Mollie Raymond, spouse of Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, moderated a discussion on “People First: Spouse Employment, Health, and a Better Life” with USSF’s Paula Krause, resilience and wellbeing program manager; Christine Heit, holistic health assessment lead; Jason Lamb, talent strategist; and Christina Parrett, director of civilian policy and programs, Sept. 20, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.
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Voiceover:
People First spouse employment, health, and a better light. Ms. Christine Heit is a holistic health assessment lead for the United States Space Force. Her professional background includes mental health, sexual assault prevention and response, primary prevention, and public health. Ms. Heit’s efforts in overall health will lead to a better life for our Guardians, Airmen, and their families. Mrs. Paula Krause is the Resilience and Wellbeing Program Manager for the Space Force. She manages numerous programs including interpersonal violence prevention, suicide prevention, and the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program. As the sexual Assault Prevention and Response program manager for Space Force Field Command, she was responsible for planning and implementing programs that will ultimately strengthen the Guardian and Airmen culture within the Space Force.
Mr. Jason Lamb is a retired colonel and talent strategist for the Space Force. He wrote and implemented the Space Force’s first ever Human Capital Strategic Plan, The Guardian Ideal. This plan guides how the newest service will acquire, develop, engage, promote, employ, and cultivate resilience in its members. According to Mr. Lamb, the only way we are going to be successful is with our teams and those teams are based on the Guardian commitment. Mrs. Christina Parrett is the director of civilian policy and programs for the United States Space Force. She implemented a workforce plan designed to maximize existing alternative personnel systems to position Space Force to be more competitive in the market for top talent. Her efforts are creating unique opportunities for not only the military and civilian Guardians, but for spouses and family members as well.
Kari Voliva:
Welcome friends. We are so happy that you’ve joined us for this very special session today. I am Kari Voliva, AFA Vice President for Member and Field Relations. I am honored to introduce our moderator for today’s People First Spouse Employment, Health, and a Better Life Panel, Mrs. Mollie Raymond, spouse to Chief of Space Operations General John Jay Raymond. Mrs. Raymond has accompany General Raymond on 17 assignments around the globe in 35 years. Mrs. Raymond has long been a champion for military spouses and families working tirelessly to support them by promoting family engagements, building genuine connections, and creating a strong sense of community. She is an avid supporter of families through her selfless service in numerous military philanthropies and assistance programs. Mrs. Raymond, on behalf of your AFA family, welcome.
Mollie Raymond:
Katie, Is there a light here by chance? Yeah, it’s okay. That’s okay. That’s all right. No worries. Good morning. Thank you, Kari, for that wonderful introduction. If I’m a little distracted, it’s because I have this great new song that’s dancing in my head. I would love to just say thank you to everyone for being here today for our Space Force Panel, People First Spouse Employment, Health, and a Better Life. I’d like to start by saying a huge thank you to Air and Space Forces Association for including Guardian and Airman Spouses as attendees this year. If you are a military spouse, please stand up and let us give you and all of us a round of applause. As you all know, the Space Force is the newest service since the Air Force was established 75 years ago. Happy birthday to the United States Air Force.
With a new service comes new opportunities and new ways of doing things differently when it comes to people, Guardians, Airmen, civilians, and their loved ones. After all, people are our best asset. Today our goal is to talk about these new opportunities, especially what it means to families and spouses and loved ones. My husband Jay often says that with our smaller size, the Space Force can apply a bit more art than science when it comes to people. If that’s the case, I’m so excited about our panel of artists, subject matter experts on quality of life issues to include spouse employment, wellness and resiliency, and our core values in the United States Space Force, all contributing to a better life. Our panel members are forward thinking and they find solutions through creative ideas, innovation, and best practices in industry.
They are trailblazers changing the narrative on how a service can take care of its people. I’m honored to share the stage with them. We have Chris Parrett, Christine Heit, Jason Lamb, and Paula Krause. After I ask a few questions of our panel, we will open it up to you, the audience, so start thinking of your questions, don’t be shy, and we’ll give all the hard ones to Jason. I’m going to start with Chris. Chris, the Space Force is the smallest military department with a little under 16,000 Guardians and civilians in a very competitive, hard to fill career field. How do you acquire new talent?
