Moving Equity from Theory into Action

Ascend at the Aspen Institute hosted Aspen ThinkXChange 2024: The National Forum on 2Gen Approaches from October 15-18, 2024 in Aspen, Colorado. 200 participants – researchers, policymakers, philanthropic organizations, parent advisors, and practitioners – from across the country attended to dive into policies and practices that advance intergenerational family well-being.

One particular session, Advancing Equity in Community Support Systems, focused on identifying and removing systemic barriers in order to advance a 2Gen approach. This discussion explored how leaders from different sectors can collaborate to address systemic barriers and offered successful strategies and practical steps to integrate equity into everyday practice. The session was co-facilitated and designed by Ascend Network and Accelerator Community Partners LIFT and UTEC, as well as Ascend Fellow Erin Arango-Escalante (All Children Thrive), and as a result they are heavily featured in this article given their expertise and work in advancing equity to support families. Here are some of the learnings from our session as well as some questions for you to consider in your quest to operationalize equity in your 2Gen approach.

In the pursuit of dismantling systemic inequities, collaboration is not just beneficial; it’s essential. By harnessing the strengths of diverse partners, we can create more effective, streamlined processes that ultimately benefit families and communities. 

Partners working in philanthropy should prioritize and fund collaboration by aligning their grantees and mitigating the need for competition. Engaging the business community, such as local Chambers of Commerce, can also serve as a powerful vehicle for change as businesses play a vital role in providing resources and support for initiatives that address systemic barriers. One of the primary objectives in collaboration could be to simplify the systems with which families interact. This can involve streamlining applications for services, reducing bureaucratic hurdles, and making resources more accessible. When we prioritize the user experience for families, we remove barriers that often perpetuate inequity. 

The Tucson/Pima County Family Voice Council in Southern Arizona is a parent and caregiver leadership collaborative of eight local nonprofits. This council – which is facilitated through a partnership between Social Venture Partners (SVP) – Tucson and All Children Thrive – creates connection and community across organizations to guide and influence the hearts, minds, and funding priorities of philanthropists. In addition, SVP Tucson provides unrestricted funding to all eight nonprofit collaborative partners to compensate them for their staff’s time and organizational participation in the critical collaborative work.

UTEC uses relationship building to generate success for the young adults they serve who are young people most impacted by gangs, violence, and incarceration. It starts on the streets and behind the walls with UTEC’s Streetworker and Reentry Teams building relationships with young people and other key players in the community and systems in which they operate. The work is possible and successful due to the intentional relationship building UTEC has done with Police and Sheriff Departments, the Department of Youth Services and the Department of Corrections, as well as legislators and other government officials. By forming partnerships within systems, they are able to advocate and continue to create change within these systems.

LIFT centers the importance of deep, trusting, and genuine relationships when working with families. In direct service, they prioritize partnering with families and building concrete partnerships with critical community and government partners to ensure their work is responsive to their communities and well positioned to accelerate systemic change through broader Technical Assistance and Policy & Advocacy work. By partnering with organizations across sectors, such as Jeremiah Program, LA City’s Community Investment for Families Department, and Dallas Community College, as well as policy leaders across LIFT’s four cities (Chicago, DC, LA, NY), LIFT prioritizes collaboration and partnership to achieve systems change.

Questions to Consider:

• How do you engage in restorative justice/repair practices with individuals and communities who may have experienced distrust and systematic oppression due to system, policies, and practices?
• How can funders acknowledge and incentivize collaboration and its true cost to organizations?

Recognizing that no singular organization holds the capacity or knowledge necessary to do the work alone, partners should integrate community voice by establishing regular practices that engage constituents and actively incorporating their feedback into program design and decision-making. For example, this could include creating advisory boards with members from the communities you serve or building systematic practices for gathering community input during program design processes to ensure your communities have an influence on program decisions.

Valuing and prioritizing community perspectives will better position your organization to create programs that authentically reflect and respond to constituents’ needs, foster trust, and generate deeper impact. When working on behalf of families, be sure to center their voices in your work and compensate them for their time and expertise. Ascend’s Ascending with Parents: A Guide to Centering Parent Voice in Policy and Practice report offers organizations effective strategies to engage and implement parent voice in their work.

Three years ago, Wisconsin’s Parent/Caregiver Equity Advisory Cabinet was co-created to ensure the state’s early childhood programs, policies, and services reflect the needs and ideas of families with young children. Parent and caregiver voices as well as their connections in community continue to be a vital asset in program and policy design. The Cabinet is actively involved in the revision process for the state’s Quality Rating and Improvement System and Child Care Finder.

