of in our nature to do that and to want to, you know, when you come in and you see a problem or a gap or whatever that you kind of want to fix it.

And it would be great if it, especially in school, if it helps your kid, that’s great. But more the better that it helps the people that are coming in behind, so they don’t have to jump that hurdle that you had to do. Sometimes it works great, and sometimes it continues to be a struggle for a while.

It just depends on what it is and where it is, and where you interact. And there’s definitely things in our past that, if I had been more aware and known what I could do in the community, we could’ve maybe made some impact sooner rather than later. But somebody, you know, will come along and has done that, and it’s great and wonderful when it happens.

But yeah, the communities, I think, the ones that are really [00:21:00] engaged and doing those active things, whatever that might look like for your community or your organization, are the ones that really kind of build the relationships. And I’ll tell you, we are still, we may be very digital, but the military community is very much – we work along the grapevine. Everything is experience-based. “And what did you do? And how did it go?”

Sometimes that’s really great, and it perpetuates really great things. Sometimes, I mean, they’re very honest about this. Montgomery and Maxwell Air Force Base have struggled for a long time.

And a lot of the folks go to the schoolhouse there with what we call geo-batch. The service member would go onto the school, and the spouse and family would stay in another state because they weren’t interested in going for whatever reason, whatever that was. The installation and the community have done a lot of work over the last several years, there’s still a long way to go, on some things, but they’ve done a lot of work. And I have known people who literally maybe 5, 10 years ago went and did not bring their family. And now they’re back again for another school [00:22:00] and they’re bringing the family, and that’s a better experience.

education has improved, all those things. So it is very, very impactful what particular military service member, spouse, family, especially the kids, what they experience when they come into a new area or reach out to a resource.

KIM SMITH: Yes, relationships are so important. So Jennifer, you work closely with the Defense State Liaison Office. Their function is to bridge federal policy and state-level implementation. From your perspective, how does that relationship function, and what difference does it make for families?

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: So it is actually super important. We work very closely. The liaisons are regional, so we don’t have one just for each state. So they have a lot on their plate as well. But to be able to funnel things it’s kind of like a two-way bridge. So the things that they’re working on, like I mentioned earlier, when the priority became licensed reciprocity and signing onto the compacts, Alabama stepped [00:23:00] up and said, “Okay, here we go. We’re going to do all of these. We’re going to join them.”

We couldn’t do them all at once immediately, but they did several. And we went from being, like, number 50 to number 1 in just a couple of short years. I think as of last fall, we were, not to toot our own horn, but we were number 1 on all of these compacts.

But it’s also fun to see the other states catching up and be like, “Okay, come on.” Like, we’re all in this together. The competition is good because it helps bring everybody up, but it also is not a, “Hey, we’re better than anybody else,” kind of thing.

It’s just, like, “We did it, so can you.” So they kind of are bridging gaps at that national federal to the states. I’m kind of doing the opposite, kind of bridging up.

And so when I hear of things from different states or at different conferences, we can say, “Okay, we know that this is important. It’s a priority.” They have gained, they have the data and all of that to bring top level information to us. But we can also bring it up from the bottom, you know, have that, grassroots [00:24:00] push to bring up to their attention what we may be seeing or what challenges we may even be facing within what they see as a priority.

We can’t always make that work, at least immediately. But we have been pretty good lately. Alabama is a state with, every time they produce a priority, we’re right there going, “Okay. All right. What can you challenge us with next? What can we do?” And keep that momentum going.

So they have that wide scope we kind of fill in the funnel towards the bottom, especially all the way down to me. Because even the state itself is a completely different level, and all of our different departments that I’m trying to kind of, you know, bring everybody together and be like, “Okay, everybody needs a point of contact for the military. Everybody needs some policies. Who wants to join the military spouse employment partnership with me?”

And, “What are these things that we can do to help?” Because all of that stuff also helps, from the top down, the leadership be involved and generate that action that we’re talking about earlier from the top down.

So it’s not always just somebody who’s maybe a military spouse in a [00:25:00] company going, “Hey, what about this?” That is happening a lot and it works a lot, but it is a struggle sometimes for them to get to the right people and all of that.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: If we’re working together with going from the top down and from the bottom up, we could be making a very tasty sandwich.

Which is a really stupid joke. But –

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: But we’re meeting in the middle. That’s the, you know, and that’s where really the meat of the matter –

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. The –

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: Works perfectly. I love it.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, the delicious middle.

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: That’s right. That’s right.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: So I’d love to know, when you’re trying to get people from very different sectors, right? Federal, state, non-profit, private, to work together on something as complicated as childcare access or reducing military spouse unemployment, what does it take to get them to the table and keep them there?

Like what are some of the barriers? What are some of the things that work or that have worked?

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: Something that works is offering the table, offering the space, and reaching out and starting a conversation [00:26:00] and saying, “Hey, I see or know or understand that you do X. That’s great. Can we adjust that a little bit?”