Christina Parrett:
Oh, that’s fun. When I came into the Space Force about two and a half years ago, I looked at our skill set that we were going to be recruiting for and said, “Oh, okay, so we’re standing up a service in the middle of a pandemic and I have five of the hardest career fields that we know of in the workforce. This is going to be fun and how are we going to challenge and how are we going to compete?” And it’s not just competing with those that are called the service on the military side of the house. When you’re competing for talent on the civilian side of the house, there’s even more options throughout the federal government, throughout the private sector, all over the place as we’re competing. And so we got to thinking, all right, we’ve got to do this differently. We’ve got to be very bold.
We have to be very proactive about where we’re going to the talent. If we say we want top talent, we have to be going to the talent. And that was a really big founding principle. The other thing that we had to really look at was sources, sources of talent. And so I don’t believe that the federal government can’t compete for top talent. I absolutely believe it because I see a lot of it in here today. What I believe is that we have some processes that we’re not maximizing the available flexibilities that we had. And so that’s the other piece of it that we had to really get bold on how we were going to use these flexibilities that we already had afforded to us that we weren’t using the best we could. And so I looked to the authorities that we had, the sources, and looking to different sources that we hadn’t always tapped into.
And I will share a story very quickly when we say sources that when I came into the Space Force, I knew one of the things that our size was not going to… We were still going to have to answer how are we taking care of families? How are we taking care of spouses and employment? And as I was thinking about what is our position going to be and how are we going to articulate that, I met a spouse from the army that had just won an award for coding her own app. And I got the chance to talk to her and I said, “You’re a coder. What did you do?” She goes, “Well, I taught myself how to code.” Okay, first of all, you can teach yourself how to code? I did not know that. I thought that was amazing. And then I wanted to know why she wasn’t working for the federal government.
Why was she not already working for DOD? And she said, “Oh, that ship has sailed. I have tried so many times to do this and I could never get in. And once I did get in I could never get to the next assignment.” And I said, “That’s a missed opportunity right there and we’ve got to do better about that.” And so we were able to explore some opportunities there and start looking at how we’re taking care of spouses and family members better. And that just opened a whole new door for how we’re taking care of the family members while meeting a recruiting challenge with our hard to fill career fields.
Mollie Raymond:
Thank you, Chris. And I would just like to say a big thank you to our entire S1 team. You started out with one Guardian in 2019 and now you’ve grown to nearly 16,000 in less than three years. To that S1 team led by Kate Kelly, I can’t thank you enough for your accomplishments and I want to say congratulations to all of you. Thank you very much. And Chris, in your answer you alluded to spouse employment and it is a real challenge for our military spouses, both in finding and retaining meaningful employment. It is a real quality of life and retention issue. We often have our employment interrupted while supporting our military member. How can the Space Force help spouses?
Christina Parrett:
Oh, another fun question that you hear quite a bit. And I will say I took my own personal experience of coming into the federal government after 123 job applications with a master’s degree with middle management experience and I took a GS5 position to become an assistant to learn HR all over again. And so that story has always stayed with me, but I always wanted to be in a position like today to be able to make that change and make that difference. And so coming into the Space Force, while we don’t have a lot of the traditional opportunities that you find on the base that are also not transferable, we do have an opportunity for careers and so we alluded to those five areas that the Space Force really hard to fill, but yet we have this talent source that we’re not tapping into well enough.
Can we and how do we, this is what we’re defining right now. We’ve launched a program called the Guardian Family Career Program and it’s career, it’s job, it grows. And we identify opportunities that are either transferable from base to base or that are remote telework. The pandemic has taught us that we can be flexible and productive in a virtual environment. And so taking those opportunities and being able to now match spouses with opportunities that are going to continue with them into their Guardians and while being able to still serve their service member. It’s been really great to see the initial successes of our first few placements and I look forward as we codify what our remote position is and what our telework position is to be able to have that program continue to grow. And I think that is one of the most meaningful things that we are able to do for family members if that’s the opportunity that they want and have that afforded to them because we have not set those conditions well.
