Empowering Military Families: Blue Star Families' Network of Support and Advocacy with Julie Riggs and Krysti Pereira

Discover the heartwarming support network behind our nation's heroes as Julie Riggs and Krysti Pereira from Blue Star Families join me to share their passion for empowering military and veteran families. You'll be inspired by the origins and evolution of Blue Star Families, an initiative spearheaded by military spouses who recognized the pressing need for a support system that tackles the unique challenges faced by their communities. With the annual Military Family Lifestyle Survey as their compass, Julie and Krysti take us through the top concerns, such as employment hurdles faced by military spouses, the quest for accessible childcare, and the financial strains that often accompany a Permanent Change of Station (PCS) move. Their stories of partnerships for book donations, caregiver support, and family integration are a testament to the organization's unwavering dedication to fostering community ties and ensuring that military families survive and thrive.

Amplifying the voices of the silent warriors at home, this episode illuminates the profound influence of the National Capital Region chapter of Blue Star Families. Military spouses gain much-needed skills and networking opportunities through a dynamic volunteer network to combat the high unemployment rates plaguing these resilient individuals. We uncover the Spouseforce Careers team's strategies, from advocacy for childcare support for job-seeking spouses to the "Do Your Part" campaign encouraging civilian employers to step up. The tapestry of support weaves nationwide, providing a safety net for those preparing for a PCS and fostering mentorship within the community. Whether you're a service member, a loved one, or a supportive civilian, this conversation invites you to connect with Blue Star Families and become part of a movement that honors and uplifts those who stand behind the uniform.

Chapters

• 0:00 Military Families Support Through Blue Star
• 9:04 Military Spouse Employment Support
• 21:51 Connecting Military Families With Blue Star

Transcript

Larry Zilliox: 0:15

Good morning. I'm Larry Zilliox, your host Director of Culinary Services here at the Warrior Retreat at Bull Run, and today our guests are Julie Riggs, the Executive Director, the National Capital Region Chapter of Blue Star Families, and Krysti Pereira. She's a Program Manager with the National Capital Region Blue Star Families. I'm really excited to have them here, because I've known about Blue Star Families for quite some time. I have always been amazed at the amount of work that you all do in the veteran service space and especially for active duty families. Julie and Christy, welcome to the podcast. I really appreciate you being here, Julie, if you would start us off by just telling us a little bit about the organization, how it got started and sort of some of the things that you'll all do today.

Julie Riggs: 1:12

Absolutely Well. Thank you so much for having us here, larry. Blue Star Families is a nonprofit organization that started 15 years ago. Blue Star Families is a nonprofit organization that started 15 years ago. It was started by several military spouses who came together to find solutions for some of would support our military veteran guard and reserve service members and their families. As an organization, we empower families to thrive where they serve. We are committed to strengthening military families by connecting them to their neighbors, to their communities, to each other and to create sort of communities of mutual support.

Julie Riggs: 2:02

At the foundation and core of our organization is our annual Military Family Lifestyle Survey, and that was started. Kathy came from a policy background. She's a lawyer, she'd worked in DC and in, like I said, advocacy policy and she really wanted to make sure that the information that we were, or the solutions we were finding, were based on actual needs and data, and that sort of was the genesis of the organization. Everything we do programmatically is based on the data that we get from our respondents to our annual survey that say that these are the pain points that we are feeling, these are the things that make it difficult to serve or these are things that are getting in the way of us having full, functioning lives as military service members and veterans of an all-volunteer force, sure so let's talk a little bit about the survey.

Larry Zilliox: 2:56

Let's talk a little bit about the survey. I've known about this for some time because within the veteran service organization space it's extremely valuable when you're trying to develop policy to understand what the needs are. Very often we think we know what the needs are and it turns out that we're all wrong. And hearing from the end user, the stakeholder, is so important. How many soldiers, veterans, family members do you survey, typically in a year?

Julie Riggs: 3:27

In a year. It typically is around. Once we clean the data, we usually end up with between 9,000 and 10,000 respondents nationally, spanning, like you said, military active duty Guard, reserve and veterans and their families. Our largest respondents are still the active duty population, but we are increasing in our number of veteran respondents every year and so we are able to cut specific data that speaks to maybe those unique challenges that those families are facing, as opposed to the unique challenges our active duty service members are facing, Are you able to separate out data points for those issues that affect CONUS active duty as opposed to international deployed families?