It’s a really interesting kind of push and pull, because the military community doesn’t want to be the cause of things, and doesn’t want to be like, “So we do this and we do it for the military.” We want to be, like I said earlier, engaged in that sense of belonging where, you know, you’re part of the team. So talking to, whether it’s service providers or state departments, or anybody, a lot of the time, it just starts with a conversation.

And usually because we are all just so connected in different ways, having a conversation, telling a story, if I tell a story about one family, a lot of the time, that person that I’m talking to will go, “Oh, I had that experience,” or, “I know a such and such that had something similar.”

And it may not even be the whole experience. There’s some little piece of something that’s in there, breaking down the [00:27:00] silos between, you know, a lot of times, even within an organization or a department, things are very kind of siloed. And we don’t even realize that something you’re doing could benefit over here and vice versa.

And kind of the, my husband was an intel guy, and his thing is always, “Who else needs to know?” Like, who else needs to know about the resource, but who else needs to know what could be maybe adjusted. So it’s really, a lot of conversation, a lot of human nature. And just trying to find those connections.

I’ve said a lot that I work in small, big things. So one example of that, and I’m not sure if it would fit somewhere else, but I’ll just say right here, most states have an immunization shot, you know, a shot record for kids, and they have to submit that to register for school, right?

So as we move from state to state, no matter how many kids you have, you have to have that done for every child, every year that you’ve moved. And it has to be done by a medical provider. You can’t just [00:28:00] say, “Oh, here’s a copy of my stuff,” and go to school.” And so we’ve dealt with that multiple times ourselves for three kids.

And I had a conversation, just a one-on-one, with a spouse down in Montgomery. They had just gotten to Maxwell. They had moved from Alaska to Virginia to Alabama once a year. They had experienced each of those three states in short order. Young elementary school kids. And we were just having a conversation over lunch, and she was kind of venting that she had just spent the day before, like, three or four hours, at the county health department, because she couldn’t get an appointment on post to get the doctor to transfer the records, and so she had to do it there.

That’s a lot of time and stress, and just all the things that you don’t need in the middle of this gigantic checklist of things that you’re trying to do, especially three times in three years. And so I kind of, “Yep, I could commiserate with that,” at least to an extent. I hadn’t done it that frequently.

But, in my head, I thought, “Hmm, I’m in a position to fix this.” And when I approached the topic with my [00:29:00] leadership and said, “Here’s the problem,” and they said, “Well, does this affect everybody or just a few people?” I said, ” Everybody.”

It’s something that doesn’t require funding. It required a few conversations with the Department of Ed and, you know, the health department, you know, a few people. And within a couple of months, we had legislation written and submitted to give military, active duty military families coming into the state, an exemption so they don’t have to do that. So they can bring their federal shot record because it is redundant.

You have a federal shot record, you’re bringing it in. It kind of supersedes the state one and you hand it in. So I am sure on the back end, they deal with having the data if they want to have it all, you know, in their streamlined system, but they alleviated the problem directly for the military families coming into the state.

It’s a small thing. It sounds like a really small thing. It’s an item on a checklist to do, but for the military families, it’s a huge thing. I mean, I’ve had people, I tell them that we’re doing this and they’re in tears, like, “Oh my God, that’s so [00:30:00] impactful.” Sometimes it’s hard to find those things, but being able to break through some of the walls, I don’t think any state has really thought through the fact that that’s redundant. And it’s something we could easily alleviate. It just happened out of conversation.

So I think, again, communication is my thing, but I think it all comes down to being able to connect with people and find out what they need.

JENNY REA: So Jennifer, I think what you were just talking about really reflects on what you were saying earlier about military families being seen and heard, and where you’re able to be in that position to kind of fix or be able to help others. I love that part, and I really hope that you can make the immunization thing happen in North Carolina.

That’d be great. So this role didn’t exist anywhere else before Alabama when you first started. They didn’t exist at all, when you created it, and now, Washington State, Virginia, and a small handful of others actually have followed this lead. What does this tell you about the [00:31:00] current movement, in the military family policy that states are starting to create these positions themselves rather than waiting for that federal direction?

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: I think it’s just a reflection of the fact that that support needs to be localized. The military families, I think, have known that forever and kind of wished for it to have more local support. The stuff that comes down is great. There’s a lot of big programs that offer a lot of support.

But, like, with our experience, I really didn’t get involved in the community, like I said earlier, until the very end of my husband’s career. There’s a bigger push now to get engaged in the local community, rather than staying kind of behind the gate, whether you’re living on post or not, and not just internalized to the unit.

And a lot of that comes from the fact that, I think I mentioned earlier, 70% of the military families are living in the community already. And so beyond just volunteering at, you know, your kids’ school or something, it’s much broader than that. I could talk about that in and of itself [00:32:00] all day long, but, Blue Star Families has created their Do Your Part initiative as, again, kind of a reflection of this.

Like they’re realizing we really, really do need to better coordinate locally this initiative out to the states to say, you know, you need to do your part. work with us. And so they have a toolkit that’s online where they’ve gone through and curated all the policies and things that have happened at the state level across many of the states so far.

