When our clients realize that we have proven solutions for their working parents, that we understand the industry and the changes impacting families and employers, and that we are ready to help, there is a tangible sense of energy that runs through our conversations.

These moments have kept me going for three+ years of creating and building a’parently.

Now, I’m getting new energy in the form of growing our team so we can continue to support our clients as the worlds of work and family continue to change.

Teal Taylor, Managing Director of a’parently, with Marti Bledsoe Post, the firm’s founder

We begin a new chapter this month by welcoming Teal Taylor as our Managing Director. Teal is a marketing agency veteran who is raising two elementary-aged boys with her husband, a small business owner and employer who saw the business impact of the pandemic firsthand. Teal has her own pandemic story of being forced to choose between her career vs. her own wellbeing and that of her family, so she can relate to the 4.5 million women who left the workforce in the past 18 months.

Teal will be shepherding our client relationships from the earliest exploratory call to the final measurement reports. I’ve worked with Teal before and I can tell you our clients will be thrilled to have her leadership and engagement in this critical work.

And that’s not all our news!

We are creating something new with the launch of the a’parently Coalition, a working team of experts in DEI, HR, Research Insights and Curriculum Design.

A critical need for our clients is to expand our coaching team so that the Foundations for Working Parents course can scale to help more parents increase their confidence at managing family and work at the same time. We are excited to announce that Rachel Beck, certified transformational wellness coach and working single mom extraordinaire, will be leading upcoming sessions of our program, helping both employers and employees with her experience and passion for holistic wellbeing.

Our Foundations course is really just the beginning of our offerings in terms of curricula for working parents and caregivers and their employers. That’s why we bolstered this incredible coalition with the addition of Jean M. Parker, a longtime Learning & Development pro with who balances her curriculum strategy work with her husband’s IT career, two elementary kids, a pandemic puppy and a pandemic hamster (ask her how they first went from two hamsters to seven!)

When it comes to thinking about the next phase of work, we have created a unique offering called a Parental Inclusion Roadmap, and that’s another place our Coalition really wields its power. By combining voice-of-the-employee insights with HR and DEI best practices, we are setting our clients up for long-term success. This work will be lead by Shawn Wolfe, a career research strategist with client and agency experience across many industries. Shawn is the group’s parent mentor, with two kids in college, a lonely dog at home and a husband who teaches high school and lived the hardest school year in history with Shawn’s support.

Together with Shawn, we have the DEI leader you want by your side for this work, in the person of Rhonda Talford Knight, Ph.D., a parent and advocate for inclusion along all facets of work and personhood. Rhonda’s guidance on this Inclusion Roadmap will give critical context to the insights and trends we share with our clients and the recommendations we make about how they can move forward strategically and quickly.

I couldn’t be more excited for what this news means for a’parently and our clients. Our ability to help our clients has just expanded five-fold, and the worlds of work and family will never be the same!

With gratitude and so much energy,

Marti

Our Big News? Major Growth and More Impact!

And that’s not all our news!