Julie Riggs: 4:13

I would say that we do not have a large enough sample of active duty deployed OCONUS families. We have not yet been able to drill down on that. We are expanding every year, every month as an organization and I do see that in the near future we will be able to do a little bit more with that. But at the moment we've not had enough data to cut that and get those results, seeing typically our four family stations in the United States.

Larry Zilliox: 4:39

And what do you see as, say, the top one or two issues that come up in the survey that the families are saying, you know, this is what rises to the top, this is what our biggest issue is, absolutely.

Julie Riggs: 4:51

Probably the one we hear not probably the one we have heard every year since the beginning is military spouse employment. That's coupled with child care issues, and this year this last year. So we just announced our survey results from our 2023 year. They came out in March of 2024. Financial stressors is also a huge one that is often in the top five. A year ago, in 2021 as well, we saw a large number of people having reported or ranked PCS moves or relocation as a high one, and that actually got replaced this year. We think that perhaps that had to do with the follow-on to the pandemic and when so many people's orders were changed or altered due to that. So that has dropped off and now we are seeing again military spouse employment, financial issues. Time away from family is huge. That's usually one of the top-ranking ones Child care.

Larry Zilliox: 5:53

Christy, you're a program manager. What programs do you work on in the Blue Star families?

Krysti Pereira: 6:00

We have multiple programs. We have partnership with Disney First Book here in DC area, where they have donated books to us that we can then put into the hands of kids through our different events. We have caregivers groups to bring those caregivers together and peer-to-peer support. Sometimes it's just a day out for them, right, Like just a couple hours of respite and getting out and seeing the environment around us.

Krysti Pereira: 6:32

Sure, we also have Coffee Connects we have six of them around Maryland. Coffee Connects we have six of them around Maryland, dc and Virginia to bring spouses out and learn about resources. We have our outdoors program. Currently we have a cohort of 25 families that we take this year. We're doing two hiking, two fishing and a stargazing event for them throughout the summer. Our biggest campaign is Blue Star Welcome Week, which is the last week of September and that one we really focus on all of the families that have just PCS'd into the area and making sure that they are aware that we're here to help them thrive and learn more about community resources.

Larry Zilliox: 7:16

Are these cohorts and groups based mainly around the installations in the area?

Krysti Pereira: 7:23

We try to bring all of the installations together so we don't focus just on Fort Belvoir or Andrews or Fort Meade. We want to make sure that we're bringing all of the people together so that they are meeting people that they wouldn't normally meet in their own neighborhood. Interactions allow for resources to be shared that you wouldn't normally find just talking to your next door neighbor.

Larry Zilliox: 7:50

Right, I know that there's a number of military spouse organizations here locally. Do you find much support with them?

Krysti Pereira: 7:59

Yeah, absolutely. That is. One of the great things about being an MVSO is that the partnerships with the different organizations around us and being able to interact with them and piggyback on each other's resources and events and again allow our families to see the bigger picture of what's available to them.

Larry Zilliox: 8:27

Julie, this sounds like an enormous undertaking. It sounds like it requires either a ginormous staff which I'm guessing you don't have, or a lot of volunteers. So what does it take? How many volunteers do you usually have like core volunteers?

Julie Riggs: 8:46

I'd say, well, christy is our volunteers. Do you usually have like core volunteers? I'd say, well, christy is our volunteer manager, recruiter, trainer, all things volunteer, and she does an amazing job. I think we were at about 170 volunteers for 2023. Wow, and of that 170, probably 40 of them are, like in everything we do, one of the ways that we scale.

Julie Riggs: 9:05

So, to answer your question, we have two people on staff you're speaking to them for the National Capital Region chapter but Blue Star Families as an organization has over 90 people, and so we are supported in terms of marketing. We're supported in terms of our operational processes. We're supported in terms of, you know, the survey. We have an applied research team that does all the survey stuff. So in a lot of ways, we are our own sort of little nonprofit in the national capital region, and not little. We've got 17,000 members, so we're a large nonprofit, but then we also have the support from our national teams that allow us to do the work on a sort of lean staff number. But the volunteers really are what allow us to scale and to grow.

