In our last episode, Marlo Nash shared why lived experience is so critical to our work before she talked about the many lessons learned from this past year’s Wicked Problems Institute national convening titled “Unlocking the Power of Lived Experience through True Collaboration,” hosted by Children’s Home Society of America and the Jordan Institute for Families at the University of North Carolina. One of those lessons came in the form of a memorable question – “How do we do this for real, for real?” Well, today you will get some answers in the form of practical frameworks, strategies, and actions from the three national experts that presented at the Wicked convening. You will hear from Sixto Cancel, Founder and CEO of Think of Us, Anthony Barrows, Founder of the Network of Intersectional Professionals, and Bryn Fortune, Founder of Fortune Consulting and Coordinator for the Nurture Connection Family Network Collaborative. Unlike last episode’s conversation with Marlo, our episode today was recorded during last year’s Wicked Problems Institute. Each expert brought their unique lived experience along with the models, projects, and strategies that they have developed and/or implemented, so I hope you find practical tools that you can use in your work, organization, and systems to unlock the power of lived experience.
Today’s episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Host: Luke Waldo
Experts:
:06-:18 - Opening Clip – Anthony Barrows -– “And for all of you who are really interested in thinking about ‘how do we bring lived experience into our work, my guess is that we are probably already there, and maybe not raising our hands to self-disclose for lots of reasons.”
00:22-2:59 – Luke Waldo – Opening and Introduction to Wicked Problems Institute national convening and the episode’s three speakers.
2:59- CJ Suitt – Introduction of Sixto Cancel and Think of Us.
3:30-25:20 – Sixto Cancel – Opening acknowledgement of the audience and the work being done to elevate lived experience.
Sixto shares why he started Think of Us as a college student when he realized that he wanted young people to have more control over their child welfare cases than he did as a foster youth who could have lived with family members.
What Think of Us does. Direct practice through Resource Navigators. Research.
Proximate Policy. Sixto provides a powerful example of how Think of Us and young people with lived expertise influenced policy change around kinship care.
He talks about how they reimagined their role and the process away from just telling their stories and providing recommendations to becoming part of the prioritization and decision-making processes.
What does it mean to be an Ambassador?
Going beyond traditional diversity.
How is it that you take your lens while also connecting with the young people that are living it today?
Great story about how the Ambassador’s work. Partnered with an agency, Unicorn Solutions, and asked “What can this federal agency do? And what can it not do?”
You have to have resource navigation for the ambassadors.
Crowdsourcing. Surveyed thousands of people, themed the responses, created long- and short-form documents sharing the themes, and then compared with Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute for Foster Club and other leaders’ crowdsourcing and research. “This kind of work matters and will pay off…”
All this prep work allows for the Ambassadors to identify policy and strategy priorities based on what is possible.
Solid process description starting with game night, relationship building, then trust building.
Sixto finishes with a Michelle Alexander quote that is powerful about family separation.
Follows it with Bryan Stevenson and the importance of proximity. “How do we integrate rather than engage?”
Goal of Think of Us is to serve as an R&D center that shares its lessons learned to be scaled.
25:21-25:31 – Takkeem Morgan - “What would you like to see replicated?”
25:32-27:55 - Sixto - Integration instead of engagement.
27:56-28:15 - Luke – Introduction of Anthony Barrows.
28:16-28:28 - CJ asks about Intersectional Professionals.
28:29-53:00– Anthony Barrows - How the world experiences us based on our identities can shape how we engage with the world.
Anthony’s introduction to himself and his work.
“I’ve been on the inside of these systems. I’ve seen how they can positively transform people’s lives when they work and chew up and spit out people when they don’t work.”
How do we make key systems deliver better for individuals?
Case Study - Strong example of the disconnect between the content experts from the context experts in San Francisco dropout study. Interesting content regarding social connectedness.
We asked the people closest to the problem. They identified different reasons for their academic challenges compared to the professionals’ reasons.
How is Lived Experience used in our work today? Who has control of the outcomes?
Anthony is going to give a different view on how Lived Experience can be used. He provides the Venn diagram of the Intersectional Professional.
Why does it matter? “I believe that intersectional professionals should be leading systems change. As dual experts, insiders with outsider experience.”
“We are probably already in your organization, but may not be raising our hands to let you know.”
Why did we decide to do this work? “This work can be isolating… so well-being is very important.” Five values that guide the work.
Summarizing his paper, The Experts by Experience.
Process.
Three Takeaways.
Best practices.
How to implement this model.
5 Integration Takeaways.
The Peer Health Exchange case study.
53:01-53:25 - Luke - How might we more effectively support those folks, especially early in that kind of process or transition?
53:26-54:56 - Anthony - Send them to the Network of Intersectional Professionals. Build supportive cohorts of more intersectional professionals.
54:57-55:17 - Luke – Introduction of Bryn Fortune.
55:18-56:09 - CJ – Introduction to Bryn.
56:10-1:11:38 – Bryn Fortune – Lived experience as a mother of a child with special needs who had 85 surgeries and grew up 40 years ago inside a Children’s Hospital in Detroit. While she had privilege, many of the people she met there did not, so she used her lived experience and what she saw others experience to advocate for change with the hospital leadership.
“Six degrees of separation of privilege” speaks to how lived experience brings a needed perspective that system leaders often don’t get to understand gaps.
Working in Alaska currently because the community has the highest child welfare referral rate in the country from their Head Start and early childhood programs.
How this model was developed.
A flavor of the What the model does.
Redesigning structures.
Pregnancy to 1000 days.
Working with 6 diverse populations and regions in the country to learn from.
Identifying Intersectional Professionals who were working with the distinct populations.
Bryn’s description of her program, how it was informed, and how it was implemented.
“What we learned about equity is that 4 out of the 6 communities didn’t know what it meant.”
Bryn’s comments about relationships and the value of Parent Partners was powerful as she states that “there is a lot of mistrust with our systems for many good reasons”.
Steering Committee made up of Lived Experience experts that are now working with Harvard researchers.
Steering Committee members bring their own Lived Experience, and they also represent their communities in a way that they are speaking to what would help the collective behind them.
Historically, well-intentioned professionals have often treated this work tokenistically.
“This is all very adaptable…” Lived experience changes over time and we need to honor those changes.
1:11:39-1:13:42 - Luke – 3 Key Takeaways
1:14:00-1:15:53 - Luke – Closing Credits
Join the conversation and connect with us!
Anthony Barrows 00:06
For all of you who are really interested in thinking about, how do we bring lived experience into our work, my guess is that we're probably already there and maybe just not raising our hands to self-disclose for lots of reasons.
Luke Waldo 00:22
Welcome to season 3 of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect, where we explore how we might change the conditions that overload families with stress, so that families can thrive and children grow up with a strong foundation built on positive childhood experiences.
Hey everyone, this is Luke Waldo, your host for this podcast series and the Director of Program Design and Community Engagement for the Institute for Child and Family Well-being, our partnership between Children’s Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.
In our last episode, Marlo Nash shared why lived experience is so critical to our work before she talked about the many lessons learned from this past year’s Wicked Problems Institute national convening titled “Unlocking the Power of Lived Experience through True Collaboration,” hosted by Children’s Home Society of America and the Jordan Institute for Families at the University of North Carolina. One of those lessons came in the form of a memorable question – “How do we do this for real, for real?”