Mollie Raymond:
Thank you, Chris. I want to take an opportunity to mention how important it is to match those skill sets with opportunity and education for our spouses. And Chris and I recently learned about a program through Hiring our Heroes Chamber of Commerce called Career Forward. And these are the opportunity to earn Google Career certifications in those wonderful areas of project management, data analytics, digital marketing, IT support, user experience. And so thanks to Hiring our Heroes and Google. We decided that spouses have this opportunity and we need to promote this opportunity to get these certifications. On my social media I did a poll. I said, If you were to take one of these five certifications, which would you choose? Asking for a friend. And the next week our answers, we came back with the poll, the course that won was project management and then I asked who was going to do this with me? There’s a lesson here.
It’s one thing to just say these programs are out there, the resources out are out there. But when you say and invite spouses to join you, it just brings it to a different level and it says that hey, we can do this together. We can support one another and inspire one another. I’m proud to say that we have 90 spouses join me in this journey and that in about three to six months we will have a project management certification. And I’m really proud of it. It’s been so inspiring to me to get the emails from the spouses on why they’re choosing to do this. Spouses have been out of the workforce for a long time like me. It gives us courage. It gives us confidence to do this. And a lot of spouses said, kids are back at school or I’m an empty nester or I want to reenter the workforce, I want to do this, but I’m so grateful that I don’t have to do it alone. We’re really excited. It’s this Space Force cohort that Hiring our Heroes has helped us establish.
But we have more than space spouses, we have navy spouses, we have active duty members, we have Air Force spouses all, are welcome. And we’re going to have a study group and we’re going to have guest speakers. Hiring our Heroes has already had a quick orientation for us, but we have the support there to uplift and encourage one another to get through this and to have a current certification. We’re really excited and I want to say thank you to Chris because you were the one that just showed how much spouse employment means to the quality of life and you’ve been an inspiration to me, so thank you, Chris.
Christina Parrett:
Thank you.
Mollie Raymond:
And thank you to Hiring our Heroes and Google. The support is phenomenal. Next, Christine, would you explain holistic health and why is the Space Force moving towards a different model for physical fitness?
Christine Heit:
Absolutely. Thank you. I had the privilege roughly six months after I started with Space Force to have a conversation with Chief Toberman at an award ceremony. And I have been in the DOD for a long time. I came from Marine Corps. I’ve seen a lot of leaders and he said, “People first. Everyone always says mission first, but if you take care of the person, the mission takes care of itself.” Holistic health is focused on the person. What we do is we’re combining science and we’re combining the person-centered, person-focused approach to create something that promotes short and long-term health outcomes.
Instead of saying, Hey, a run will do this for your health, we looked into science to find out what does promote health. Holistic health assessment is focused on those short-term health outcomes to include helping somebody know what to eat for their body type, promoting consistent physical activity in line with the CSOs intent and the Guardian ideal, while also focusing on a person’s health after they take off the uniform. So much of what is pushed across the DOD is a one size fits all model and this is tailored and garnered to the individual.
Mollie Raymond:
Thank you, Chris. We juggle so much in our lives that we often forget the importance of things that contribute to self care and continued wellbeing. And if you are educating Guardians on these health issues, I know families will reap the benefits. If we can avert a crisis to begin with, it helps all of us. Thanks, Christine. Jason, could you describe the Guardian Ideal and why the Space Force is going with this different talent management program?
Jason Lamb:
Because General Raymond told me to. General Raymond did a really, I’m not just saying this, he’s leaving, did a fantastic job of explaining the why of the Guardian Ideal and why we’re taking this approach. But you don’t start a new service every day. It was a new opportunity and my marching orders were very clear, Jason, relook everything. Work with the team and relook everything. Why are we doing what we’re doing? Very happy to take that type of order, a mission type order. And so we looked and said, okay, what is it that we’re actually trying to do here? We are trying to create high performing teams so let’s begin with the end of mind. Then we roll back to the beginning.
