Terry Gerton Well, Blue Star Families is a busy place to be. And I want to talk to you first about what you’re hearing from military families right now. We’re six months into Operation Epic Fury. Navy families were the ones that raised concerns about living conditions on the Abraham Lincoln. There seems to be a lot in the air. What are you hearing?

Kathy Roth-Douquet Blue Star Families, we’re very close to the families on the ground, through our chapters, our online platform, The Neighborhood, and we do a lot of pulse surveys and polling to hear what’s happening. 2026 has been a very challenging year for military families. At Blue Star families, we have had the highest ever demand for our programs and resources. It is the war. It is the way that that has affected the families who have been deployed. Those families evacuated from Bahrain, which has been an incredible burden. It’s also the government shutdown had an enormous effect, especially on the Coast Guard families, but really on all families. But Coast Guard was cut out of a lot of support because of Department of Homeland Security. And also the overall affordability crisis that is hitting Americans is hitting military families particularly hard. So we have just had a surge of need, demand for our programs, our resources. We’ve been able to meet that unprecedented demand. We’ve had to lean heavily on our partners to do it and we appreciate people stepping up. But it’s been a tough year for military families and I’m proud of how much people have been able to bear up under this strain.

Terry Gerton A lot of those stories don’t get very many headlines. In the past, we’ve heard more about that. What do you think is changing in the communications and media environment? How are we not hearing more?

Kathy Roth-Douquet It’s such a fractured media environment, Terry, as you know. So I think that there are fewer outlets. And I do feel that it’s my job, at Blue Star Families, it’s our job to break through and tell those stories. People are, in fact, very sympathetic when they can hear it. We just have to fight to get these stories told. The Lincoln stories are breaking through. I think one of the stories that’s important to tell is that military families are constantly put under a lot of strain. It’s the nature of this kind of work. It’s extraordinary and unique work. There’s other very important, honorable work in America and taking nothing away from police, firefighters, teachers, nurses, all those great things, but there’s something unique about military service. You’re under government orders, the disruption that that means if there’s, something unique for military families being under government orders, having all of the challenges of the globe on your lap puts people under a great deal of strain. And whether there’s a declared war or not, the kinds of things that families face are very keen all the time. So I think that’s just something we have to break through on to help the country understand that they need a military. Through some miracle, these Americans who do not have to do it do stand up and choose to serve. They find it an honorable and a pleasurable thing to do, but we actually need more help to pull this off.

Terry Gerton Kathy, as you talk about that, you mentioned some of the operationally related headlines, deployments, affordability, government shutdowns, but those build on years of other problems that Blue Star Families has documented, military spouse unemployment, lack of access to childcare, frequent moves and mobility challenges that really upset family dynamics. How are those long-term pressures then affecting the way families are experiencing this particular moment?

Kathy Roth-Douquet It’s a great question because when you’re depleted, it’s hard to surge to create the support you need. And families can be a bit depleted because of the demands of the military lifestyle and because the support system that we created for our military was created for a 20th Century military and a 20th-century society. And what we don’t have and what Blue Star Families is trying to create, and in fact, we’re rolling into something called Welcome Week, which is one of our tools to create, is a domestic system that can truly support the 21st Century military. Our 21st-Century military serves a long time. They’re married, they have children, they’re sometimes dual military, as you yourself know. They are not largely on base. They are living in communities 70 to 80% in some cases in the local communities that don’t know they’re there. They’re guard and reserve who are deploying not like the 20th century, but like the 21th, where they are on our front lines. They’re 40 to 50% of our deployed forces. And we need two incomes for people to make ends meet, and those spouses can’t get that second income because of the way they’re moving over and over again, and because of demands of the military lifestyle, these 48, 72-hour notices of trainings and deployments that make it very hard to hold a job. So the communities need to understand who they have amongst them and how they need to support them in the schools, as employers, with local policies to make it possible to serve. And then we need to surge support from the community with the community assets, the organizations, the volunteer organizations, the corporate, and in addition to the federal and the government support, all of these things, it takes a village to raise a child, it takes the nation to support a military, and we just need to help people understand that.