Well, today you will get some answers in the form of practical frameworks, strategies, and actions from the three national experts that presented at the Wicked convening. You will hear from Sixto Cancel, Founder and CEO of Think of Us, Anthony Barrows, Founder of the Network of Intersectional Professionals, and Bryn Fortune, Founder of Fortune Consulting and Coordinator for the Nurture Connection Family Network Collaborative.
Unlike last episode’s conversation with Marlo, our episode today was recorded during last year’s Wicked Problems Institute. Each expert brought their unique lived experience along with the models, projects, and strategies that they have developed and/or implemented, so I hope you find practical tools that you can use in your work, organization, and systems to unlock the power of lived experience.
A quick tip before we start: As these presentations were originally delivered in video format over Zoom, you may find the slide decks that each presenter used that day helpful to follow along. You can find them in the show notes.
We begin with Sixto Cancel who shares how using a Lived Experience Ambassador model helped integrate lived experience into federal policy. I will let our talented MC for the Wicked convening, CJ Suitt, introduce Sixto and Think of Us further.
CJ Suitt 2:59
Sixto is the CEO and Founder of Think of Us. Think of Us is a Research and Design Lab for the social sector working to transform child welfare. The organization is led and guided by people who have been directly impacted by the child welfare system, including Sixto. Think of Us looks system wide to identify opportunities for the greatest impact. Then alongside lived experts, they engage across the ecosystem to create and co-implement novel, scalable solutions.
Sixto Cancel 03:30
I'm super excited to be here with you all today, and just so inspired by all of the work there have been. There are folks. I've seen your work, Anthony, I saw the report that you put out. I love to be in this space where it just feels like a reunion of the folks who are talking the talk, but also walking the walk.
So with that being said, I'm going to share a little bit today around one of our use cases around centering lived experience. And what I'm going to do is I'm gonna dig into some of the more practical pieces from our our work here.
Alrighty, so today, I wanted to share a little bit about Think of Us, who we are. I started the organization about nine years ago when I was in college, and the point of it was to create an app that gave young people voice and choice of their case plan. For me, I had grew up in foster care, and I ended up actually discovering that I didn't, I did have family members that I could have lived with who were foster adoptive parents, but because I wasn't part of my active case planning, talking about the family members that I had in my life, I just looked back and I realized having that voice would have made a huge difference.
But today I really want to focus in on some of our work, and a little bit about us is that we span across different areas. So we have direct service where we do resource navigation, so we have folks with lived experience, or who are proximate, who are resource navigators. And they pick up the phone, email, text message, and they go ahead and act as a resource to help folks navigate. We do research. So we bring folks in, do qualitative research, do interviews, over online, do surveys, and last year, we were able to engage over 2200 folks in our research.
So I want to start off with some of the policy work that we've been able to do and some of the work that I call proximate policy. The reason why we call it proximate policy is because we're not putting pen to paper and saying, here's our policy recommendation, but what we're doing is that as folks who are in different political appointments, whether that be the Associate Commissioner of the Children's Bureau, whether that be a secretary, right? They have questions around a decision that they're going to make, and they ask themselves, Well, how am I really going to center lived experience, or how am I going to integrate lived experience into my decision making process? And so for this administration. When it started, we had assistant, excuse me, Assistant Commissioner Aysha Schomberg, and immediately she launched into, how is it that we can go ahead and integrate lived experience through her decision making?
And so we went on a journey to say, number one, how is how can folks with lived experience be integrated into the actual strategic planning process. And then that had happened. But three years later, we found ourselves in this moment where the administration wanted to engage young people with lived experience. Again, this was a moment where we all paused and said, Well, what do we really want to achieve here? Right in the beginning of three years, three and a half years ago, the administration started and in her leadership, Commissioner Schomberg had already set a strategic plan, had put nine advisors with lived experience, had came up with these particular goals, and had engaged young people and birth parents and kid can caregivers throughout it.
So what was going to be so different about this convening? And so this convening, we said to ourselves, how about we don't actually gather young people to give recommendations based on their story? What if we were coming to the table to do something that is a little different, which is to do the back door work right, to actually say, how do we actually help you prioritize what you're going to focus on with the limited time that you have? So last year, recommend the the administration and the internal teams at the federal agency were thinking to themselves, how do we spend our time? And we have a culture, a sector, that will say, Come, tell us what's wrong. Come let’s find some solution to the problem.
But what I realized is, what happens when you have to make the tough choice beside the to decide I'm either going to do a or I'm going to do B or I'm going to do C, and are we really at the table for those conversations? So we were able to go through that experience. It led to being able to inform some of the additional federal actions, such as the kinship care convening. Young people directly gave us recommendations that we saw there. If you saw some of the news with a bill passing the House side, you'll see that some of the young people's recommendation you'll see inside of that draft bill.
But where I want to bring us back to is not so much about the outcome, it's about the steps. I was asked to really talk about what these steps are. So we were asked to bring together folks around recommendations. And we said, Okay, I think you've gotten enough recommendations, right. We've been sharing a lot of stories. We tell the same stories over and over. So with the limited amount of time, how can we actually switch things up here? What should be prioritized to make the most impact for young people with only about a year and a half left?
And so that's when we decided, well, what if we did more than just convene with folks? What if we went beyond the traditional model and said, Let's do a new approach. Let's really focus on how every lived experience person here can be an ambassador to the work, and that they are doing a set of different activities to bring in knowledge. And then we're going to show up in DC. But what we're going to do is, what we're not going to do is share our stories. We're going to base it on the sub the content alone, right? And so people were skeptical. I ain't gonna lie to do that.
So what did that mean? That meant that, as folks with lived experience, we would do our own homework, from lit reviews to online trainings to listening to being able to source additional research to come to that table and then understand. So the first thing we had to do was set the clear expectation with folks like, hey, this engagement. We're really not trying to center on just personal stories. You can share experiences, right? But what we want to really be able to do is make sure that we're bringing in all the different knowledge that you have heard and that you have engaged with.
So what did that mean? Selection matters. So we were first started off with how we selected, and what we paid attention was just not diversity around age, race, gender identity and sexual orientation, but we wanted to make sure that we had all of the different for these 20 ambassadors that were being chosen, that we had all the different other diversities, right? From being urban, suburban, tribal nation, traditional states, territories, the experiences that were diverse, from folks who experienced group home to folks who experienced kinship, folks who've been reunited, and sometimes that's a voice that we don't hear at the table, right? They've been reunited for years, but still being at the table here and then a variety of folks who were in different living situations, right from folks who have experienced homelessness or either had just moved into their first apartment, literally the week before, being able to gather a group of folks to be part of this process that spanned the different experiences.
And so here are some graphs. I'm going to share a report with you all that lines out exactly how we created this Ambassador model and how we executed it, but we were intentional, and we used some of the traditional research methods to say, how do we do some selection. This was not a research project, but taking some of those practices was very helpful there. And so what did it mean to be through, to be an ambassador, and what does it mean to actually go through this training? So first and foremost, we had a virtual training. I'm going to speak a little bit to the nuances in a second. Then we said, let's get proximate. Let's talk. Let's have our ambassadors who were between 18 all the way through 30, talk to folks who were in the system, right? How is it that you take your lens that you have with your experience, but then how is it that you hear from folks who are currently navigating the situation, to also bring those voices in? Then we asked folks to receive input from the advocates, to discuss those recommendations, and then to provide a report out to the the Children's Bureau.