We created very intentionally a modern tailored approach that is looking for individuals with the right character, potential, and desire to serve as Guardians because we’re really willing to invest in them to develop them and place them in line with their personal professional goals as those evolve over time within the context of what the space force needs, so that when we develop them, when we place them, people are actually developed doing what they want to do instead of maybe just doing what they were told, which sometimes is necessary, but that’s not how you want to operate day to day because that isn’t how you get the best out of people. Why? To be a part of a high performing team because we absolutely need teams to defend and secure space for the nation and our allies.
Mollie Raymond:
Thank you, Jason. Collaboration on teams is so very important and a lesson for all of us. It’s great to be part of a team. I love this question. Frequent moves is definitely a major challenge of a military lifestyle and family stability is a huge quality of life issue. What are you doing to improve stability and decrease the number of PCSs for Guardians?
Jason Lamb:
I love this question. And again, so much of what we do draws from our personal experience and we ask the question why. It’s very powerful and if you don’t have a satisfying answer, you need to go back and work it again. Being in the Air Force service I love, Happy birthday Air Force, my daughter lived in five states before she turned five. Why was that? Hugely disruptive. Hugely disruptive. And for what purpose. It’s disruptive. It hurts families but at least it’s expensive. If you want to do it, you should have a really good reason. Part of that mandate from General Raymond to say look at what we’re doing, why are we doing it? It all needs to serve a purpose. We need to be able to explain to our Guardians why we are doing what we’re doing. Especially when we have much fewer bases that we’re moving people to.
Are we really going to bounce people back and forth, back and forth? Are they going to own two houses and just rent them to each other when they’re moving? The going in position was, unless there was a really good justifiable reason to move somebody, don’t move them. It sounds basic, but if there’s still an opportunity for someone to professionally grow and meaningfully contribute to the mission, the person doesn’t want to move, or there’s not some other factor driving it. We really are trying to take into the consideration what is going on with families and Guardians at different ages and stages. As a colonel, all my fellow colonels and I love to complain about, or the senior enlisted, I’ve got kids in high school or I’ve got aging parents. Not that anybody has to deal with that. Talk about the human condition.
Why wouldn’t we be more intentional and take into account what’s happening to the maximum extent possible. Acknowledging that we really do have to focus, the reason we exist is our very important mission, but it should be in balance. And when we have those conversations they should make sense and not simply the very poor parenting technique of because I said so. Good luck with that if you’re a parent and that’s your go to by the way. That was it. What are we trying to do and why? There’s this old mantra from the rest of the services that homesteading, that is staying in one place for too long, is bad and we’ve thrown out that out the window. It is not bad in and of itself. It’s bad if it hurts the mission and it’s bad if it’s stagnating or hurting Guardians but otherwise we just need to look with a fresh new eyes at what we’re doing and why.
Mollie Raymond:
Thank you, Jason. That is huge. I come speaking from a family with three children. All three of them had three high schools. But I also want to share another story, a personal story from our family. 28 years ago we chose adoption as a way to grow our family. And when you choose to adopt you have to start the process and complete it in the same state. And so we waited to move because then we thought we could start it right away. And then I was under such worry and stress, it’s a life stressor. Are we going to complete this in time before we get orders because this is so important to me. And 28 years ago as a spouse I could have worried less if I had the Guardian Ideal. Thank you so much for this forward thinking opportunity to have a little more stability, flexibility, and choice. It’s huge to military families. Thank you very much. Paula, could you tell us a little bit about the brand new integrated resilience and response operation center at Vandenberg Space Force Base?
Paula D. Krause:
Sorry. Thank you. My mic’s not working. For those you that were here yesterday and heard Secretary of the Air Forces remarks, the IRC, so sexual assault and sexual harassment, we had 82 recommendations across DOD that we are working to implement. One of those recommendations is that we need to centralize our services and this is something that our under secretary of the Air Force is very passionate about and actually mentioned at the national discussion last fall. Within the department of Air Force, we have seven locations that we are piloting integrated response. Vandenberg was selected for our space force installations for many reasons. One is a very isolated site. If anybody’s ever been out there, it doesn’t have a city right outside of the gates, like a lot of our installations do. And so it’s a little more isolated. And so we felt like services at Vandenberg need to be centrally located where it is easy for spouses, for families, and for our service members to find what they need.
