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On this episode, we feature PsychArmor's ability to partner with organizations to create a custom learning pathway that will meet their educational needs by having a conversation with Jenna Pryor, PsychArmor's Director of Programs
Because fewer than 7% of Americans have served in uniform, most Americans are unfamiliar with military service and culture. As a result, members of the military and Veteran community are at greater risk for disconnection and lack of belonging with the civilian community. PsychArmor’s mission is to bridge the military-civilian divide by educating and training a Nation. Each week, Duane France, a combat Veteran and Clinical Mental Health Counselor, will dig deep into the stories “Behind The Mission” - and create a conversation with organizations and leaders on how they are utilizing their expertise and networks to support the military-connected community.
Welcome to Episode 70 of Behind The Mission, a show that sparks conversations with PsychArmor trusted partners and educational experts.
My name is Duane France, and each week I'll be having conversations with podcast guests that will equip you with tools and resources to effectively engage with and support military service members, Veterans and their families. Find the show on all the podcast players by going to www.psycharmor.org/podcast.
Thanks again for joining us on Behind The Mission. Our work and mission are supported by generous partnerships and sponsors, who also believe that education changes lives. This episode is brought to you by PsychArmor, the premier education and learning ecosystem, specializing in military cultural content. PsychArmor offers an online e-learning laboratory that's free to individual learners as well as custom training options for organizations. You can find more PsychArmor at www.psycharmor.org.
On today's episode, I'm having a conversation with Jenna Pryor, PsychArmor's Director of Programs.
Jenna leads the implementation and evaluation of PsychArmors educational programs and training on military culture and coordinates with the clinical customer success and content development teams to design and implement education and training resources for individuals, organizations, and community initiatives. You can find out more about Jenna by checking out her bio in our show notes. Let's get into my conversation with her and come back afterwards to talk about some of the key points.
DUANE: At PsychArmor, as director of programs, you wear a bunch of different hats and are involved in a wide range of projects. Before we talk about that, however, I'd like for you to share with listeners what brought you to this work and why?
JENNA: Yeah. Thanks Dwayne. Thanks for having me today. So like Duane said, I'm the Director of Programs at PsychArmor. But my involvement with the military community started when I was much younger. My dad is still an active duty Marine. He is a logistics Officer. So I started out as a military kid, was born in San Diego, went to Camp Lejeune, up to Quantico, Virginia. And so I was deeply embedded in the military community, from birth. And that's really where my passion started. And eventually I went off to college and found social work, as a profession. And that really got me interested in the intersectionality of the military community and some of the inequities that the military community does face and some of the gaps in services, that I saw as part of a military family, and really found my place in the military community. I actually went to college on a full ride Air Force ROTC scholarship, with my triplet sister, Emily, who is still active duty in the Air Force and quickly found that the Air Force active duty was not for me, but I eventually found my way to social work that allowed me to still serve the military community and my country, in a way that fit with my personality to be completely honest. And, I eventually found PsychArmor as well.
DUANE: It's interesting that you mentioned this is a way for you to continue to serve. I think about both of my children, my daughter just graduated college and she's going to be a teacher. A lot of military children tend to serve if they don't serve in the military, which again, a lot of them do.My father did me and my brother do. But military children seem to have a measure of service to their community, not to say that other people don't. But I think it's very typical for military children to go into it's service oriented occupation.
JENNA: Definitely. Yeah. And that's exactly how it ended up working out for me. And that's what I love about social work so much. The VA is also one of the largest employers of social workers in the country. And I think that speaks a lot to our social work values. But that's really what I liked about social work and being able to give back to the military community that literally raised me. And then PsychArmor as a military and Veteran service organization is also filled with military connected individuals. So I've appreciated the sense of community and service that PsychArmor has brought to this space and through the work that we’re doing.
DUANE: As well as being a daughter, like you said, but you're also a sibling right. A lot of people think about military families. They think about that spouse, or child. But again, in some of our other guests, it may be a different experience having a sibling in the military, especially you being connected to the military, through your social work.
JENNA: Yeah, definitely. It's a different experience for sure. Having a sibling in the military, seeing it through their lens, especially as the military has changed over the past 25 plus years. And the different branches. I've gotten to see a lot of different perspectives of what the military community looks like through my sister's service experience and my dad's.
DUANE: No, I can absolutely recognize that. Just how the military has changed since I when in the mid nineties, right? In this, there's this ability to see a lot of change in a very short period of time, but it's really great to hear your military family background, and what that's brought to you at PsychArmor.
Now a lot of people know what PsychArmor is, as far as when it comes to educational offerings to support those who are serving the military affiliated population, but many may not know about PsychArmor ability to work with organizations to build custom training portals.