It’s a building/growing toolkit. But stakeholders can go in there and kind of, it’s not necessarily forward-facing to the families as much as where mine is a little bit more kind of like the actual resources. This is just kind of awareness of what’s going on in your state, and different states, to help people see where they can localize things.

It gives really good ideas and examples of things that other people can carry forward. and just really making it more of a local team effort to support what’s happening at the federal level.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. We’ll include a link to that in our show notes so our listeners can check that out.

Well, [00:33:00] let’s switch gears a little bit. Many of our listeners are family service professionals that are working in communities that don’t have someone in a role like yours in their state, right?

There’s no state liaison. There’s no formal coordination infrastructure. So what can an individual practitioner out in a rural county, for example, do to create some of that connective tissue themselves?

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: I think one of the easiest things is to just start building trust by showing that you are knowledgeable about the military community. Learning, making sure that, you know, you’re aware of trainings and things, so that you’ve got, if you’re not already personally connected, a lot of time, people are personally connected or working with people who are military connected, so that helps a lot.

But if you can, when you’re reaching out on social media, be intentional. Don’t just post a flag day, social media post, Happy Flag Day, and that’s your military connection. You want it to be much deeper and more intentional than that.

So sharing things that are [00:34:00] your resource or other resources for families to help spread the word about those things. Create a landing page. It’s a little bit, you know, sharing on social media is probably the quickest, easiest thing when you’re sharing intentional, knowledgeable things, and reaching out to show them that you care, not just what you offer.

But having a landing page, whether it’s for the military families or the spouses, or whatever it is for your particular thing. I even did that with our website. Our website is titled Heroes Welcome Initiative, because it was named before they even knew that this was going to be more focused on spouses.

So I created a landing page for military spouses to hold more of our spouse-connected resources, to spotlight that. So for an employer to spotlight job opportunities for those arenas that spouses may be more interested in, or their policies. If you have a policy that’s specific to military spouses, spotlight that on your website.

You know, it doesn’t even have to be a whole landing page, but have something on there that starts to highlight your connection to the military and supporting them.

KIM SMITH: You’ve been [00:35:00] a military spouse, a volunteer leader, a foundation VP, and now a state liaison. So we’re curious, Jennifer, what do you now know about supporting military families that you wish someone had told you during your first PCS move?

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: I am sure that there are a lot of things, but the one that comes to mind, because we’ve already just talked about it, is, just engaging locally. We were very internal to what was happening because it was also, you know, GYT. we kind of needed to be internal, in a lot of ways.

But, we also really could have leaned on the community a little bit more. And I think if we had, they would’ve stepped up. And I think some people did. But I think generally, from the military community and spouse side, it’s more of an internal thing. We’ve got this and all of that HUA stuff. Just, you know, step out into the community, go out and volunteer and do something out there and engage, and be part of the community.

JENNY REA: Jennifer, that’s great advice. In a follow-up to that, what is one thing that you [00:36:00] want service providers or community leaders who are listening today to do or think about differently, after hearing this conversation?

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: I think it’s starting small. Start those small things. You can do big sweeping things, but a lot of the time, like we talked about earlier, those small things are very impactful. Especially when it comes to the difference between active duty and garden reserve.

The same applies across all of it. Start small. but you can really make some big impacts with the Guard and Reserve folks, if that’s what your focus is in your area, because they don’t have a lot of that continuity on the military community side, and really within their own communities.

But show up. Show up, whether that’s virtually or in person. And if you have a service and a program that you’re providing, how does that really impact and affect the military? Is it what they need? I guess that would probably be the even bigger thing is, connect with the [00:37:00] military community, and make sure that what you’re providing is what they need, or find out how you could adjust it by actually talking to them instead of kind of guessing or assuming.

It makes your job a lot easier.

JENNY REA: Thank you, Jennifer. I really appreciate you sharing that experience.

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: Absolutely.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing your experience and your perspective with us, and for the work that you’re doing to strengthen support for military families. I think this conversation really highlighted how much of this work comes down to connection, right? Connection across systems, across sectors, across communities, and of course all of those things are made up of people, which is the most important ingredient.

Thank you so much for being here.

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to, to share with you all and, hopefully offer some nuggets of wisdom along the way, but, it’s been fun. Thank you.

KIM SMITH: Well, that’s it for this episode. If this conversation sparked ideas for your own work, we encourage you to share it with a colleague or partner in your [00:38:00] network.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: We’d like to thank one more time our guest, Jennifer Holliday, for joining us, and our guest co-host, Kim Smith and Jenny Rea for being part of today’s conversation.

KIM SMITH: We’d also like to thank our announcer, Kaylin Gobel-Mathis, Maggie Lucas, and Joyce Vaughn for their help with marketing, and Nathan Grimm, who composed and performed all the music you hear on the podcast.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: And of course, thank you so much for being part of the conversation. We’ll see you next time.

CREDITS: The Practicing Connection Podcast is a production of One-Op and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense under award number 2 0 2 3 4 8 7 74 3 3.

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