The news clip from 2019 offers a look back at an early Be Connected Roadshow stop in Phoenix, where state leaders, community organizations, and nonprofit partners came together to raise awareness about veteran suicide prevention and the resources available to Arizona’s military and veteran community. The segment highlights the purpose of Be Connected: helping service members, veterans, families, and helpers understand the support network available across the state and connect to resources before challenges become crises. That message continues to guide Be Connected today as the program works to make support easier to find, easier to use, and available when people need it.

Most people experience only a small part of the support available to Arizona’s service members, veterans, and their families.

• A veteran may know the organization that helped them find housing.
• A spouse may know the program that helped them navigate employment.
• A service member may remember the community partner who helped during a time of transition.

What is often unseen is the larger network working behind the scenes. For the past sixteen years, the Statewide Symposium in Support of Service Members, Veterans & Their Families has provided an opportunity for that network to come into view.

For two days, on April 15 and 16, 2026, military leaders, state agencies, healthcare providers, nonprofit organizations, educators, employers, tribal partners, community volunteers, and veteran-serving professionals gather in one place. Each arrives with a different perspective, expertise, and role to play. Together, they represent something larger than any single organization could achieve alone: an ecosystem of support dedicated to strengthening the lives of Arizona’s service members, veterans, and their families.

Every day, we pass people who are carrying far more than anyone around them realizes.

Some are navigating chronic pain that never fully goes away. Some are trying to quiet racing thoughts long enough to sleep through the night. Some are balancing financial strain, relationship stress, burnout, loneliness, or the lingering weight of experiences they have carried for years. Many continue showing up for work, for family, for responsibilities, doing what they have always done: pushing through.

And often, they do it quietly.

The word, collaboration… it shows up in mission statements, grant proposals, strategic plans, congressional testimony, and in more meetings than probably all of us care to relive. And sometimes the word collaboration gets used so often that it starts to lose some of its weight. It eventually risks something called semantic erosion – when a word is used so often that it starts to lose the depth of what it was supposed to mean.

In the language of collaboration, we say things like cross-sector, integrated, whole of community, collective impact, and even public-private partnership. But sounding collaborative and being collaborative are not the same thing.

Organizational Silos

Real collaboration is not just about being in the same room. Think for a moment about the concept of parallel play in child development. Toddlers are near each other. They may be using similar toys, and from a distance, it may even look like they’re playing together, but they’re actually not. They’re not interacting with each other at all.

Now thinking about organizations and systems and programs – unfortunately, many work in this “parallel play” way. But I believe that Arizona is different.

• When we sit near each other, we talk to each other.
• When we come into the same room, we greet each other.
• When we are on the same committee, we consult each other.
• When we are working together, we engage each other.
• When we are helping others, we work together.

Collaboration is sharing responsibility for what people actually experience.

Sharing the Experience

It’s more than simply knowing what other colleagues or organizations are doing. True collaboration goes beyond what others are doing, or even what we’re doing together, to the experience we’re building together for those who benefit from our work.

Thinking about collaboration this way shifts the point of view from simply being aware of or in proximity to the work to ownership of the work, and from participation in the work to accountability for its outcomes.

That’s part of the beauty of Be Connected. Our experience collectively goes from good intentions to working together to shared responsibility. We are all responsible for service members, veterans, and their families in this state, and we are all accountable to provide them with a positive experience in a community that deeply cares for them and takes accountability for how they experience support.

This is truly collaboration in the form of shared motion. Shared responsibility in motion.

This shared motion involves making the decision to share ownership, committing to stay aligned, and recognizing that, together, we produce something no single system could produce on its own. 

Building Something No One Organization Could Create Alone

And that is exactly what has happened with the Arizona Coalition for Military Families and Be Connected.

It’s amazing to have folks who have been with Be Connected for a long time. Our vast network of Be Connected partners is contributing to this process of shared responsibility in motion. It’s absolutely amazing.

When we make that continuous effort to push away parallel play in favor of shared collaboration, it creates something very practical and almost magical for the service members, veterans, and the military-connected families we support.

It means they don’t need to spend time and effort navigating our boundaries to receive support.