JENNA: Yeah, so we work a lot with community organizations, government agencies, businesses, really anyone that wants to better serve and interact with the military connected community to provide custom training solutions for those organizations to specifically meet their learning goals and the specific needs they have in what they want to improve in their interactions with the military connected community.
So for example, we have worked with the Firewatch, which is a community initiative out of the state of Florida training community members and gatekeepers in suicide prevention, specifically for the military and Veteran community. They have launched a statewide initiative now, over the past few years using PsychArmor educational resources. And we've created a custom training and technology solution specifically for their initiative to meet their learning goals. And they do a mixture of live events and online trainings, which is what they use PsychArmor for, to train. I think their goal this year is 5,000 people over the state of Florida. And we're super happy with their success that they've seen throughout the state.
DUANE: So anyone can go on to PsychArmor, we shared every week during the show, anybody can take a course and learn something for their own knowledge. I can pick up a journal article and I can read that journal article. And I developed that knowledge, but this is really more specifically, like you said, for organizations to be able to say, if you do this range of courses and you could talk about how organizations can set that up, then you will have this outcome, whether it's a certificate or a training, goal or what have you.
JENNA: Yeah. I'll walk you through the process here. So first we start off when an organization comes to us wanting to work with us and use our courses to meet whatever need they have within their organization. We typically start with a needs assessment, to identify their specific learning goals within their organization.
And I know the social workers listening to this episode will love this and a lot of other mental health care providers. So we start with a needs assessment to identify those specific goals and match up, either individual courses or what we call bundles to match their specific needs.
And then we use the Kirkpatrick Model Of Evaluation for training to evaluate whether they met those learning goals and outcomes, through our training courses and other initiatives within their organization.
DUANE: And so in an organization again, we have all of the different courses, but they can go, as you
mentioned, Firewatch says, we'd like to specifically train our group of people on suicide prevention. Another organization might come in and say, we want to train our group of learners on helping them understand the military more or how to hire military. It really is customizable for the organization.
JENNA: Yeah, it's customizable to organizations to specific audiences or topic areas. Like you said, suicide prevention. We also work with StackUp and we train their peers on military culture and suicide prevention. We train them on a number of things, to better prepare their peers who are moderating those communities, that support the mental wellbeing of Veterans within those communities to better engage with those Veterans. They take our courses and we do follow up evaluation with them to see how well our courses are working at improving their programs.
JENNA: So an organization will come to PsychArmor and they select this menu of courses, like you said, you can bundle or what have you. And then, that organization has a set number of learning seats. We're talking about online learning. And so how would organizations ensure their members are meeting their goals.
JENNA: Yeah. So we work one-on-one with the organizations. We start with that needs assessment and work with them, throughout the life of the partnership to identify continuously those goals that they have.
So we identify the number of people they want to train within the organization. Of course, we always shoot for a hundred percent cause you can never know too much about the military community or suicide prevention or whatever they're interested in training on. So we helped them identify the number of people they want to train,the different topics they want to train in. So say they have HR managers, their general staff members, and then they have their Veteran employee resource group. So those are three completely separate populations that need specific training to meet their specific learning goals.
So for that Veteran ERG, we would offer courses on how to write resumes or courses on just general mental wellbeing as a Veteran employee in the civilian sector. For HR managers, we'd train them on the operations side. We'd train them at how to look at a former military members resume, how to interview them, how to really MOSs to what they're doing in a civilian job, and then how to interview with them.
We did great partnership with a healthcare organization where we trained both job candidates and HR managers to better prepare them for the interview process. And they ended up hiring I think, 20 or so Veterans in one of their hiring fairs. So that was a very successful example of our partnership in the HR sector.
DUANE: And so, for example, the individuals inside employee resource group, they have an individual login, they would sign up for PsychArmor, but then they would indicate that they're a member of this particular organization. And then they would be presented with essentially a learning path of the different courses that they have to go through.
And at the end of that, they would get some form of a certificate or something like that. But that's for the individual learner within this training portal, but then the organization itself also gets to know X of my HR professionals finished this part and X of my ERG folks finished that part.
JENNA: Yeah, so we do have a certificate program, Veteran Ready Organizations. Organizations can work with us to receive this credential and basically what that looks like is exactly what we've talked about here. So they identify a certain number of people within their organization that they want to receive our training. And we make sure that they hit their goal. And they have to maintain that for two years to maintain their credential and how we really try to frame that is over a learning journey. So we start with that needs assessment and identify those initial learning goals. And we work with them throughout the life of their partnership to continuously identify new learning goals that come up because as you know more Veterans, military spouses, caregivers, military kids into an organization, the needs will constantly change and the external environment will change as well. There's always new things coming up. So we work with them to identify those new learning goals and offer our recommendations of courses that their employees, volunteers, board members might want to take to improve their knowledge of the military community and how to better serve them. And we essentially keep doing that as long as,we keep working with them.
