Eighteen months of planning has finally launched the JBLM Spouse Club, an online club where JBLM Spouses and local business owners meet. The mission of the JBLM Spouse Club is simple. Local businesses want to introduce themselves to the military not just as business owners, but as people who support military families. Many of the business owners are Veterans also therefore they know the challenges of military life.
JBLM Spouse Club is the creation of Michelle Maestas, a spouse of a Veteran. Her husband Dave Maestas served proudly at JBLM for 15 of his 20 years of service as an Airborne Ranger and Special Forces "Green Beret" retiring as a Master Sergeant in 2014. In an interview Dave states, "Since my retirement we have volunteered in many ways to help the Veteran and military community. The people around JBLM are very much tied to the Service Members and are proud of them. Business owners want to form relationships with the families that may transcend the normal business/customer relationship. Michelle shared this idea with me and since then she has lived bringing this dream together for over a year now." We were happy to sit with Michelle as she described more, "We have spent a great deal of time volunteering and bringing military families together with events and providing information through our media outlets. We also belong to the Thurston Chamber, Lakewood, and Tacoma Chambers along with local networking groups so we know local business owners. We know that they want to meet families from JBLM. We are going to provide them that opportunity. First we will introduce each other through our JBLMSpouseClub.com site, then with events in the South Sound in the future such as lunch and dinner parties, and events for kids. There is a forum space where spouses can discuss the issues that they are concerned about or ask questions such as, 'where is a good place to get my hair done or where can we take the kids for fun or the dog for a walk.'
The next blog post will give you details of the features of this site. There are none like it!
To register as a Spouse, you just go to the site, www.JBLMSpouseClub.com and click on Sign-up at the top of the page.
To register as a business, you will need to email [email protected], the parent site of JBLM Spouse Club.
See you there!