So the first thing that we were able to do here was is prepare folks by really saying, Okay, what is the virtual training that folks need? And so we partnered up with another lived experience agency Unicorn Solutions, and had a specific training that was created on what can the federal agency do and not do. I remember going to DC as a young person, younger person, let me say, and being and thinking to myself, Oh, wow, I just gave a recommendation that's really for Congress to a federal agency, or I didn't realize that 60% of what I said was not something that they could act on. And so I don't know if you all have ever had those experiences, but it's so important to be able to say, like, look, here's strictly what they can do. What does that actually look like? You know? What do these examples need to be, right? How is it that the feedback that I'm giving is just not just giving you context for your learning, but that I am equipped as an ambassador to say, I think this technical lever could be pulled right?
So first we leaned into really being able to make that happen. And what we've learned is that for some of our engagements, it requires, number one, creating that custom prep, prep material. There is a traditional prep of like strategic sharing, about self-care, about making sure that you have that well-being packet in the beginning. We know that, right, but then, as we prepare folks with lived experience and and these experts to go into different scenarios, there's nuances, and nuances matter, and the information that we decide to give people or hold back can be a form of manipulation. So we want to make sure that we are actually putting as much on the table as possible.
So then the next thing that we focused on here, and I'm getting very tactical, because that's my role in today, is really to say, Okay, from that training, we went into what's next, which was to have a listening session and crowdsourcing ideas. So the listening session was an opportunity for ambassadors to go ahead and actually listen to folks who were in the situation, so in foster home, in group homes, in a homeless situation, so that you're bringing the most current voices into the space. So without having to go into that space, without having to go ask the young person who's going through some possibly very hard things and bringing them, we wanted to make sure that we had the ambassadors who were that bridge in and that was the first time we did that.
So we were a little nervous things that we had to make sure we had was our resource navigation folks available to do some resource navigation. And we thought it was going to be more for the participants. But as we went through this journey we also realized you have to have resource navigation for the the ambassadors, for everyone that you have brought in. One of the things that we did when we convened was we actually hired what you call it, two folks, one of them with lived experience. Both of them had lived experience, but one of them with lived experience, whose full time job was to be present and available to process so as folks need to step out, as folks who need to be engaged in certain conversation, or just prepare mentally for a conversation and not be reactive us understanding and having that person who has text you, who has been there and who has just been that support was one of the critical things that I felt like made this successful.
The second thing that was part of this upfront, of broadening perspective, was the crowdsourcing, the crowdsourcing of ideas. So we put out a forum, and we said, ambassadors, what do you want to know? And they said, Oh, we wanted all these things. So we said, well, you know what we should ask the public. This is so many questions that it shouldn't just be Think of us as thoughts. Let's go and email blast folks. So we emailed blast 56,000 folks a Google form. We put it on social media, and people literally gave the ambassadors their ideas. All of those ideas came in, they were compiled. And what we did was we produced several synthesis reports, so we had some folks who were part of this journey, who had, you know, one of our folks with lived experiences just graduated law school and had passed the bar, and so she volunteered to go in and dig in and look at the 200 plus ideas. Right then we had an 18-page version. And then in some of our engagements, we even done, like, a three-to-five-page version, so that we meet people where they're at. I have difficulties reading long form. And so for some folks, it's it's really important that we create different snippets, right?
And then being able to say, for some folks, okay, you are really good at listening and hearing information. So how does that information get presented to you. So we wanted to collect all of these ideas, all of these, what you call it, all of the literature that had been out there, and say, Hey, how do folks consume that information? This is very important for when you are bringing folks together, like these ambassadors, to make decisions that are going to affect you know why the significant direction, what we felt was important, is that they get as much information as needed.
This is just the example of the form. I'm happy to send this out also so that folks have this. And it was a simple form. It went out. A lot of different engagement. Then we asked those folks to be available to the ambassadors. Folks made themselves available, right? The thing that I also was extremely excited about was that this is not the first time folks come to DC to inform a federal agency or Congress about some recommendations. So one of the things that we did here is we went out and we crowd sourced as many lived experience publications as possible. So shout out to Foster Club, who has been doing the National Foster Care and Alumni Policy Council for years, right to the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute who's been doing, you know, legislative proposal for a year.
And so we did was we said, Let's go crowd source all of these folks' previous recommendations that are from lived experience, lived experience folks, and then bring them in. And so then we had a subgroup of those 20 folks who literally read through all of the recommendations themed and worked with Steven on our team to theme them up, created those themes, and then brought those voices into the room. It seems like a lot. I know it sounds like a lot, but I guarantee that when you're in the process of doing something like your strategic plan or your next five year vision, this type of work matters and it's going to pay off. It is the way to truly integrate folks with lived experience into every single one of these bits, where it's not just you're at the table, but truly being able to then have the discussions that come from it.
So that was all of our prep work. And the reason all of that prep work was needed was because when folks got into the room that day, they needed not just to be able to talk about a recommendation for what the agency should focus on the Children's Bureau, but they need to be able to have the tough conversation of at this point, we only had a year and a half left. What can you do in a year and a half, six months before the new administration? It makes it easy for the next administration to undo some of the regulatory things that you may have passed, things of that nature, right? So this was really a tough conversation around like this may be the hardest thing that folks are going for going through, but you only got about a month to nine months of resources to be able to deploy. And so that's the difference between us creating an ambassador model and having young people come to share their stories.
So once folks got to DC, the thing that we did was we just had a no work, just relationship, community building, game night, from the Cha Cha slide to mega-Jenga, Jenga to Uno and so forth. I don't know if y'all play Uno but it can get pretty, pretty, pretty intense in a good way. And so we brought people together to be able to have that community inform then once we were in the actual convening, we made sure all the supports were in the room right, making sure that there was a space for people to go to, making sure that we had folks who were there, who were there for processing.
But I also want to name the importance of prepping. So having folks who said, You know what, siblings is my touchy area before I go into the sibling conversation, I want to step out mentally prepare, then come back in, right? Because we talk a lot about doing it on the after, but not enough on doing like the before. And so instead of being reactive, we can prepare folks and support folks to do that. And everybody needs something different, right? So always keep that in mind too.
So we went into these design sessions with folks to be able to have the conversation. What the room looked like was it was first this large room where folks sat in an oval but then we broke into smaller groups. And what was important about these groups is that it wasn't just about the commissioner and the appointees being in that room. What was just as important is that the career folks who work at the CB were at each of these tables, and they stood there throughout the entire convening, right? So it wasn't just like, hey, we're going to come in, we're going to observe. They were each each group was assigned someone from the CB. They were, they were allowed to make direct, direct contact, exchange information, follow up after this meeting which happened, right? And make sure that you all have someone who is in charge of taking the work and continue to move the work despite which administration is in office to be able to continue that body.
And so we were able to do that, and this is what the groups looked like. And we made sure that we accommodated for as many things as possible, from making sure someone in the room was available for the young moms who we had in the room to be there, to making sure that some of the other you know, for lack of better words, ADA accommodations were there, but going above and beyond to even be more supportive to say, Hey, I understand this is what the law says, but what is specifically do you want above and beyond that? And asking that question is critical for you to check in with folks.
