 Hi everyone, this is Cherine Brown, spouse of the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and I'm here at AFA, their ACS conference. And you know, we wanna bring important information to you. So I have this fabulous advocate here for childcare, and she is truly on top of it. A dual male family, family of six. She is working all kinds of advocate, she's our major advocate for our childcare situation. And so let me just say, can you help us with, or at least share with us some of the things that you're doing for our Department of the Air Force, as well as what your vision looks like going forward with childcare. Yeah, it's heavy, but I know you can handle it. First, thank you so much for including me, ma'am. This is quite an honor, and you're absolutely right. Childcare has become a major passion of mine. Having six kids will make that pretty much a priority if you want to serve, and if you want to have a family that you love. And so really the past two years, it kind of started to break us a little bit, and we realized this is hard. And there was a new pilot program that came out, the childcare in your home pilot program, which for the first time in our career, we would be able to receive a fee assistance for a nanny. We got into this about 10 years ago, and we were both on 12-hour shifts. He was also traveling, and a third adult was the only way we could both serve at the capacity we wanted to, and continue to grow our family. And so two years ago, new pilot program, amazing. We already knew how to hire nannies, but I realized very quickly that most of our military did not across the DOD. It's a new set of skills, and this is a critical tool, right? As we're looking at how do we help our non-traditional families with childcare? We need more than the CDC. We need more than the FCC. We need more than even local daycares to make sure that our families that are serving in support of 24-hour operations have what they need to be able to serve if that's what they want to do and raise the family that they want. Ma'am, you and I both know that these little ones that our military families are raising right now is the future, right? The data all demonstrates that. So we want to make sure they have a great childhood, and part of that is exceptional childcare. Thank you so much for that. That is a boatload of information, and ones that our families can really resonate with. I know the five in Thrive, and the childcare seems to be the one challenging issue going forward. So how can our audience support you as you continue this advocacy going forward? Great question. So the past two years, like I mentioned, I really took it as an academic study in, okay, what's going well? What's not going well? I gave myself some mandates to say, okay, we're gonna exhaust existing resources, right? There's a ton of resources out there. Five in Thrive, F2, military one source. So I don't want to duplicate anything we're doing. So exhaust what we have, make sure folks know about them, and then do not duplicate anything, right? We are in a resource constrained environment, right? We don't have time for any of that. And yet through all of that, working with the military one source, new military parent resources, working with the childcare where America enhanced referrals, working with our community childcare coordinators on basis, I still believe there's a missing piece. And really what the missing piece is, is on demand childcare education and support. And so whether it's on demand when the families and leaders want it, so evenings and weekends, or when they have time to go on and look at some asynchronous things, resources as far as their options, being able to compare them, being able to see what's right for their family based on perhaps adding a child or changing a job or a deployment. And then the other part is sometimes folks need to talk to somebody, right? We don't want folks to ever feel alone or actually be alone. And so that's kind of what I tested the last two years. I've been able to individually work with over 600 families and test this theory of if we can support them individually as a family, can we get them from feeling overwhelmed to back focus on the mission because their family is secure. And I submit to you ma'am, yes. So my hope for your audience is just like the secretary Kendall said this morning, we have got to be innovative with a sense of urgency and childcare is no different. When it comes to our human weapon system, it's got to be on par with all of our weapon systems. And so that means we need to be investing here immediately and figuring out what do families need. And I offer you, it is the personalized education support to help them know their full suite of childcare options, not just the FCC and not just the CDC. And my encouragement to the audience and for everyone listening is that this is not the time to do what we've done before and that specifically applies to childcare. Folks that have been in there a long time may not be seeing what we're seeing when it comes to talking with families directly on what's changed and really how we need to change going forward. Every branch right now is dealing with a recruiting crisis, right? Retention, all the things and our military families are the most important thing. And they're the only ones making our other missions happen. So yeah, I would encourage some investment in innovative childcare things, especially coordinating with our communities and seeking out new opportunities to figure out whether it's the Universal Pre-K or any of their programs that from the White House on down that we're getting attention on right now. So lots of opportunity to invest and innovate in childcare. All right, well you heard it right here from Lieutenant Colonel Maria Quinn. This is fantastic. We want folks to be innovative. We need your ideas. We need your feedback. We know situations change from place to place. So anything that you can do to provide us with some ideas, reach out to us. This is the person to talk to. So thanks so much for Maria and myself. Have a great day.