Oct 07 2009
Feedback, please
On October 24th, MOAA will be hosting a Military Spouse Symposium in Coronado, California in conjunction with our Annual Meeting. The topic is: “Leading on the Homefront: the Evolving Role of Spouses in Today’s Military”. Here is the description of the panel:
Today’s heightened ops tempo and the stressors associated with back to back deployments make it difficult for some to reconcile the needs of their families with the needs of the military. When the All Volunteer Force was first conceived in the 1970’s, the makeup of the military was quite different than what we see today. Resources and support programs designed to support service members and their families were engineered centered around life on a military installation. Today, the demands of the military lifestyle are no less challenging, yet the military demographic shows that more than half of service members are married, males make up between 6 to 10 percent of the miltiary spouse community (depending on service), more than 69 percent of military spouses are either working or seeking work and roughly 70 percent of military families live off of the installation. With this panel, we want to evaluate the military’s ability to keep up with this cultural shift. Additionally, given this new set of challenges – how do organizations like MOAA reach out to support military families in the All-Volunteer Force?
We have invited six military spouses from different branches of service as well as the Army Reserve to share their experiences and insights on the programs available to support military spouses and families. Their background ranges from the spouse of an NCO to spouses of Flag officers. We’ll have the male spouse perspective represented as well as insights from spouses delivering family support for geographically dispersed populations. The panel is fairly representative of our military spouse population. My question is this: if you had an opportunity to share your insights, what would you say about your own experiences? Where are the gaps in services? If you had to pick one program to hold up as a gold standard for something that works well (it doesn’t have to be a military program or resource), what would it be? How do you feel that your role as a spouse has changed in this era of persistent conflict and heightened op tempo? And finally, if you could ask the panelists a question about spouses and today’s military, what would it be?
