January 2019 Convening Recap: Applied Activity
Posted on: January 28, 2019 | Posted in: Community Blog
On Friday, January 25, the San Diego Military Family Collaborative hosted its first Monthly Convening of 2019! The topic focused on the findings of the San Diego Regional Veteran & Family Wellness Strategy Project. After the panelists (Daniel Romero, Kim Hunt, and Ronald Stark) discussed the project and its findings, the audience was asked to split into small groups to discuss the gaps/opportunities that were detailed during the convening.
These gaps or opportunities included: Entry point into military life, Change in family status, Change in rank, and death as primary life moments universal to the career of many service members and their families. Then the audience broke into small groups to further discuss collaboration. Below is a list of the main points each group offered:
- A system of communication and tracking data must be established through planning an expo for all organizations to share.
- Spouse education and childcare should be provided in more abundance and more data should be gathered on the needs of affordable child care.
- Promoting collaboration is essential to address these gaps. Increasing effective communications to connect to more military families.
- Sharing more local community resources at the state and federal levels.
- Getting the word out to the community would help address these gaps.
- Providing support and resources for military families needs to occur earlier and more regularly in the early stages of their military career (ie, while in boot-camp).
- Organizations and service providers should be collaborating together to write grant proposals to be able to provide better services to the military connected community.
- These identified gaps should be potential future convening topics to elaborate on.
Below are some pictures of the groups that have participated in this applied activity:
