A military child moves an average of 9 times throughout their life as a military child. With each move comes different challenges- finding a new school, getting used to a new place and a new home, finding new activities, and finding new friends.
What if there was a way to make a least one of these things a little easier for military kids and families?
Two Army spouses, Lisa and Natalia, have a dream of doing just that. Their program, PCSKid, is designed to make finding new friends at a new duty station much easier. Parents sign up as a family on their website and make profiles for each of their children. They can designate ages, gender, religious affiliation, likes and dislikes, and even special needs.
With their program, it will never be easier to find new friends for your military child after (or even before!) you PCS.
PCSKid isn’t just for finding friends during PCS season. As Lisa mentions, say your child wants to do a Nerf Gun battle at the park in your neighborhood, but you don’t know enough kids to put one together. Well, head on to PCSKid and create an event and open it up to children with similar interests in your area. Next thing you know you’ll have tons of new friends joining in on the ultimate Nerf Gun battle. This can also coincide with MWR events and other base-wide events, giving you more opportunities to make friends wherever you go.
Security is Lisa and Natalia’s first priority. Each family is required to use the sponsor’s DOD email to verify that they are in fact a military family. They are also only able to use the child’s initial (first, last, middle-whatever they decide) as an identifier for their child’s profile. Addresses are required for geo-location, but as Lisa notes, it can be any address in the local area- it doesn’t have to be your home address. PCSKid is committed to ensure that your kids are safe and that their information isn’t shared with any party that is not aligned with PCSKid or a member of their service.
PCSKid is currently under development and needs YOUR HELP as they try to secure a government contract to make this accessible to military children all over the country. Please take a few minutes to fill out this survey so they can get the information they need to continue this amazing work.
To hear more about the great work PCSKid is doing, check out this interview with our friends, #TheDependas and Lisa from PCSKid.
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