Military spouses are the backbone of Arizona’s military-connected community. They juggle deployments, relocations, career changes, and family life, all while keeping up their household, the cars, the kids, pets, and daily chores. We want to hear directly from these spouses to better understand their strengths, their challenges, and their perspectives, so we recently launched a series of Military Spouse Listening Sessions.
Through these sessions, held in May, we’re offering a platform for military spouses in Arizona to speak, share, and shape the future of support programs in our state. The response has been overwhelming. Each of the sessions has filled to capacity within days of offering them. Through the sessions, our trained team, which includes military spouses, will open up a dialogue to not only understand the real-life experiences of the participating spouses, and they will also be able to share helpful resources to connect participants to available support.
Whether it’s navigating career opportunities, finding childcare, managing healthcare, or staying connected through transitions, the voices of military spouses are shining a light on what’s working and what’s not. These listening sessions are part of a larger commitment to partnership and progress as part of the mission of the Be Connected program offered by the Arizona Coalition for Military Families and the hundreds of partner organizations that comprise the Coalition.
The insights shared directly inform how we design and deliver programs across the Be Connected ecosystem. Our goal is to take what we hear and turn it into real-world action, whether that’s creating new resources, improving access, bringing new partners into the Coalition, or fostering stronger community connections.
While the scheduled sessions are now fully booked, we still want to hear from you. If you’re a military spouse in Arizona and haven’t had a chance to participate, you can still share your thoughts. We’re collecting feedback online to ensure every voice can be included. Visit ConnectVeterans.org/Spouse and fill out the form to share your thoughts.
No one understands the needs of military families better than the spouses who live it every day. By listening, we can learn. And by learning, we can lead change together. This initiative is just one of the many ways we’re working to strengthen Arizona’s military-connected community.