DUANE: Now, and that's something that's sooner or later, it always comes up. Wow, PsychArmor does a whole bunch of stuff. This is too good to be true. We always say it every week that the courses are free to individual learners. And so anyone can go on to PsychArmor and access a free course and take that course but this is a little bit is I often say about mental health and talking about mental health professionals, somebody has to pay the bill, right? It doesn't necessarily have to be the end user itself. But this is actually something that is done through PsychArmor on business to business basis.
JENNA: Correct. We use a fee for service model for these types of partnerships, but we don't want to ever make cost a barrier to accessing education for your organization. So we work, really on the basis of the size of your organization, how much training you would like your organization to receive and really the level of support that your organization needs.
If you're a large enterprise level business, the ticket cost is going to be higher than if you're a nonprofit organization looking to train your small number of staff and volunteers. So we do work with organizations on an individual level to customize, not only the training, but what that looks like in terms of cost, just depending on the size of your organization.
DUANE: And really this can be seen as an investment. An investment in the employees, but ultimately to ensure that the service members, Veterans and family members that the organization is working with, that they have the best out.
JENNA: Absolutely. And that's really why do customize that price tag, and are willing to work with organizations because it goes back to our mission as a nonprofit organization. We want to get our education in front of as many people as possible to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of the military connected community and that's really what we're all about.
DUANE: And so you've given an example of StackUp or the Firewatch. I'm interested in hearing about some of the other training portals that have been set up and how some organizations may be using them differently?
JENNA: Yeah. For example, we are the provider of training for the Governor's Challenge, to prevent veteran suicide. And this is a really unique example of our training because it's now a national initiative, and a few of the states have come to us to customize the training that's offered within this training portal.
Each state can customize their training solution to fit the needs of their specific community or counties. Anyone on any level of this governor's challenge training can come to us to customize their training solution. So for example, we have a couple of states that are offering training specific to healthcare providers.
We look at our suicide prevention courses for health care providers, our military culture courses that are geared towards health care providers, but we also have states that are looking at training attorneys within their state. We also have states that are looking at training, just community members, as gatekeepers to Veterans suicide prevention. So that's a really unique part of the governor's challenge training portal, because it's so customizable down to the community level, where they can focus on different audiences, different topics and it truly is a fully customizable solution.
DUANE: And again, going back to the idea of someone has to pay the bills, is that since the governor's challenge is a joint VA SAMSA funded initiative the initial group of training is really funded for the states. It's not at any cost for the states, but as you said, as the initial states have started to go through this, say this basic level is good, but it also gives us a use case to go back to maybe our funders, maybe, to the state budget and make a use case for something more robust.
For example, the governor's challenge doesn't necessarily bring out that Veteran Ready Certificate for a particular organization. But a state or a state team can go back and say, this is very good for the basis, but we would like to do something more, like you said, in the healthcare space, the customizable aspect of this is really valuable.
JENNA: Yeah. And that's really the true intention behind the governor's challenge training portal. And that initial funding through VA SAMHSA is to create a baseline of military culture, knowledge and suicide prevention knowledge within the community and get that reach as far as possible to engage as many community members, as many government agencies and organizations that we could to then have them come back and focus specifically on what they needed for their community.
DUANE: And so again, this idea of it starts out with maybe what the organization might need, but then it can branch off in different ways. As you said, some states are working with lawyers to make sure that those that are working in the judicial system criminal and non-criminal, understand about military culture.
We have Benjamin Pomerantz, who is a sponsor for the veteran ready lawyers ticket in New York state. I know we keep talking about how customizable this is, but really it's anything that an organization can think of when it comes to training and education PsychArmor can work to develop something that might meet their.
JENNA: Correct. We also develop customized courses to meet the needs of that organization, whether it's suicide prevention around military and Veteran caregivers or animal assisted therapy, different things like that not everyone in the country needs because you don't need that level of military culture knowledge, unless you are that specific type of provider or an attorney or an employer. So if you're an organization that has a specific training need that our library doesn't currently cover, we can work to develop those specific courses with our learning design team, and our clinical experts either provide that to the public on our library or privately to your organization.
DUANE: And so again, I really appreciate you coming on the show to be able to talk about this, because this is something that many people are, again, familiar with PsychArmor and their courses, but they're not familiar with this ability to customize that.