I don’t know how many have ever gone translation. You’re trying to find something and you’re like okay it’s building 3-0, what? Where is that building? And so we’re trying to just integrate that where it’s an easy one stop shop where if I walk in as a survivor or a victim of something, I don’t have to tell my story over and over again. I can tell my story one time, the services are either in that location or we bring the services to you at that location. It’s a great program that we started end of July. It was when Vandenberg’s program started. They actually have taken a step further. The bare minimum was get your SAPR, which is your sexual assault and response services, and your DAVA, which is your domestic abuse victim advocate, co-locate them. Vandenberg took it above and beyond because that’s what we do. They are co-locating. They have a satellite office for the chaplain. They have a satellite office for the victims’ council, which is the special victims attorney for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.
They are putting their prevention services there as well. We are growing our prevention team and we’re putting those in that same location. And so really it’s going to be a response and resilience center. They’re running it similar to what our Airmen, well used to be Airmen family readiness, now our military family readiness centers are where you walk in, somebody greets you, and we get you to the right office. They’re going to have center hours. And so it’s not, oh sorry that person’s out. That door’s going to be opened during the hours. We’re going to get those people the help that they need in a timely manner. And we’re not going to send them all over the insulation to, oh sorry, that’s the wrong service. You need to go five doors down, take a left, and then a right. And really it’s going to be client focused, survivor focused. And we’re hoping that this helps people not only heal quicker but also have those warm fuzzies that, okay, I came to the right place, the help I need is here. I’m going to get what I need and the services are here for me.
Mollie Raymond:
Thank you, Paula. I think it’s a great idea. As a spouse sometimes you don’t always know which helping agency that is the right one for your issue. If you can walk in these doors and the key is to, you don’t have to have an appointment. You can walk in reducing barriers to access. Walk in and you will be guided to where you need to go. And I think that is going to be such a wonderful opportunity for our spouses to feel that they are welcome and that their privacy is intact. There’s different waiting rooms that they can wait in. But I just think this is a fabulous idea and I’m really excited to hear in the months ahead how much impact it makes. At this time we are ready for some questions from our audience. If you have a question, we’d love to hear it. Raise your hand and we have several microphones that will be brought to you. Do we have any questions yet? Oh, we do.
Dr. Ann Bennett:
Dr. Ann Bennett, I’m a space engineer and currently working on the contractor side of things, but I’m also an active duty air force spouse. My question is are there opportunities to modernize the command climate and promote culture to support service members with fully employed spouses so that they can take a more active role. And of course this has to be as mission needs permit, but to take a more active role in their family so the spouses can actually take advantage of the opportunities that we’re setting up for them. Setting up opportunities is great, but in order for spouses to actually have the time, the bandwidth to take advantage of those opportunities, you do need a little bit, not a huge amount, but at least a little bit more parenting of quality at home. And I feel like the military culture is a little bit archaic and doesn’t really support service members in providing that to their families. Are we doing anything to help modernize military culture in that regard?
Mollie Raymond:
Good question. Spouses are multitaskers, aren’t they? And one of the reasons why I think project management was the most ideal course is that spouses, that’s our life. We’re always managing everything. But I think Chris, maybe that’s a good question for you. Tag you’re it.
Christina Parrett:
Well, if I heard the question correctly, I think we’re looking at the culture to afford not just the spouses, but the service members as well to be able to idealize what that family life balances with the work life and mission support balance. And I think that is a fabulous opportunity to then take the culture one step further because it’s not just leaving it. That’s always been on the spouse or the family members to make sure that the household’s running. And I do see that culture starting to change where we do as we grow in a society that understands and accepts the dual income roles. And it’s been a shift. It’s been a growth even in our household when we’ve had to have that conversation of what a career is and what that means. And so yes, we see the work starting. It’s just at the very beginning of how we enable that culture to support the dual income, the dual family, the dual career side of the house while supporting the mission. We’ve got a lot more work to come and I appreciate you highlighting that for us as an importance.