The way we got to the priority areas was there was a voting process, the goals were prioritized, and then the outcomes were delivered. But what was the most important part of this was not the report that was written. It was the relationships between, my opinion, the career staff, in the staff, excuse me, in the ambassadors who were there. And the ambassadors were a collective group made up of different skill sets, right? So while some folks were like, I'm not going to speak at this meeting at all. They were great writers, right? And we wanted them to use their writing skills to come in there. Some folks were very vocal, and we wanted them to use that tool to come in there also.
And so this is the nuances of how we were able to create this different type of what we call a model, which is the ambassador model. But I felt like I wanted to end with this quote here, which is from Michelle Alexander, and it says, “We must work tirelessly to ensure that our government oppose the dignity of all families, recognizing that the separation of family is a grave injustice that echoes the darkest chapters of our history, true justice demands that families remain united supported by policies that foster community understanding and equity.” And when I think about Bryan Stevenson, I think so much about his his work around proximity and how important it is to be so close to the suffering and the experiences that people have in order to be able to solve problems. Because we can't solve problems of being far away, right? And so when I think about this quote and the importance of developing those policy, it means that we're there.
But I really, really push us to say, how do we really integrate versus having engagement, and so you all will. I'm going to drop this report in here. In Section three is where we even go further to get to the nitty gritty around how we've done exactly what we did there. So our goal, at Think of Us, is that we're testing things as an R and D lab. We get to test it and then to. Success for us is how other people leverage it, use it. That's what we get reported on, that's how we get graded. And so I would say, feel free to lean in on any materials, and then you can totally email us. I don't want to go over time, because I could talk forever, but I definitely wanted to open it up if there was one or two questions.
Takkeem Morgan 25:21
So you shared a lot. It's a lot of work, right? What aspect of what you shared would you like to be replicated across the ecosystem?
Sixto Cancel 25:32
The ambassador piece of having folks who are building skill sets across the continuum. So when we looked at the 20 folks, right? Some folks came in and they wanted to learn a little bit more about what does it mean to dive into material, synthesize it, bring it out, to watch people go in and look at lived experience reports. I'm talking like over 30 of them. In fact, we're gonna, I'm gonna find the link of our folder. We're talking about over 30 different reports that have been done just in the last five years was one subset. And so to see folks learning how to do that synthesizing, bring that out, figure out what they're going to share with their colleagues, I thought to myself, like that is powerful. So many times we come to the table and I think people say, Oh my God, if you share your story, you're going to change the entire system. And I think it's very different to say you are sharing your story, your your your part of your experience in community with hundreds of others who've experienced the same injustice that you have, and together like you are, this narrative continues. Here's how now we can change it, right? Because too many times people be like, Oh, well, that was just you. Or that's a unique case. Or is this really widespread, right? So to actually look through years of these are the same recommendations, or here are some slight nuances, was one, one thing that really stood out to me. And I think sometimes we're asked to speak, but where do we act? And I'm not a great writer, so, but I'm advocating for all of our ambassadors who are like, hold on. Like we want to write. We want to put something together. We want to put it forward. And that was very powerful.
So I would say that piece there, and then I would say the piece around being able to be that cultural broker between your experience and then talking to folks who are in the system, talking to folks who are experiencing the struggle, right and then being able to bring that into the room. And I will say about half the folks who participated in the convening did not actually bring their own story up. They brought up things that they heard in the previous report. They brought up some of the folks who were in the listening session. And I just felt like that was so powerful, because the combination of your lens and then bringing folks who are not in the room in just felt like we're getting closer to what would feel more like integration versus an engagement.
Luke Waldo 27:56
In this next segment, Anthony Barrows, Founder of the Network of Intersectional Professionals, will introduce himself through his own story before sharing the role of Intersectional Professionals in systems change and how we can make these key systems deliver for the people who rely on them.
CJ Suitt 28:16
You helped coin the term intersectional professional. Is that a different type of lived expertise than we've been in conversation about so far today?
Anthony Barrows 28:29
It is a distinct flavor of it. So I'll say a couple things about the phrase. It's a something that we coined a little over a year and a half ago to describe this kind of specific experience that I'll dig into when I show folks my slides, but let me give you, like a little background on why we chose it. Because we chose that mouthful on purpose. Intersectional professionals, very literally in regards to the semantic meaning of the word, like our lives intersect with our work, but intersectional also in the tradition of black feminism, because we think it's critical to acknowledge that the world encounters us in certain ways rooted in our identities. So the way that you look, the way that you talk, where you were born, what your gender or sexual expression is really do shape how you encounter the world and how the world encounters you, and if we aren't careful, deliberate and tuned in to those differences, then we're going to fail in any effort that we have to change what's going on out in the world, or even to engage with each other and build solidarity in relationships. So intersectional professionals are a critical subset of people with lived experience, and I'll dig into it more as we go.
I've been exposed to basically all of the systems that you can imagine, WIC, snap, public housing, child welfare, juvenile justice, you name the system. I probably. Been on the inside of it, and I've seen how those systems can positively transform people's lives when they work well, and how they can chew people up and spit them out when they don't, which is why it was super important to me as I entered my career after college to try to return some of the good luck that I got by going into direct service. So spent about a decade in child welfare, doing independent living work, adolescent permanency work, as well as regional system improvement work at the New England Association of Child Welfare Commissioners and Directors. But at a certain point, I got very convinced that with a philosophy degree from undergrad and an MFA in printmaking, no one was going to make me the Assistant Commissioner of anything. So went back and got a policy degree with the hope of climbing the ladder in the world of child welfare, but instead became convinced that we could get upstream from the problems associated with child welfare if we addressed poverty and the social policy that's attached to it. So spent about another decade doing applied behavioral science work at Ideas 42 focused on economic justice before pivoting again to start the Center for Behavioral Design and Social Justice at Project Evident, the aim of which is to do blue sky, ground up policy design in a way that combines evidence from research alongside input from affected communities. So what does the science say works? What do the people say that they need unleashed from the political economy of today focused on the possible, not just the plausible. So all of this is to say that my entire career, my entire life, has been focused on trying to answer this question of, how do we make key systems deliver for the people that rely on them?
So I'm going to skate through this section quickly, because I don't think any of you need to be convinced, but I think it's helpful to have a story around why lived experience matters. This comes from a project that I ran at Ideas42 with San Francisco State University, where they were having a problem with people dropping out of school, freshmen, in particular, they were losing about a fifth of their freshmen. And when we went to engage with them on this project to figure out how we could stem that tide, what we found was that about 11% 11 percentage points of those 18 percentage points were dropping out for no discernible reason related to their academic record. They weren't failing their classes, they weren't not completing their remediation. They were showing up to school, but they were leaving nonetheless.
So depending on who we asked, we got different explanations for why this was happening. So when we asked the traditional experts, so these would be researchers, maybe administrators at the school, these were some of the ideas that they put on the table. Maybe people aren't prepared. They've got bad study habits. That certainly doesn't account for those 11 percentage points of people who weren't leaving for any academic reason. But they had some other plausible explanations, like maybe they didn't have enough financial aid or housing. San Francisco is an expensive town with not a lot of housing, so that could have been the case, but what we found when we dug into the data is that we didn't have any strong correlations between people failing to file the FAFSA or applying for housing and not getting in and then later dropping out.