Julie Riggs: 9:50

Christy and I cannot be everywhere at once in this area. That includes Northern Virginia, the District of Columbia and Montgomery and Prince George's counties in Maryland. That's our chapter. So we use volunteers who raise their hand to independently lead our programs, which are plug and play thanks to organization from our programs team and from our staff, and we hand them the tools they need to go do a Coffee Connect in Herndon, virginia, and that way Christy and I are driving out to Herndon every month to do this.

Julie Riggs: 10:19

And this allows also, if you think about military spousal employment as one of our top issues affecting our military families If someone is unable to work for whatever reason or chooses not to work at this command or at this duty station, being a volunteer with Blue Star Families genuinely puts resume-ready skills and project management and stuff like that for them so that they can take that maybe to the next step. In fact, I found Christy because she was interested in one day being a volunteer coordinator at a hospital and I said, hey, why don't you one day do it here? And so she raised her hand and volunteered as my volunteer manager for over a year before we were able to convince her to come on as a full-time staff person.

Larry Zilliox: 11:02

Yeah, I imagine it fills that gap in the resume, which a lot of spouses have trouble with. Talk a little bit about spouse employment and it's a huge issue for military spouses. I think the last thing I read is about 21% unemployment rate, which is much higher than the national average. In fact, it's significantly higher. There's also licensing issues for our spouses that are professionals. I know that some of the military spouses who go on assignment with their family overseas also run into the recertification and training issues that go with licensing. When you're in a foreign country, it's hard to get the training you need to keep your certification up. Many of them are in the nursing field. What are the resources that Blue Star Families can offer for spouses when it comes to employment?

Julie Riggs: 12:01

Some of the things. So just to step back a second. So 49% of our respondents to this year's survey indicated military spouse employment as their highest issue. So that's almost half and it has been just every year.

Julie Riggs: 12:14

Some of the things that we have done as an organization we have a spouse force careers team that helps to connect spouses to training and to employers who are interested in supporting military spouse needs as an employer. But on a larger scale, we really have been focusing on advocacy and working with Congress and our friends on the Hill to put into place systemic changes that will allow, will have an impact on military spouse employment, and so recently there has been Congressional Military Lifes lifestyle committee subcommittee. They have released a report or a recommendation of things that can be done to help support our military spouses, including something called the GI Plan for Child Care, which allows for military spouses seeking employment to receive funding through this GI Bill, if you will, to get the job. So it's not paying for child care while the person has a job, it's actually providing support to the military spouse in order to go interview for a job.

Larry Zilliox: 13:15

Okay.

Julie Riggs: 13:16

Because many times people are not able to do that because they don't have child care. And why would you pay for child care if you don't have a job?

Larry Zilliox: 13:23

It's a vicious circle Right, a catch-22 for sure.

Julie Riggs: 13:25

So this bill would allow for money to be given just much like the GI Bill, in the sense that there's a limit and a time frame that it would be allowed to offset cost of child care for spouses seeking employment. Another thing we've launched is the Do your Part campaign, and this is really one of our big initiatives these days is to focus on engaging not only our veteran serving organizations, our military serving organizations, the Department of Defense and, you know, dod at large, but to really engage our communities, our civilian communities, in supporting our all-volunteer force, doing it in a way that they can actually contribute to make change. And one of those is reaching out to employers and asking them to sign a four plus one commitment, and that is basically that employers are committing to either offering flexible working hours for military spouses, paid or acknowledged PCS leave portable. So if a military spouse leaves a job at one employer in DC and they get stationed in Puget Sound, that employer guarantees that person a job, maybe not exactly the same job, but they guarantee a transferable job to that in the company. So the person, so the family, doesn't lose that gap and pay during the relocation.

Julie Riggs: 14:42

And then, and so we're asking companies to say I'm'm going to do my part. I'm going to pick one of those that I promise that I will implement in my company to make military spouse employment easier. Right? So just that acknowledgement of what the actual issues are. Not just that military spouses are employed, not just that it's hard to keep a job, but how can we move the needle on making that happen for spouses and the licensure that you speak of? There's many organizations that have been fighting that for years and I think we're doing pretty well on legislation and other things happening at the state levels as well that are allowing for licenses to be transferred. I want to just read you a stat here really quickly 81% of our active duty spouses whose license or certification was honored at their new duty station said that they were able to start the minute they arrived.

