Abstract: The year 2020/21 was a period of change for AFF, with our greatly admired Chief Executive, Sara Baade, moving on to fresh challenges midway through the year. She left a strong legacy of commitment to always improving how AFF listens to and engages with Army families, so that we can be an effective voice for them, and respond to their needs. This commitment to listening to families has never been so important as it was this year, during the continued challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are always looking for ways to improve our service, but increasing our range of engagement really accelerated over the last year! AFF pivoted quickly to providing families with accurate and timely information through our website and social media platforms in early 2020. However, as the year went on, it was increasingly important for us to better understand and respond to complex and specific needs, particularly from families based overseas. We introduced a team to answer calls and email enquiries from a central enquiries point from 0800-1900, extending our availability to families before and after the working day. We increased the capacity of our policy Specialists team, so we could better answer the increasingly complex questions that families faced and were asking for support with. We delivered presentations on all types of digital platforms, attended online families’ discussions, and increased our capacity to engage directly through social media platforms. We will be building on all of these areas in the future, as families increasingly want to engage and receive information in many different ways. AFF also launched a new evidence database, with help from funding from Army Central Fund and Grant in Aid. We are now able to better capture the issues that families raise with us, increasing our ability to tailor our services to their needs. It also allows us to present even better evidence on their issues to the Army, Ministry of Defence and wider Government, to press for improvement to policies and processes that affect Army families. In addition to our ongoing work, we ran a Big Survey in September with a focus on the Future Accommodation Model (FAM). Almost 2,600 families contributed their views on this subject, and we were able to use their voice to influence the development of this work. This year, we will be looking at extending the ways in which we can capture even more families’ views. It has been a challenging year, but I feel privileged to have been asked to step up and lead the amazing AFF team in their work to support Army families, and to continue to build on the foundations provided by Sara, and by many talented and committed AFF staff, over the years.