So what we did was to ask the people that were closest to the problem, that would be the students and the staff that worked directly with them about what was going on with them, and what we heard over and over again were things around these themes. I didn't feel like I fit in. I couldn't find my niche. I feel like I'm the only person that's struggling. I feel completely disconnected from this environment, so a radically different set of explanations.
And the reason that this matters is because if we hadn't done that, if we had only listened to the traditional experts, we probably would have come up with this kind of stuff in terms of an intervention. We might have given people advice about how to file financial aid, how to pursue housing. Maybe would have given them navigators to work through all the administrative burdens related to school. And don't get me wrong, none of that stuff is bad. Probably would have helped some people, but because we were focused on doing what the students told us that they needed, this is what we did instead. We launched a social belongingness intervention rooted in a video that we created with the cinema department, and then sent a bunch of messaging to boost that.
And so here's here's how that worked, in essence, to combat this sense that there's something wrong with me, as opposed to understanding your struggles as being a feature of the environment, we showed a bunch of students, recent graduates and upper classmen, talking about how they struggled too, and giving people examples of how they got through that struggle, getting tutoring, joining a club, etc. We collected some data from students to help reinforce that, connect it to their own experiences, and then set them text messages and emails once a month, along with some of that administrative help as well reminding people about financial aid, etc.
And for those of you who may be education researchers, hopefully your eyes will pop like mine always do when I show these results, we got a 10-percentage point increase in retention year over year for the group of students that were in our treatment category, in the most at risk category of folks which were students in the Metro Academy's program. And that was statistically significant, and we saw some other non-significant, but very promising results in terms of GPA and credit completion as well. So I tell you this story because I want you to think about what might we have done if we hadn't asked, and my guess is that we would have done stuff that was useful to people, but we probably wouldn't have gotten these kinds of results.
Okay, so hopefully you're convinced that lived experience matters. So the next question might be, where can we find lived experience? Here's some typical approaches, some of which we've heard about today that people take to draw and lived experience. There's often organizationally bound approaches, like creating advisory boards, doing listening tours with clients, creating peer support roles to help people do navigation. That stuff is definitely good. A lot of it, though, is rather temporary.
If you're a researcher, this is the kind of stuff you might do, surveys, getting feedback, doing participatory action research, doing focus groups, also great stuff, but also temporary. Maybe you're in the world of design, like I've been for a long time, and you might launch an HCD campaign, do some user experience work, do some behavioral design, engage in some co creation. But again, this is all kind of centered on the institution itself, being in control of what's being designed for, when and how, controlling all the resources. And again, it's usually very temporary. You do a project, maybe it gets implemented, and then those people who are giving the feedback go away.
Or maybe you're kind of on the outside trying to push in, doing legislative advocacy. Maybe you're part of an activist or a pressure group, or you're doing some strategic sharing and storytelling, but usually this is opportunistic, getting in, where you fit in, when you can. Maybe people listen, maybe they don't. But all of these approaches, these typical approaches, make me ask the question of like, who's actually in control? Who's got the steering wheel. None of it is bad. I think, you know, I've engaged in a lot of these processes myself. Wouldn't want to denigrate any of them, but at the end of the day, the people that are in control in regards to what happens when this kind of approach is taken are usually the program officer or maybe the Board of Trustees at a foundation, the people that are in the upper administration in a state or federal agency, maybe your dissertation committee, if you're doing the research, those are the people that are eventually calling the shots. Where is the control? It's typically not with the people that have lived experience.
So I'm going to offer you a different view on this. So we've heard today a bunch thank you for the folks that have raised up the profile of this idea of intersectional professionals, which we coined. These are the people, for my money, who I think should be in charge of imagining and driving systems change. And our claim is that intersectional professionals are people with a dual expertise. They're the people in the kind of shaded area of this Venn diagram, and I'll give you a couple examples. There's many kinds of examples, but here's just three.
This one is close to my heart. You can imagine somebody who was in foster care and aged out, got adopted, got reunified, went back and got a policy degree and is now a policy analyst for an organization like the Administration for Children and Families. They're hitting all three sectors. They've got the lived experience, they're doing the work related to that lived experience, and they've got some training that's relevant to that work.
On the left hand side of the screen, you might imagine somebody with the experience who's doing the work but maybe doesn't have relevant professional training, like someone who's gotten the benefit of things like food stamps or WIC, who's out there doing food justice advocacy, doing the lobbying, doing the public speaking, but maybe their degree is in communications, or they don't have a degree at all, but they're still in in our in our group of intersectional professionals.
You might also imagine somebody who's got relevant training and lived experience, but doesn't necessarily do work directly related to that, in this case, somebody who's a survivor of intimate partner violence, who does trauma informed psychotherapy, but doesn't specialize necessarily in other people who've experienced intimate partner or gender based violence, but all of these people are bringing their lived experience to work, and we want to welcome into our community of intersectional professionals.
So why do we matter? Why is it important to forefront intersectional professionals and their role in this work? First, it's because of that dual expertise. We've got that firsthand, visceral experience navigating these systems as beneficiaries, as well as the professional experience that comes from being employed within them or leading them. And because of that, we've got some unique strengths, including understanding in a holistic way, all of the dimensions of this work, including the affective or emotional parts that will never turn up in any quantitative study of this work, as well as the intrinsic motivation to improve the systems that we rely on. And because of that positioning, because we are straddling that, that divide, bridging that span, we’re insiders with outsider knowledge who are positioned to drive change in the long run, and for all of you who are really interested in thinking about, how do we bring lived experience into our work, my guess is that we're probably already there and maybe just not raising our hands to self-disclose for lots of reasons.
So that's why we created the network of intersectional professionals to meet some of the presence of people who bring their lived experience to work premised on the idea that community unlocks all of our potential. What we've what we found when we initially started doing this work, because I was hoping that an organization would already exist, is that nobody was doing it. Nobody was naming us. And if you go unnamed, you go unorganized, and if you go unorganized, you are systematically disempowered. So we wanted to build community around this identity instead of experience. Of experiences. And as we did it, people were excited about doing some policy, design work, about changing the world. But what we heard over and over again is that's a great idea, but I need something else first, and that's something else started with well-being. People told us they needed community because the work that they do when they bring their lived experience to it as tiring. It's exhausting, it's isolating, it's marginalizing. We can feel tokenized and stigmatized and hit glass ceilings. And so that's the primary thing that we're doing in our organizing, is creating community where people can find that sense of belonging, mentorship and, importantly, replenishment.
And if we can do that, then we can pursue the other two outcomes that we're after, getting, acquiring influence, having power over the systems that we're in, making sure that people are listening to us and articulating actionable visions. Because if we can stay in the work and people are listening to us, we better have something to say. We better have an alternative vision of the world that we're fighting for.
So I will quickly roll through this before then summarizing the paper that we wrote, because I think it's important for you all to hear this based on the discussion that we've had earlier today, we take a very specific approach to doing this organizing work that is values forward. So we've got five values that we do our organizing organizing around.