Jason Lamb:
If I may, I’ll just add onto that. We are actively working to instill something that’s called psychological safety. For those of you who aren’t aware, it’s not a cry room where you fill out your hurt feelings report. It’s creating that environment where people can speak up. Because quite often what happens is there’s this, if I express that I need something or that maybe I need to go home or I need to create some bandwidth, I’m being selfish and I’m not being a team player. There are a lot of team leaders and supervisors out there who also have families who also know how complicated and challenging it is to balance, but they’re never told that somebody wants something that they need something and so they sit quietly and goodness does not happen.
We are actively working not just to give a PowerPoint slide presentation on psychological safety and the importance of teams and speaking up, but actually reinforcing the environment, doing more to assess what’s actually happening in that environment. These are all things that we’re building. They don’t exist yet, but general Raymond’s intent is very clear on this and we’re building towards it to create that environment where people can speak up because that’s what real resiliency looks like when you’re connected and you can actually voice those concerns and count on your teammates to support you instead of shame you because you actually need something at home. Because we all need it. We just need to have that environment where we can express it and feel like we can do so without penalty. Because we’ve all been there. Hey I want to go to my kids’ game. Hey I got you covered. No problem.
By the way, my kid has a game next week so I’m counting on you. Yeah, we got it. We got it. We just need to express it and we’re building towards that and it’s going to be a part, spoil alert, of our performance appraisal system. How are you doing as a leader? How are you doing as a teammate? If you’re not there supporting each other. That matters to us. It’s not just the what, it’s the how. The how matters to us as a space force. And I’m super excited about that because I think it’ll be a game changer for Guardians and their families.
Mollie Raymond:
Thank you, Jason. Both Jason and Chris, thank you. Do we have another question? Couple, yes. Microphone’s coming. We have one from Heba. One from Cassie. Oh, over this way. Sorry. Sorry. I should do my job appointing.
Heba:
Okay. Hopefully I’ll go super fast. Mrs. Raymond, thanks so much for moderating this panel and panels. Thank you for participating. My name’s Heba Abdelaal. I was on a panel yesterday. I just have a quick question about on the military spouse employment front. How are you identifying those skills that a spouse can bring on the front end to the left of that PCS and then ensuring or trying to place them or at least see if there are opportunities for them through that transition if it’s not something employment wise that they can take with them? I’m just really curious the mechanism that y’all are using to facilitate that particular placement or at least identification of what potential career skills they might bring to a job opportunity at the next location. Thank you.
Christina Parrett:
Thanks for the question. And I love getting questions from the crowd because now we know what’s on everybody’s mind. And so one of the things that we’re looking at, so we’ve got to do a couple things here. We talked about proactive recruitment and so a lot of times spouses are registered out in USA Jobs, have gone over and over and over again applying for job, but there’s the ability for us to be data mining those resumes. And so we’ve started going out to spouses looking for the opportunities that are out there or the skill sets that they bring to the table for the one to one job opportunities. We know that we have a vacancy. We know we have a need to fill.
We’ve started looking and placing that way. A little bit reverse traditional. Now how do you position yourself as a spouse and bringing those skill sets to the table? And that’s what we’re starting to work on with Hiring our Heroes, with the Google certificate program to be able to say, Hey, if this is what you want to do, if you want to be marketable, these are the opportunities to be able to do it. You’ll see more of that coming in this next fiscal year is where one of our big focuses are going to be.
Mollie Raymond:
I appreciate how Hiring our Heroes works with everyone in the program after we complete our certifications with their fellowship program and their amplified program to further professional development and education and identify opportunity. Lots ahead of us, lots of great things happening. Thanks, Heba. Any other? Cassie?
Cassie Cable:
Hi, I’m Cassie Cable. I’m a spouse. One of my questions I want to make sure that formulating correctly is that you guys were talking about some culture and especially with it being a new branch, we’ve got the culture from many different services all coming in. How are we going to try to combat some of the cynicism? Because it’s awesome and I’m one of those, I’m out there, I’m a go getter spouse, and I love champion for encouraging spouses to be involved and encouraging that family unit and getting the services because sometimes it’s just the fact that we all know that service members don’t always take the information home. And so trying to encourage the spouses to go out there and find. There’s all these amazing resources and trying to encourage those spouses, the military does care about you and the military does care about your family, but how are we going to combat some of that culture and some of that narrative of, okay, they just say that. Where are we actually going to put the work into it?
