Families serve alongside those serving in frontline occupations. In Canada, we’ve organized our thinking and our response under the umbrella of ‘Garnet Families’. Why garnet? As symbols of love, loyalty, and safe return to family, garnets are particularly relevant to the experiences of frontline, emergency response, and defence families. By virtue of their occupational association, Garnet families deal with dynamic, stacked lifestyle dimensions—facing risk, navigating complicated identities, managing work and family logistics, and, often, dealing with the realities of relocation. These lifestyle dimensions weigh more heavily at different times across each family’s life course, but they all are impacting life on the daily for Garnet families, all the time. This convergence of lifestyle dimensions sets the experiences of Garnet families apart from other families, but the broader community often overlooks how these demands ripple into family life. Garnet Families has emerged as a collaborative research ecosystem that centres families and those who study, serve, and support them, building awareness and research knowledge to inform policy and programming. Garnet Families draws on the work of the Families Matter Research Group, an international, interdisciplinary group committed to research with these occupational sectors and its Garnet Families Network. The Network works directly with the community to raise awareness of research and free, evidence-based resources while also bringing emerging issues back to the researchers. The research and network activities are woven together with the Garnet Families Partnership, a formal collaboration funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council through to 2031. The partnership brings together dozens of relevant parties across Canada and internationally to collectively set priorities for research, create knowledge, and enhance our research capacity to optimize individual and collective family well-being.