The first two are our freedom agenda, liberation and autonomy. If you've taken philosophy classes, you'll recognize this as positive and negative liberty, basically saying that we should be free from social control and coercion and that freedom is only meaningful when we've got the resources and the power to convert those choices into action.
The next two are our mindsets, creativity and excellence. Creativity meaning that we aren't committed to the status quo. We think a different world is possible, and we're going to think creatively and outside of the box, to imagine it and then pursue it. And excellence basically means that we deserve nice things, even if you're getting your services through the public sector or nonprofit, the people providing those services should be paid a living wage, and the stuff that you get should be a very high quality.
And the last one is solidarity, which I think speaks for itself, but for us, this really means that we win nothing unless we figure out how to build community across difference. So for that reason, the network is purposefully ecumenical. This isn't one topic that we focus on, like just child welfare. It's child welfare, it's poverty, it's racism, it's misogyny, it's mental health, it's substance use, because we all share the experience of that marginalization, traumatization, stigmatization, when we bring those lived experiences to work, and the only way we're going to build enough power to get the changes we need is if we work together.
And frankly, as most of you know, any one of those experiences can't encapsulate the 360-degree life that any of us have lived, because, yes, I was in child welfare, but I was also a public school student, growing up in public housing, getting access to public benefits, and all of those things matter to my lived experience as well. And this is just the kind of community that we're trying to build, being people first focusing on joy and replenishment and making sure that we have room to dream.
Okay, so hopefully that's all very persuasive. But as we've been doing our work, our funders are like, this is a great story, but tell us if it actually works. So, being a research-oriented guy, it took up that mantle, and we put out this paper that you can find Experts by Experience, that tries to summarize what the quantitative, causally oriented literature can tell us about how well integrating lived experience into program design and delivery actually works.
So what we did was to look at the existing literature, kind of a meta-analysis, to see what kinds of outcomes we could anticipate how well it worked, but also how to do it, and this was rooted mostly in the realm of public health, because that happens to be where most of the quantitative research on this has been. And spoiler alert, there isn't a ton of it. We were only able to identify about 70 studies that approximated answers to these questions.
So here's what the findings were, and there's a range of 50 to 80% of the time because of the different methodologies that the studies we were looking at used, but between 50 and 80% of the time, depending on what kind of metrics you were using doing this kind of co-design, enrolling people with lived experience in the design and delivery of programs yielded positive outcomes related to distal policy, relevant things like reducing fatalities or obesity, helping people comply with their medical treatment, etc.
And so it really varied depending on which kind of criteria we used. The strictest criteria were things like running random assignment experiments, mid-level criteria were more quasi experimental or observational. And you know, if you're an economist, you might be scratching your chin and saying, This isn't very persuasive. But one thing that we did find is that if you rewind in time from those distal outcomes and instead focused on some of the proximate or process-oriented stuff, there were more striking outcome improvements related to bringing lived experience into the design and delivery of programs.
And so what we found there was that almost every single study that we saw showed improvements on outcomes that are logically related to successful service delivery, and this included things like increasing empathy among the staff, increasing knowledge among the clients, changing attitudes and knowledge, increasing a sense of belonging and inclusion, building on social capital, etc. And so in the engagement social capital piece, as well as the increased knowledge, were the most striking increases among this quantitative literature that we found.
So what we've concluded is threefold conclusion. Number one is that, based on this evidence, it is ethically necessary to integrate lived experience into the design and delivery of programs, because even if you discard those distal policy relevant results, the interpersonal results are striking. And we think, from an ethical perspective, that everyone deserves to have respectful treatment to get services that are culturally relevant to them, and they're just not getting it now. So we need to do more of that, okay, but maybe you're not a philosopher like me. Maybe you're more statistically or quantitatively minded, and so from that perspective, I would make this kind of practical argument to you that you could consider this meta-analysis as almost a Do No Harm analysis. And so on balance, you're not getting any worse outcomes. You're probably getting slightly better outcomes by taking this approach. And so for me, that justifies this investment in this approach, because it's worth doing if, on balance, the later outcomes are more or less the same, but all this preliminary stuff is strikingly better.
And then the last conclusion that we have is that we just don't know enough yet. So again, only 70 studies were included in this meta-analysis. That's all we could find. So we think that we need to basically make more observations, run more of these studies, run more of them that are focused on the role of intersectional professionals and not just lived experience. More broadly, we expect that we would see different kinds of outcomes, but also, we need to study these things more longitudinally. Most of these studies were fewer than were less than three years long, and so if you're measuring stuff that matters to communities, you're probably not going to see it in those 12-to-36-month intervals.
So that, that is the conclusion that we made about what the evidence tells us, which brings us to some of the best practices that are also built into the paper. Because hopefully that evidence is persuasive. But you might be asking yourself, okay, great, but what do we do? How do we do it?
So we heard earlier from Bryn about Arnstein's ladder. We're fully supportive of climbing Arnstein's ladder, our general advice is to aim for the top three rungs of citizen control, delegated power and partnership. If you're moving in that direction, you're probably doing it right.
But then, importantly, we've got these five practice takeaways, and if you follow that QR code, you'll be able to download the paper for yourself. But I'll discuss them in brief, and then walk us through a quick case study of people that have done this well out in the world. So the first one is valuing lived experience, community knowledge as its own form of expertise. So we've been talking about this today. I don't think I need to dwell on it. But in essence, as Ramona was saying earlier, this is kind of an epistemological struggle that we're in. How do we make claims about what is truth and how we know it? We need to begin by believing that lived experience is a valid form of knowledge.
The next thing that we have to do, once we make that mindset shift is actually sink some resources into this. To do this work well, you've got to invest and yes, that means money, but it also means time and relationships. And this is another theme that we've heard a bunch today, that you can't just parachute into a community or into a group and expect that trust will just flow naturally. These are things that you need to invest time and energy in, and that does include money, of course. So anybody that's working for a foundation, please take note you should extend the budgets and the timelines associated with any of these projects to make that work. Okay.
So you've changed your mindset. You believe that this stuff is important. You've invested the time and the resources that it takes. The next thing that you've got to do is unlock the permission for people to do this stuff, especially the new and challenging things that will come up, which means that organizational leaders need to be out front of this. So you need your Commissioner, your executive director, your secretaries, to make it clear that this is an expectation. This isn't a nice to have. It's a must do, and they're the ones that are going to unlock these resources anyway, since they have control over the purse strings, so they need to model, as well as exercise leadership that values lived experience.
So okay, now you've gotten there, and this may be one of the most important things, and we heard this from Sixto and from others, you've got to make sure that as you're starting to engage and draw in people from the community that they represent the array of diverse perspectives and experiences out there. And as we heard earlier, this isn't just about demographics, about age, about race and ethnicity, those things definitely matter. It's also about things like geography as well as affective dimensions, like how good of an experience these folks had with your program, and then once you've gotten all of that taken care of, the one thing that you've got to make sure that you're doing is working to institutionalize all of these efforts. So we've got to have infrastructure, including explicit roles for people with lived experience, to make sure that control is being shared. So we can't just be paying people temporary stipends or giving them gift cards or buying lunch for the focus groups. We ought to be having salaried roles, decision making power on different kinds of decision making boards, and making sure that that stuff is is permanent and can't be discarded at the change of administration or the end of a grant cycle.
