Thank you for joining us at the 2025 Leadership Summit!
About Our 2025 Leadership Summit
The Military Spouse Leadership Summit is a one-day, in-person training and networking event designed to equip Spouse Club leaders with the tools, strategies, and connections needed to thrive in their roles. Through a mix of expert-led plenary sessions, interactive workshops, and peer roundtables, the Summit empowers leaders to build stronger, more resilient communities across the military spouse network. This event serves as a unique opportunity to foster collaboration, inspire innovation, and invest in the future of military spouse organizations.
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Keynote Speaker: Melissa Sayers “Using AI in your Volunteer Role. Giving Leaders the Tools to Work Smarter Not Harder!”
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Fireside Chat with Corie Weathers, LPC and Dr. Julie Taufa’asau. “Connecting with Military Spouses of All Generations”
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Breakout sessions for practical applications of both presentations
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Panel Discussion: “The Future of Military Spouse Clubs”
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Choose 1 of 4 Concurrent Workshops: (Rank top 2 choices at registration)
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“Cracking the Code: 2025 Trends in Volunteer Recruitment"
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“Club Events That WOW!”
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“Emotional Intelligence”
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“Relational Leadership”
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10 Roundtable Discussions, each with a different topic, open rotation between topics
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Continental Breakfast and Lunch provided
Thank you to our Summit Speakers
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
"Using AI in the Volunteer Role. Giving Leaders the Tools to Work Smarter Not Harder!"
Melissa Sayers
Melissa Sayers is a military spouse and is currently serving as an Army data scientist. She holds a MS in Computer Science focused on data science. She likes to say she is a data translator with ten years’ experience using data to solve business problems and communicate with operational leaders. Melissa builds data engineering pipelines, teaches data literacy, and leverages optimization, simulation, and predictive algorithms to enable decisions. Her recent experience focuses on transportation tracking, efficient business operations, financial auditability, recruiting challenge identification, and improving military training with AI. She orchestrates technical solutions using data and translates operational impact to leaders.
Melissa is a member of the Military Operations Research Society where she is a co-chair and co-founder of the Analytic Capability Development working group focused on manning, training, and equipping data focused professionals.
2025 Summit Workshops
Relational Leadership
Every leader brings something different to the table—and that’s the point. But what happens when your way of leading doesn’t match what your team needs? In this session, we’ll explore how curiosity helps you better understand your own leadership preferences—and how to flex when your team needs something different. You’ll get a quick strengths-inspired snapshot of your own leadership style using Gallup’s leadership domains and learn how to spot—and support—the styles of others. Whether you’re leading volunteers, committees, or an entire club, you’ll walk away with practical, people-first questions to guide your leadership, reduce friction, and help everyone feel seen, valued, and motivated to contribute. We’ll explore: - Why advising too soon can shut people down—and what to ask instead - How your strengths shape your natural leadership preferences - How to spot what others need to feel supported, trusted, and empowered - Simple tools and questions to build trust and energize your team Let’s trade assumptions for curiosity—and lead in a way that connects.
Emotional Intelligence
Did you know that emotional intelligence (EQ) is the number one predictor of job performance and leadership potential and the higher the emotional intelligence score, the higher the salary? Luckily, emotional intelligence, unlike our IQ, is something that we ALL can improve! In this workshop, participants will learn more about what emotional intelligence is, why it is so important to us as leaders, and how we can cultivate our EQ through understanding and practice.
Club Events That WOW!
Building Community through Exciting Events with Kara Hileman - Kara will be sharing her step by step process to plan any program, save you time, and simplify the process! She will also share tips and tricks she has learned through the years, theme ideas and everyone gets a favor! Because it's not a party without a favor.
Cracking the Code: 2025 Trends in Volunteer Recruitment
The importance of Volunteer Recruitment has never been clearer: it’s all in finding the people to serve as volunteers. And the payoff has never been clearer: volunteers can help support and achieve the mission and goals of the organization. Let’s crack the code! We will look at 2025 Volunteer Management trends, challenges and tools to help prioritize and prepare for the volunteer recruitment needs ahead. We will work to identify some challenges and opportunities within the current recruitment landscape as well as explore the latest strategies for attracting, engaging, and retaining volunteers into the future. We will give some extra time to look at how our leadership can impact volunteer recruitment. Let’s gain fresh perspectives, actionable solutions, and renewed inspiration to build a stronger network of Military Spouse Clubs. The workshop will be led by Susan Sanow, CVA, Senior Manager, Volunteer Management Education at Volunteer Fairfax, Fairfax, VA.
Thank you to our Summit Sponsors