Julie Riggs: 15:31

They didn't have a gap in pay right.

Julie Riggs: 15:33

However, for those active duty service respondents who needed a new certification, 61% report that it took two or more months and they estimate that that it costs them between five and ten thousand dollars in lost income.

Julie Riggs: 15:49

And if you look at so, one of the other things our survey is showing is food insecurity. Yeah, if you look at the cost of a PCS move, which we are showing that people are paying out-of-pocket upwards near two thousand dollars each time they move and we relocate their family, that's not reimbursed through to bill. And then you look at the loss of a job or the gap in employment and then moving in sometimes so a market that's higher, or even just the cost of having to come up with first and last month's rent again. You know, everybody knows when you move you've always got to do that run to, you know, target or Home Depot or whoever and fill, fill the house again. All of those things are leading to sort of a trickle-down effect of food insecurity being a factor in not only junior enlisted families but in our officer families as well and in people who have been in the military for quite a while. So it's a compound issues that all are linked together.

Larry Zilliox: 16:44

Sure, sure, especially child care. Yeah, I mean, if you don't have adequate child care, it's nearly impossible to work Exactly. Somebody has to watch the kids Exactly, and right now that's a national issue.

Julie Riggs: 16:56

I mean, that's not just a military issue, and I know that the military services are working very hard to come up with creative ways to make sure that their service members and their families have access to child care.

Larry Zilliox: 17:10

And I did read recently that the White House, under executive order, issued executive orders stating that military spouses who work for government agencies have to be allowed the option to remote work if they are deployed or transferred to a location where their job just isn't, which is a big help too. That's the right direction, correct, although the real right direction is to have Congress codify those into law. Let's talk about the webpage. What's the address for the webpage?

Julie Riggs: 17:44

It's wwwbluestarfamorg.

Larry Zilliox: 17:51

And I've been to the webpage and there's a tremendous amount of resources on it. There are. You can spend a good bit of time looking at all the resources, a lot of it having to do with what we just talked about finding employment, especially for military spouses. The most important thing is we need listeners to go and take the survey. The survey is active right now. You don't have to be active duty. You can be a veteran, you could be retired military. It's any of the branches, including the Coast Guard. It's any of the branches including the Coast Guard, and it's a reserve or guard. It's also a family member of a military person.

Larry Zilliox: 18:36

So we're talking about maybe a 20-year-old who's at college and their father or mother is in the military. They can take this survey and answer the questions and say my life's a little bit different than most. But here's the things that affect me, right? And I'm guessing that in most cases, it's the fact that mom or dad is gone, even when they're away from college. It's not easy to call somebody when they're in wherever Right Africa someplace. So I would encourage everybody to go to the web page, take the survey. It's right. The first thing you see when you land on that page is the survey. You click on a button, you start working your way down. How long does it take?

Julie Riggs: 19:24

usually, so the survey is constructed in a way that the person who maybe doesn't have, like you said, the college student whose family is part of the military, he'll click or she'll click something and that'll take them to a different set of questions. So it's not going to get as many questions Exactly, so they might have a shorter survey. I'd say at length, about 25 minutes. It is a long survey, but the reason why it is so long is because we don't again, don't just ask are you having problems finding a job? We're asking why are you having problems finding a job and does this impact you and how does this not having a job as a impact X, y and Z also, and so it's a very holistic approach to understanding again these complex issues. So it's very worth taking and it really does allow us to do the work that we do and really make some change for our military families and veteran families, instead of just handing out help or finding solutions.

Larry Zilliox: 20:18

Sure and the survey part of it is through Syracuse University.

Julie Riggs: 20:23

So we partner with the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse.

Larry Zilliox: 20:26

They have a very strong program at that school. Yes, god bless them. They're doing great work there. They are All right. Let's talk about the other very important aspect of the webpage and that's the button that you push to donate. Where is that on the webpage?