Okay, easier said than done, I know, but these are the best practices that we were able to glean. And I'll just walk you through a quick example of this with the Peer Health Exchange, which hopefully some of you know. They are an organization that displays organizational leadership in regards to lived experience, from their founding all the way through today. They were created as an organization doing public health work, taking its cue directly from the young people that they're trying to serve. They've got the power to choose what's done and how it's done.
Now, like many organizations during COVID, they were affected by school closures because that's how they'd been delivering their program, and they needed to figure out what they were going to do, because they lost their channel into young people. And so they trusted in those young people to say, what should we do? How do we engage? And what those young people said is, you've got to move online, and you've got to go to TikTok and create an app. And because the organization trusted those young people, they did that uncomfortable and expensive thing, invested the time, invested the resources they need to needed to move their programming into those venues, which included some budget modifications. And as they created that content, they created roles as well as boundaries, to figure out how to effectively share power and negotiate what would be on those apps and how they would be run, and young people were behind many of the major design decisions that they made. And happy coda to this, after having moved online, Peer Health Exchange has increased by an order of magnitude the number of young people that they're serving and have continued to see the good results that come out of their program.
Luke Waldo 53:01
So you had made a comment about intersectional professionals can often feel isolated and overwhelmed, as many of our organizations are embarking right on this, on this journey of really integrating intersectional professionals into our organizations. How might we more effectively support those folks, especially early in that kind of process or transition?
Anthony Barrows 53:26
Great question. I think, number one, you can send them to the network. Our aim is to build that community for people independent of like where they work, where they live, etc. So feel free to do that. I think two other things that I would suggest for any organization that cares about the well-being of intersection of professionals within them, is to think about like, what kind of cohorts you're building. So when you're the only anything right, when you're that unicorn of whatever kind in an organization, it can be really isolating and feel really lonely. And so the more that you have a robust amount of people who are bringing their lived experience to work as employees, ideally across the hierarchy of the organization, the easier it will be for people to feel like they've found that niche.
And the second really important thing that I would say is make sure that you've got glide paths for people into leadership positions, because typically people stall out when they've got lived experience at the field level. So they come in as direct service workers. Maybe they get to a supervisor position, but ain't nobody trying to hire them to run the organization, you know. And part of that is because of the like imbalance in social capital. Part of that is because there's lots of tacit knowledge that often comes from people that don't have lived experience of things like poverty that makes it easier for them to climb the ladder, and part of it is just that we don't invest in leadership development, so making sure that you've got a purposeful glide path for people to acquire power, positional power in your organization is also important.
Luke Waldo 54:57
Bryn Fortune, Coordinator for the Nurture Connection Family Network Collaborative, talks about her own lived experience journey before she shares the work that she has done across the country to build equity-driven parent collaboration.
Again, CJ will take the introduction from here.
CJ Suitt 55:18
I'd like to welcome all the way from Alaska, Bryn Fortune to join me for the next portion of our program. Bryn is going to share a framework for equity driven collaboration that she is using in her work with the National Nurture Connection Movement, which is focused on promoting life enhancing impacts of positive emotional connections between babies and toddlers and their parents and caregivers. Bryn's work is central to the movement, because every aspect of the work is centered on ensuring equity and justice for every family. The National Movement is intentionally guided by the ideas and experiences of families through an interesting approach that Bryn will tell us about. Bryn, could you kick us off by sharing your definition of lived experience and sharing more about your background and how it led you to this work?
Bryn Fortune 56:10
So I became a person with lived experience when just about 40 years ago, next month, I gave birth to a child with really significant health challenges, and by the time she was five, she had lived half her life inside a children's hospital in the inner city of Detroit, as well as 85 surgeries later.
So there was a lot that I figured out I was a family of privilege, but almost all the families in the hospital with me were not and they were involved in many, many different systems, and candidly, they were treated incredibly different, and the structure wasn't even set up well for my family. So I got very involved in recognizing in that classic six degrees of separation of privilege that I had the opportunity to work with the chief medical officer and the president of the hospital, reminding you that this is 38 years ago, about all the structures and things that weren't working, knowing we shared the same pieces of purpose, and yet they had no idea there were so many layers of separation between them and their policies.
So my background came through health and education. I actually live in Michigan, but I'm here in Alaska, MatSu Valley, because I'm actually working here in the valley with a group of families who from many different angles, whether they're foster parents or they were people referred into the child welfare system. My understanding from this community is that they have the highest incident rates of referral within their early Head Start and Head Start program of any place in the country into the child welfare system.
So I've been working with them for about a year, and I'm working from this framework and this, essentially, this structure was, it began getting developed 30 years ago, and it was informed by tons and tons of families and professionals. This has been a iterative process. It was initially begun to thought through from the work of Sherry Arnstein, who published her work about the Ladder of Citizen Participation, gosh, maybe 1969 and then over many years, of what families and professional partnerships brought us to, took us to a place where it then got a second layer of information from Rosa Gonzalez, who, in 2019 put out the public or put out the piece of the spectrum of community engagement and participation.
And then you will see that after we had formed this probably about two years ago, and that's where I'll go with the national launch. It was last year that we had the opportunity to come across the work of Anthony Barrows, and it was the first time we actually had a label to understand STEER. We understood the components inside STEER, but we actually didn't have a label that resonated for anybody. So you can see that that column is also informed by some of the work that Anthony has been doing.
So with that's the backdrop in the context, what you're going to get is just a flavor of the what. Know that to bring about this authentic level of collaboration in the what you have about 50% of the formula and the purpose. It's what are we trying to do? And your success to authenticity is about 50% in the how, which is a set of tools and resources that aren't yet published, although they will be, to really bring about the level of results that we've been able to achieve. But in In essence, what you're seeing is the what of the framework that is about redesigning structures.
It's about looking and the way we approached it is we started first by identifying who were the six communities that we think we have the most to learn from. Know that we were really interested in going to the very early end, working with families who had children, pregnancy through 1000 days, but maybe up to five years, because we wanted to go early into the pipeline, working with intersectional professionals so that we could build trusted relationships throughout the entire structure to get to the level of authenticity we were wanting.
So we identified a fatherhood network out of Washington. We're working with the San Felipe Pueblo out of New Mexico, Spanish speaking immigrants out of New York, families who identify as black and brown from the city of Detroit, families who identify also as black or brown out of San Francisco, and then rural Alabama. So these were the communities that we first thought had the most to teach us, and I think I said the Spanish speaking immigrants from New York, but these were the six communities.
So we started by identifying the six intersectional professionals who were positioned to have relationships with families, and by intersectional they had the lived experience of whatever that system was. So by definition, if they were in an organization as an intersectional person, professionals such as Reach Out and Read. They had the experience as a parent having been a part of the Reach Out and Read, giving books to their children. So that was a requirement. Then they had to have a way they linked into a minimum of 10 families who are also Spanish speaking immigrants, who were in going to be receiving books from Reach Out and Read, so each one of those profiles that was one of the requirements of the intersectional professional.
