In this episode of our Solidarity of Service podcast, host and Operation Gratitude CEO Kevin Schmiegel speaks with two current Starbucks employees with different, but equally important backgrounds in service. Matt Kress is a Marine Corp veteran and also worked as a firefighter before eventually becoming Senior Manager of Military and Veteran Affairs with Starbucks. Nikki Young, a veteran spouse, formerly worked as a Starbucks Military Family Store Manager and is now a part of the company’s Talent Acquisition Team. Together, the three cover the power of service, gratitude, and community, and the human connection that can be made through conversations that happen over a cup of coffee.

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“Service is doing your part to make the world a better place. Most of us are serving in some way or have the ability to serve. It doesn’t have to be signing up for the military and giving 4 to 20 years of your life. It can be little acts that you’re doing on a daily basis in your community.” (Kress)

“That’s what makes it a military store- our partners, our customers, our veterans and spouses that work. We’ve created a safe space for our community...It was important to me to create that awareness for my team. Being (in this role with Starbucks), I felt a sense of duty to ensure that our community was supported.” (Young) 

“There’s a recognition when we bring communities together in service that people are there for the same reason. They’re there to serve whether they’re in uniform or not and they’re serving together. There’s a recognition that they all want to make their communities stronger.” (Schmiegel) 

Watch this episode here: https://youtu.be/GBgC-SCDhj4

In the 10th episode of Solidary of Service, host Kevin Schmiegel chats with military spouse and Blue Star Families’ Co-Director of Applied Research Jessica Strong. Strong and Schmiegel discuss the results from Blue Star Families’ 2020 Military Family Lifestyle Survey. Find out what surprised them, what didn’t, what the results mean for military families, and how the results can be used to help bridge the military and civilian divide. Strong also discusses exciting changes to the newly launched 2021 Military Family Lifestyle Survey, which will be open until June 7! Find out how your family can participate in this year’s survey here: https://bluestarfam.org/survey2021/

Watch the episode here: https://bit.ly/3ucYsVk

11:07 [Military] families spend a lot of time apart and that was intensified during 2020 because people who were deployed were having to stay apart for longer due to quarantines or potential exposures. If you were geobaching, your ability to travel may have been limited due to covid restrictions. A lot of those issues we already saw got a little bit more intense for families.  -Jessica Strong,Blue Star Families’ co-director of applied research

11:59 For the past few years, we have kept tabs on mental health in general -- service members, family members, veterans mental health -- particularly their thoughts of suicide. This year for the first time we asked about whether children had thoughts of suicide and found that 6% of our active duty families responded that sometime in the past year their child had expressed thoughts of suicide, so we know its been an intense year for everybody. - Jessica Strong, Blue Star Families’ co-director of applied research

14:10 I think it's really important for people to know that [the Annual Military Family Lifestyle survey] is statistically significant data that shows trends over time and [this] is important because it allows us to address the problems that exist. - Kevin Schmiegel, CEO of Operation Gratitude

15:41 I was surprised to see the amount of discrimination that service members mention. Service members of color -- 26% of them - said they had experienced racial discrimination in their unit and command.  -Jessica Strong, Blue Star Families’ co-director of applied research

20:25 -21:20 The reason I think we get all excited and geek out about data is because its very validating, if you are coming from that lived experience yourself you are thinking, “I am not the only spouse who has struggled with employment after a move. I am not the only person who has struggled with mental health in the past year. I am not the only one struggling with time away from my spouse. It’s validating to see its not just you, you are part of a community, and everyone is going through some of these things. And that’s one of the things that COVID showed us over the past year, is we are strong together as a community and we do better when we are working together. It’s the power of certain tragedy that brings us together.  -Jessica Strong, Blue Star Families’ co-director of applied research

22:00 We were expecting to see that everyone’s social isolation would have gone up [in 2020] because we couldn’t hang out with other people. But we actually found the opposite -- that social isolation wasn’t that different than it was before because we are still connecting with each other. And I think military families are really good at connecting with people because we are very practiced in it from moving all of the time. So we just took those skills we had from connecting with people over a distance and applied them not to just with our extended families and friends from other duty stations, but applied that to our friendships with people [in our community] and helped our civilian neighbors who didn’t have those skills also build those connections from a distance. -Jessica Strong

In this eighth episode of Solidarity of Service, hosts Kevin Schmiegel and Sherman Gillums, Jr. are joined by military spouse and entrepreneur Serena West. West’s company, Westhouse, blossomed from a home hobby into an online boutique which aims to grow connections, communities, and businesses. West speaks about her journey to discover her own identity while also navigating the demands of being an Army wife and mother and her efforts to combat the widespread under- or unemployment of military spouses. She, Schmiegel, and Gillums also discuss how military families can better connect to their communities and the importance of pursuing that connection with intentionality. 

Watch the episode here: https://youtu.be/lwPsMDJ-pjU