It’s Time to Move Forward With America’s Families
Across the United States, families face rising costs and essential systems – health, child care, housing, education – that fail to reflect their daily needs. As a result, families must negotiate a constant series of tradeoffs. These pressures show up in kitchens, workplaces, classrooms, and clinics – where families are doing everything they can to stay afloat.
For too long, the response to these challenges has been to wait. Wait for the next federal package. Wait for the next pilot project. Wait for the next election cycle.
Families don’t have that luxury. And increasingly, states aren’t waiting any longer.
Across the country, leaders in states and communities are aligning policies, investments, and systems around what families actually need to move forward.
From proving ideas to delivering results
Fifteen years ago, the two-generation approach began as a question: Could we design systems that work for children and the adults who care for them – together? By challenging deeply entrenched ways of thinking about policy and services, we found the answer is a resounding yes.
Together with leaders and communities, we built the modern two-generation field. This network of leaders – many with lived experience – is putting responsive, family-centered approaches into practice across states.
Now, we’re no longer asking, ‘Do we know what works?’ Instead, we’re exploring how we will organize around existing solutions at the scale families need.
Powered by Ascend at the Aspen Institute, Forward With Families aims to advance progress by building on what works for families across states, systems, and sectors so more families thrive.
Five focus areas driving change
Forward With Families organizes action around five interconnected focus areas — each essential on its own, and transformative when aligned across systems.
Health & Well-Being
Across the country, leaders are rebuilding health care from the inside out – centering dignity, caregiving, and whole-family needs, from perinatal care to mental health to parental engagement. These approaches show what’s possible when systems start with families and make health a pathway, not a barrier, to opportunity.
Child Care & Caregiving
In communities from coast to coast, leaders are expanding access to affordable, reliable care and aligning supports so parents can stay enrolled, earn credentials, and support their families. Treating child care as core infrastructure – rather than a side service – restores time, stability, and choice while strengthening local economies.
Education & Employment
Colleges, workforce programs, and community-based organizations are redesigning pathways for parenting students and working parents, pairing credentials with child care, social capital, and wraparound supports. These efforts demonstrate how alignment across education and workforce systems can unlock persistence, completion, and long-term economic mobility.
Housing & Food
By shifting toward prevention — aligning housing, food, and family-support systems – leaders throughout the country are finding ways to stabilize families before hardship escalates. Early, coordinated action is turning stability into a foundation for long-term opportunity.
Savings & Cash
In many states, leaders are redesigning tax, benefits, and income systems to smooth transitions, reduce risk, and put cash directly in families’ hands. These approaches show how building margin and trusting families can turn hard work into lasting stability and economic mobility.
The leadership to move forward
Progress for families requires leaders who can move across sectors, center lived experience, and act with urgency and imagination. What matters is not a single program or ideology. It’s leadership across governors and state agencies; city, community, and Tribal leaders; nonprofit and philanthropic partners; business leaders; and parents themselves – all organizing around what works and pushing systems to reflect real family life.
Our role is not just to elevate what’s working, but to set the table, bring leaders together, and help build the conditions that allow solutions to grow and scale.
Why Forward With Families – and why now
Forward With Families aligns leaders, investments, and policies around proven solutions so families can move forward. By advancing and adapting these solutions – from child care and housing to employment and cash – state and community leaders will deliver concrete results for children and families.
Not someday. Now.
Indicators on health, education, and economic security will rise, while those on unaffordability will decline.
With focus and determination, together we will drive progress in all 50 states, creating momentum around family economic well-being that we have not yet seen in this lifetime.
Families have heard the rhetoric and have repeatedly said they need action, not words. They need systems that work as hard as they do.
Forward With Families is our call to collective action to advance solutions shaped by families and scale them across communities nationwide.
Resources
Forward With Families identifies programs and systems that are working for families and helps strengthen their reach. Ascend will continue to share updates, insights, and examples as this work evolves. The resources below offer a starting point for further exploration.
2Gen Investment Case (2025)
This report documents the more than $500 million public and private sectors have invested in two-generation (2Gen) approaches over the past decade and includes a comprehensive view of key pilots and initiatives with a 2Gen approach, outlining important themes, lessons, and considerations for funders new to 2Gen approaches.
Aligning Systems: Aspen Early Childhood Development and Health Forums (2021):
The brief provides an overview of lessons learned and new innovations to inform and support a comprehensive early childhood system and advance federal efforts to align early childhood and health systems in order to strengthen family outcomes across agencies.
2Gen Platforms for Scale: Whole Family Approaches Rooted in Community with National Reach (2020)
This report captures insights and lessons of the pioneering practitioners leading Community Action Agencies, women’s funds, community colleges, Head Start programs, and workforce development boards.
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