Terry Gerton Kathy Roth-Douquet is the CEO of Blue Star Families. Kathy, well, speaking of elevating the issues, the President Trump has created a presidential commission on military spouses, and they met for the first time last week. What is different, if there is anything different about this commission, and what are you hearing, at least from this first meeting, that maybe makes you optimistic?

Kathy Roth-Douquet Listen, it’s helpful to have a presidential commission on military spouse issues because it shines a spotlight. It gave me and many others an opportunity to go on national TV and talk about issues because the president set up that commission. So that’s very valuable. Another thing I like about the commission is that in addition to the wife of the secretary of war, we have the senior spouses who are attached to the chairman and the joint chiefs of each of the services and the senior enlisted advisors of each of the Services. Many of these folks are on our Blue Star Families National Advisory Board. They travel constantly, they’re talking to the families constantly. They do have good insight and in my experience they’re really super people who are in a good position to share information. One thing I like about it is it creates some trust and relationships behind the ideas. In my experience with Blue Star families, you can have all the fantastic numbers in the world, but unless two people who trust each other in positions of power are talking to each other about it, you’re not actually transmitting anything that leads to change. So I’d like that part of it too. We do have an opportunity to support them. We do have an to provide them a lot of information so they’re not reinventing the wheel and to see if we can’t coalesce around some items where we’re all rowing in the same direction. Blue Star families, along with a number of our partners, Hiring Our Heroes, Elizabeth Dole Foundation, many others, we convene a group of 140 non-profits, philanthropies, and government partners who care about military family issues. We have been able to develop a pretty broad consensus about what the most important issues are. So we can save the commission some time. We know what the problems are. How do we start breaking through on some solutions? So I appreciate the formation of this commission. And I think we’ve got the opportunity to push that ball down the field.

Terry Gerton I love that. And now let’s come back to Blue Star Welcome Week because that starts this week. Tell us what’s on your agenda and how that moves the relationship of military families and their communities closer together.

Kathy Roth-Douquet So I love Blue Star Welcome Week and our members do too, because it is an upstream solution to a root cause problem that results in a lot of symptoms that are really uncomfortable. You know, what we see is that a 40% of military families feel a sense of belonging in their communities, 60% don’t, and those 60% who don’t they have mental health disorders, they have anxiety, depression, they have financial insecurity. All these things that we don’t want our families to have, the root cause of it is isolation, a lack of sense of belonging, because when you have people you know, you trust your community, you’re comfortable in it, you can navigate it and find your own solutions. Blue Star Welcome Week was designed to get upstream of that by creating a moment of welcome for the 600,000 connected military families that move every year on government orders. Those are the people most at risk of becoming isolated. And those are the people who, if you create a moment of welcome at the beginning, can have a completely different turnaround. This is an easy, fun, meaningful way that everyday Americans can engage in their communities to welcome military families and truly make a difference. If I could just say one other thing about that, Terry, we evaluate all of our programming, we see that instead of 39% of people feeling a sense of belonging, folks who take part in Blue Star Welcome Week, military families, over 80% reflect having a sense of belonging in their communities and feeling that their community understands them. That’s very, very powerful. So it’s a fun week. It’s full of all kinds of engagements. We’re taking hundreds of families to the aquarium in Tampa. We’ve got the USS Midway in San Diego and another one of the aircraft carriers in Hampton Roads, doing enormous, nourish the service, restock the pantry, packing events with our partners at Target, so we’ll be giving, you know, a thousand of military families a beautifully stocked pantry to move into their new home with. Other kinds of activations around the country, as simple as coffee meetups at Starbucks for people to meet their new neighbors, and as elaborate as visits to Broadway shows for our families moving into the New York area.

Terry Gerton Kathy you timed Blue Star Welcome Week to come kind of at the end of the summer PCS cycle so people are where they’re going to land but maybe not really settled there. If our listeners want to know how to get involved this week, where do they look?

Kathy Roth-Douquet We ask people to come to Blue Star Welcome Week. Bluestarwelcomeweek.org has a way for military families and for everyday Americans to get involved, find an activity and take part in it, volunteer, give, or just learn more about it. And it really is for both the folks who are currently serving, for veterans, and for people with no military affiliation who just wanna wrap their arms around the families.