Like I said, I know it’s all there. It’s just that combating some of that cynicism and some of the old thinking that’s still there. I was part of the AFWERX think take several years ago, and we talked about using things like the Air Force Connect app, some of those different things of trying to integrate some more things to reach some of the spouses who are at home sitting there thinking the military doesn’t care about me, but in it’s there, it’s just breaking some of that barrier. How are we going to combat some of the culture and the narrative of no, we really do and we’re not just saying it, if that makes sense.
Jason Lamb:
That 100% makes sense. And most of it is people enter into a life of service, most especially spouses. Y’all volunteer just as much as we volunteer to be a part of this craziness in the service of the nation. But what we don’t want is to feel lied to or taken advantage of. And so we are very mindful of the trust that is being placed in us as a new service. And we are working very hard not to overpromise under deliver. What I would offer is it takes time to build that trust, especially if we DOD have transgressed or violated that trust in some way. We would appreciate, but we don’t ask for anything to be taken on faith. And we are very mindful that as we are building things in culture like the Guardian commitment and our values, I can’t even tell you how many conversations we have about, hey, we’re looking at this policy, how does it align to our values?
Which is a conversation that I frankly didn’t have a lot and I served with all the services. I’m very, very joint. It was always mission, mission, mission, mission, mission. And if you have time, let’s sprinkle a little values on it. Everything that we’re doing is really aligned to the commitment and the values because we do not want to break the faith. We want to say that if there is going to be a thing, there is a mechanism to provide transparency and accountability. Because we really fundamentally believe that we owe the reason why. And if we can’t do something, why we can’t do something, which is something that was quite frankly missing for a lot of my career and those that I talked to was you’d submit something, you’d go into a black hole, and then it came back no, and it was just suck it up.
Inherently ungratifying, unsatisfying. We’re very conscious about closing the loop and building those loops. You’ll hear this a lot, but we really mean it. We need your feedback on the, Hey, we asked this question and we never got a response or we got a response, but there was never an explanation why. Most of you are very, very tolerant if you know why. And we need to make sure it’s a dialogue and not a one way thing. If you bring up specific programs or those things, we can tell you how we are building the loop to close the loop with you and making sure that it is fair, consistent, transparent, and just for all the Guardians across the board. I know I’m doing a lot of hand waving, but reach out to us and we can close the loop on whatever issue you are working. Thanks.
Christine Heit:
I would add from a holistic health assessment standpoint, some of what we’re trying to do and what we’re trying to build is attaching action to what we’re promising, understanding that unless the family’s ready, the service member isn’t ready. We will have embedded teams, they’re called Guardian resilience teams, and one of the members of those teams is charged with developing relationships in the gates and in the local community with a focus on prevention. Not a focus on, oh, somebody has something wrong, let’s fix it. It’s what can we build with our families? What skills can we build to promote overall health? I’ve partnered with Mrs. Raymond. We did self-care sessions with spouses back in May.
Very mindful that there are working spouses, so we did multiple days across multiple time zones. We’re working to do different skills. We’re going to have a self-care skill learning session with children. And then we’re also going to, as we build these relationships with the community, recognizing most of our service members live in the community, our spouses, our children, our families are going to have more access to positive activities focused on prevention, focused on protective factors across the Space Force total force.
Mollie Raymond:
Thank you. I guess we are out of time, but I so appreciate our panelists and thank you for the responses, speaking from the heart. I can’t thank our panelist members enough. And just finally, as Jay and I head into retirement, a lot of people ask me, Are you happy? Are you sad? And I think my daughter had the best word and she said, “Mom, I bet you’re reflective.” And I am. I’m reflective over the past 35 years as a military spouse, almost 39 years for Jay. We’ve had so much joy and opportunity, but it hasn’t been without challenge. I often didn’t always know where to go for resiliency or wellbeing. Spouse employment was a challenge for me, stability a challenge. But I am so excited for the future, for your futures. As a new service, how we can think out of the box and take advantage of our size and put our best asset, people first for a better life. Semper supra thanks for being here.