So people wanted to find out more about how organizations can work with PsychArmor to create these training portals, how can they do that?
JENNA: Yeah, so you can go to our website www.psycharmor.org or, shoot us an email info@psycharmor.org, and just inquire about our services. And we're happy to schedule an introductory call with you and anyone from your organization, your agency, or community initiative, and explain more about what we do and how we can help meet your training.
DUANE: Absolutely. We'll make sure that all of those links are in the show notes. Thanks for coming on the show today.
JENNA: Thanks so much for having me, Duane.
Once again, this show is brought to you by sarcoma, the premier education and learning ecosystem, specializing in military culture content. PsychArmor offers an online e-learning laboratory. That's free to individual learners As well as custom training options for organizations. You can find out more about what they're do at www.psycharmor.org.
When thinking about this week's guest, I had realized, we had a lot of guests on the show that talk about how they use PsychArmor to train their group members, but hadn't actually shared how they do that and how PsychArmor is able to partner with organizations to provide training and education in a specific way.
There are a lot of benefits of self study, of course, but this aspect of PsychArmor’s programs can be customized in a number of different ways. I think you heard both Jenna and I say it a lot, but the PsychArmor team will work with an organization to truly build a custom learning pathway that meets your needs. An organization can start with a concept.
Using Jenna's example, you can say, I'd like to train our HR staff to understand military culture. And they can load courses on a learning platform that relate to that topic. Or you can take a course through PsychArmor. For example, if you're someone who's looking to build a local coalition and takes the backbone organization course, then you can reach out to the team at PsychArmor and see what other courses they have that are affiliated with that and build a custom training application for you around that course.
A sneak preview. There were about nine total courses that are part of a group that provides insights on establishing a coalition to support service members, Veterans, and their families in your community. And the learning management system that PsychArmor uses is designed to be able to show you how many users have taken, how many courses, the progress that each has made in a number of other data points that an organization can point to, to be able to show progress in educating their workforce or their group members.And PsychArmor can work with you to make it part of a larger learning curriculum within your organization. As Jenna mentioned, again, both the Firewatch, which we highlighted on episode 36 and the stackup Overwatch program, which we highlighted in episode 60, have in-person components to the training program that's complimented by the online training Provided by PsychArmor. It truly is a customizable solution.
The other point that I'd like to touch on is the fact that there is a cost associated with this aspect of PsychArmor's program. As a mental health professional, I've often heard from others how mental health treatment in particular should be provided at no cost or extremely low cost to service members, Veterans and their families. It can be challenging to be a mental health professional who both wants to provide care and support to whatever clients they're working with.
But also our licensed professional with the clinical training and credentials much like other healthcare workers, such as doctors and nurses. In a similar manner, PsychArmor provides some highly specialized expertise in working with organizations to provide this customized learning pathway and that can't be done for free.
Organizations like the VFW and the American Legion have dues that their members pay as do organizations like the boy Scouts of America or the YMCA. Unfortunately to bring the best resources to whatever group and organization is trying to support. There is a cost. The cost of developing a customized training program through PsychArmor, isn't necessarily something that I've heard is an objection from organizations. But I have heard the objection raised generally in the Veteran support space. The expectation that services for service members, Veterans, and their families should be provided at no cost to the end-user and at no cost to the organization, serving the end user. As Jenna said, PsychArmor will work with any size organization to provide whatever support is needed. And the cost to a small nonprofit, won’t be the same as the cost to an organization that's going to be training thousands of learners.
I know that I'm stressing this point somewhat, but it is a common thing that I hear in the military and Veteran support space. It's hard to find funding for things like this when organizations have so many more competing priorities for the limited resources they have. I look at it this way. There are three valuable things in this work, money, expertise, and time. There are funding sources for money and varying degrees of expertise are available to a greater or lesser extent, but there's no grant or external source that will give us more time. Time is finite and PsychArmor has put in the time to develop the expertise to help organizations be more efficient with their time in order to provide the best possible outcomes for those that we all care about: service members, Veterans, and their families.
So hopefully this conversation with Jenna has sparked some thoughts for you and how your organization might partner with PsychArmor. If you enjoyed the show, let us know by dropping a review in your podcast, player of choice, or sending us an email info@psycharmor.org.
This week PsychArmor resource of the week, I'd like to share the link to the PsychArmor training partner page, where you can learn more about how PsychArmor creates and builds custom learning pathways to meet your organization's needs. PsychArmor can build training packages that provide your users an annual subscription to on demand 24/7 access to bundles and courses. Engage in custom course development, have access to live speakers and webinars and receive educational consultation to meet your learning goals. You can find a link to that page in our show notes.