And the reason we built it this way is because we discovered very quickly that we had many things that we were wanting to design in this Nurture Connection Early Relational Health movement. And our parent leaders or intersectional professionals, as we would bring a here's what we're really wondering about, like we wanted to know something about equity versus race equity, what did they think they would have a conversation, they would actually translate our question into what we think of now as living room language, and then their task was to go out and interview the minimum of the 10 families. Now many of them are overachievers, and so we end up with about 75 families. But all those families have children, age Birth to Three, because we really wanted to go early into the pipeline to do this. So you're hearing about the readiness of how the how we're bringing the voice forward.
And so, for instance, the equity, race equity, what we discovered is four of our six communities, the word equity meant absolutely nothing to them. They thought it was about financing houses, or they actually had all kinds of ideas that doesn't even translate as a word into the language in the San Felipe Pueblo, and it has no meaning and is not really translatable inside of Spanish speaking immigrants out of New York. So what we discovered was here, what we talk about nationally, had no meaning inside the families who are currently using the system. That was really important to us, that because our intersectional professionals had a conversation, they all you know more opportunity you expand your perspective, and now you have obviously equity means something to them.
What we've learned is that as we take questions into the families in the communities, we're discovering that they actually are teaching our intersectional professionals because they've had so many expanded opportunities, they don't even, you know, it's unconscious to us what we've learned along the way. So it's layered, so that in that first place where this is a partnership model that I'm describing, we're using intersectional professionals as what we think of as these parent leaders who are doing the interviews. You can see that that takes them into the participation area because they're conducting the interviews. And you will notice that in each one we're looking at the keys of the equity drivers, we actually went through this Relational Approach in our work because we were really interested in knowing what's the level of authentic feedback we will actually get from our questions if they feel comfortable enough and safe to give an honest response. And often anyone in the system, everything needs to be filtered. Families don't trust us. There's lots of good reasons for that, and we all know that.
So it was our way of getting to a level of authenticity and then having our parent leaders bring it to us. They have a relationship with the families, and they have a trusted relationship because, of course, they have this shared experience. We also have the benefit of having this beautiful opening into the development of our pipeline, if you will, of families who can more and more get involved to feel comfortable and competent. And I use the word competent. Don't really like that, but at this point, families like that. And yes, it is very much a proximity kind of approach in what we are doing. And so every layer comes through in trusted relationships.
So this steering committee, everything inside the work we do, this family network collaborative, these six families who go out and interview these 75 families and bring the information to us. Everything is co- designed with them. We actually launched our family network collaborative, before we launched the National steering committee, and that was very intentional, where we were bringing in researchers and neuroscientists and pediatricians, policy makers, intentionally bringing in all these different perspectives into the steering committee. And what we wanted to do was really move away from often in initiatives, you will see this voice is brought in by two or three voices and their experiences. What we essentially did is everyone on the steering committee is bringing forward a body of expertise, meaning more than just their own experience. They each bring their own individual uniqueness, expertise and lived experience.
But it's like, what does the collective of these six communities? Where does it intersect? Where does it look different? And now the families can be on the steering committee, and they have this they can they're representing 75 because often families who get involved in the early stages are your squeaky wheels. And the squeaky wheels don't necessarily represent the core of the community. And so it's real easy for the system to write it off and say, Yeah, that's you, but that's not like the families we work with. This was a way for us to move away from that.
And so you will see that they're the ones doing the interviews, creating the safety. They actually in terms of inform they actually have created the brochures that we that they give to the families about the work of nurture, connection, and they are the ones who inform. What do we need to be doing to remove the barriers so that we are really doing that in a very equity driven approach to our work? What are we changing and taglining differently because our Spanish speaking immigrants want to tagline to the language, and we also then are working with on different parts of the work, you know, we actually now have our family network collaborative inside of our neuroscientist research group. And you know, you're talking the Ivy Leagues and researchers, and you can appreciate it's been its own interesting journey to now be partnered in that arena.
We actually have completely redesigned part of the research approach, getting at the question through all these interviews and stepping processes to what's the what's the research question we ought to be asking? And so we're beginning there, and then we're working with, usually, what research assistants do, where they do the interviews for certain sort of community participation research. We actually trained parents, our parent leaders, to be the interviewers, and then now they're doing the interviewing. So we're doing a lot of building capacity, both for the system, if you will, or the structures as they exist, as well as the opportunity for families to really deepen and learn about their skills.
So the only last thing I'll say about this framework is that, and there's lots more to tell you, as you can imagine each of these can be done in a very tokenistic approach. And in fact, historically, if you think about news, newsletters, it was most of us who were really well-intentioned professionals who were putting them together and designing them. And essentially it's flipping that approach, saying we actually are generating this pipeline who can inform us what we ought to be sharing, how we need to be languaging it, what, how it needs to be designed, and how we need to think about how to get it in the hands of families in an authentic way.
I just want to flip and you can see that we pay stipends. Mean there's so many layers to this particular framework and and I just wanted to give you kind of a very quick snap of what's possible going after authentic partnership utilizing intersectional professionals, but really as leads to really go directly into the neighborhoods and communities for the people or services are trying to serve and really get into the early end of it. While I gave you the what in a approach that was quite linear. It is actually, when it's in action, it's very intersectional in how this framework operates. Again, all of this has been adapted, and we're working with the network here in the MatSu valley to an audience of families who are either foster parents or families who have had their children they've been referred into the child abuse.
So this is all very adaptable at an organizational level, at a local level, at a community level, or at a national level, like our work is you're having to look at our demographics. But what it does is, and I will wrap up here, CJ, it gives us the opportunity. Often, these systems say we don't know how to get to these young families. They're busy. They're doing this, they're doing that. And what it does is, it gives us this voice of the families receiving the services now, because what happened in that hospital system when my daughter was born. And yes, I do have lived experience and expertise, and some things don't change, some things do change. And so that cookie recipe may stay the same, but it may now need to be adapted to a microwave, and I can't tell you how to do that. So we have actually built a structure that honors the lived experience, but also puts us into the real time of the people we're trying to serve, that recognizes what's happening in the community and the system right now as a driver.
Luke Waldo 1:11:39
I hope that this episode and insights from Sixto, Anthony, and Bryn have you thinking more about how we might unlock the power of lived experience through true collaboration. Before we go, as always I wanted to highlight three key takeaways to reflect on as we move into our next episodes.
Thank you for joining us for today’s episode. We hope that you will come back and listen next week as we continue to explore how we might change the conditions that overload families with stress, so that families can thrive and children grow up with positive childhood experiences.
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To learn more about the experts that you heard today, visit the Show Notes, which is where you will also find links to sources or information that were mentioned in today’s episode.
Thank you again for joining us. See you next week.
This podcast would not have been possible without the support and talents of Carrie Wade, who is responsible for our technical production and original music composition. I can't express my gratitude enough to Carrie for all she has given to this project. I'm also grateful to my team at the Institute for Child and Family Well-being at Children’s Wisconsin, who drive the Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative and contributed to the ideas behind this podcast.
Finally, I would like to thank all of our speakers that you have heard today and throughout the podcast for their partnership, their willingness to share their stories and expertise with me and all of you, and their commitment to improving the lives of children and families. I'm Luke Waldo, your Host and Executive Editor.
As this season is how we show our work as we learn about the innovative systems change happening across our state and country. Please share your work that is changing the conditions for children and families by leaving a note in the comments section or emailing me. Thank you again for joining us. See you next week.