Julie Riggs: 20:45

That is up at the top and there's one that you push to donate up from right up on the top. On the right-hand side. You can distinguish or determine if you want it to go to a specific chapter. So let's say you happen to be in the National Capital Region. You could say that you would like your donation to go to support programming here specifically, or you can donate to Blue Star Family in general.

Larry Zilliox: 21:10

Well, I encourage everybody to go and click on that button and donate whatever you can the more you can the better because this is an organization that helps active duty soldiers and their families directly. They are right there in the trenches. It's not a policy organization. They're not sitting in a room somewhere on Capitol Hill trying to figure out what's best for people they don't know, for people they don't know, and this is really an organization that does the work and has the volunteers. It has the staff. It has a history of doing good work. Christy, what's the thing that you would want to leave our listeners with knowing the one thing that they should know about Blue Star Families?

Krysti Pereira: 22:02

I would say that Blue Star Families I would say that Blue Star Families has the is a catch-all.

Krysti Pereira: 22:10

It has resources from all over and even if you're in the National Capital Region and you're getting ready to PCS, the resources that you may need to know for your next location you can find at Blue Star Families.

Krysti Pereira: 22:27

It's all about connecting, and not necessarily, to the specific chapter you happen to live in across the US, and so it's truly a neighborhood, and there are ways to ask all of those questions that you need answers to on our website forum, and our website is actually called the Neighborhood, and so, yes, come out and ask us for an egg or a cup of sugar, and we want to be able to help you get what you need in order to thrive, whether you're staying here or going somewhere else. We want to help you make those connections locally and at your next station, and so come to us and be part of our neighborhood, be part of the solution. We don't have all the answers, but somebody in the neighborhood another spouse, another military family, a veteran but somebody in the neighborhood, another spouse, another military family, a veteran they are going to have the resources that you're looking for as well.

Larry Zilliox: 23:30

And in the neighborhood is there interaction between the various spouses or family members? So, somebody who has been a military spouse or been in the military for 17, 18 years, I imagine they have a lot that they can share to help somebody who's in for their first year. Right, I just married my high school sweetheart, yeah, and oh, by the way, he's just graduated officer candidate school and we're going to the first base and I don't know what to do. That, I think, is so valuable to have that person say oh, I remember when my husband graduated in our first year and it was hard and here's what you need to do and I spent three years at that base.

Larry Zilliox: 24:22

Oh, by the way, reach out to these people that sort of mentoring. Yeah, mentoring is really huge because I think there are a lot of people that have a lot of knowledge and skills and they want to help. They just don't know how. And that's one of the beauties of Blue Star Families is there's a platform for people to help. Julie is the big cheese. What do you see as the future national capital region for Blue Star Families? What are you seeing? Where do you see Blue Star Families in three to five years.

Julie Riggs: 25:02

I can tell you what I hope happens and what we're working towards is we want to be able to have, when people come here and they say, oh, we've got orders to the National Capital Region, we're going to Washington DC, they go oh yeah, it's a Blue Star families town, like we want to be embedded as a resource and as a community plus in the area. So that's kind of my goal and our goal is to really make sure that all of the military installations and the leadership at the DOD and our local commissioners in Virginia and Maryland and DC and mayors and governors and everybody know about the organization and that people can then access it and feel like, if they come here and let's say they've never lived in a big city before and they don't even know how to use the metro, but they feel that they at least know Blue Star Families is here, I can get connected, I can get acclimated, I can find my community.

Larry Zilliox: 25:55

Yeah, sort of like take the scary out of the assignment.

Julie Riggs: 25:58

Yeah, exactly.

Larry Zilliox: 25:59

Because people are I know, military people that have done everything in their career to try and avoid coming to the Pentagon because it's just, it's a different kind of experience, for sure. Well, listen, I can't thank you both enough for joining us today. This has been so interesting and the work you guys do is just amazing. I want all of our listeners to go to the webpage, check out the resources, take the survey, make a donation and join in the neighborhood, because that's where you're going to find the help that you need or where you can share your experience through the neighborhood to help others that were in your shoes years ago. So, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Larry Zilliox: 26:52

Thanks for having us, Larry. So for our listeners, we'll have another episode next Monday morning at 5 am. If you have any questions or you need any information, you can reach us at podcast at willingwarriorsorg. Until then, thanks for listening.