The White House is today announcing a far reaching new policy to “improve the lives of military families by tackling everything from child-care and financial problems to veteran homelessness and job opportunities for spouses,” Military.com reports.
The policy includes improvements to family psychological health, children’s education, spouse career opportunities and development and improvement to child-care services.
While the child-care improvements had been previously announced, the rest of these initiatives are new.
So far there are very few details on how the Obama administration plans to make any of this happen. The report, the story says, talks of adding new military outreach offices or programs to existing departments. For example, the Education Department plans to make “families a priority for its discretionary grants program,” it says.
Other initiatives include making national parks more friendly to military families as a way to improve psychological health. The Department of Agriculture plans to enhance its partnership with 4-H clubs.
Most interesting, however, is the reported push for more and easier spouse employment. From the story:
The Department of Labor will open the Transition Assistance Program – the career guidance counseling and workshop program long available to separating and retiring servicemembers – to military spouses. DoL will also promote priority hiring of military spouses in its workforce.Gordon said DoD also plans to expand a successful Army program for spouse employment to all the branches. The Army Spouse Employment Partnership has a support program with more than 40 Fortune 500 companies that, since 2003, have hired more than 90,000 Army spouses. DoD will also provide job counseling and educational stipends to help spouses get the training and education they need to get into the workforce.
Hopefully the White House at today’s announcement will give us more details on how and when this will all rollout. Meanwhile, check out the full Military.com story here.