UTEC’s young people determine what they want to see in the program; it is for them, created by them. The young adults have formed what is known as UTEC Council, where young people enrolled in programming serve as the liaison between UTEC leadership and young people. They are the ones who meet with UTEC leadership and others in the organization to ensure all young adult voices are heard.  Furthermore, in UTEC’s policy work, young people and their stories are integral. Every two years before a new legislative cycle, youth collaborate and identify key legislative campaigns they want to work on based on their lived experiences. 

At LIFT, centering family voice and experience sits at the heart of their work. They prioritize inclusion in program strategy and design by actively engaging families through feedback surveys, listening tours and policy agenda creation. This ensures that the voices of those they serve directly shape the approach. Beyond program design, LIFT partners with community members as critical leaders and advisors in driving systems change. From serving as policy advisors to representing their experiences on national panels, such as Prosperity Now and LIFT’s DC Benefits Cliff Conference in partnership with United Planning Organization, parents are leaders and advocates in creating a more equitable future.

Questions to Consider:

• How do you intentionally support and elevate the voices and lived experiences or those historically marginalized and underinvested?
• How do you ensure the needs and feedback from communities, those who have been most impacted and/or marginalized as a result of the inequitable systems, are articulated in documents, policies, and funding opportunities (e.g., grants)?

Analyzing data by race/ethnicity, gender, age, income, and/or geography allows your organization to more precisely understand where services are effective and where they may be falling short. This provides insight into successful approaches for specific groups, enabling replication of these strategies to achieve broader impact. 

Once data is analyzed, communicating a clear value proposition for your efforts is key. Partners need to understand not just what data we are collecting, but why it matters. This information should be shared through a centralized knowledge hub which compiles data from various programs and initiatives, providing a comprehensive view of our efforts across the system. Creating a space where data is accessible and easily navigable enables partners to learn from one another, identify trends, and recognize areas for improvement. The following examples are Network Partners that partner with or commission an equity-centered data analysis to strengthen awareness and uptake of strategies for families with low incomes.

Child Trends, in partnership with Network Partner Santa Fe Community College, published a report – Survey of Parenting Students in New Mexico Helps Us Understand Their Needs – to provide essential data to higher education administrators and policymakers that can help them better support parents who are students.

Ascend Network Partner Abriendo Puertas released the National Latino Family Report 2024: Strength, Resilience, and Aspiration, a comprehensive study on the economic and social issues affecting Latino families with children prenatal through age five.

LIFT conducted an analysis of economic outcomes as a domestic violence and intimate partner violence (IPV) upstream protective intervention. The analysis disaggregated outcomes data by different demographics and found no differentiated or inequitable outcomes. This analysis uses a 2Gen lens to shed light on efforts that work with parents to improve their families’ economic stability with the explicit intergenerational aims of preventing future IPV for the parents and preventing children from ever experiencing IPV first hand (i.e. an upstream intervention to bolster protective factors for young families to support near-term, as well as long-term outcomes for both families and their children specifically).

Questions to Consider:

• How can your organization collect and analyze data by demographic factors (race/ethnicity, gender, age, income, geography) to better understand where your interventions are most effective and where they may need improvement?
• What strategies can your organization implement to share the data you collect, ensuring partners can understand both the significance of the data and how it can be used to improve outcomes across your initiatives?

To effectively reimagine a new system that meets the needs of children and families, it is essential to critically unpack existing internal structures, policies, and practices. This process involves rethinking how to approach your work, such as innovating child care solutions that align with workforce demands, ensuring families have access to the services they need.

Organizations should also regularly evaluate the use of these equity tools to maintain accountability and refine practices as needed. Organizational accountability plays a crucial role in this transformation; by establishing core values that prioritize belonging and inclusivity, you create a workplace culture where employees feel valued and engaged. Furthermore, incorporating bias checks into accountability frameworks is vital for identifying and addressing inequities within systems.

Ascend Network Partner Alia partnered with Rock County (WI) Human Services Department and its community through the Rock Families First effort, which aims to reduce out-of-home care placements, eliminate disparities, and improve family satisfaction with county services. A critical step was engaging parents and community members in the co-design process, addressing the gap in centering the voices of those most impacted. Together they engaged in a co-design process that centered the experience of families, acknowledged harm done, and redesigned the way Rock County works with families.

DEI has always been central to UTEC’s success, as evident by their Promise to DEI Practices. They focus on hiring staff who reflect the racial diversity and lived experiences of the young adults they serve, including former gang members, refugees, and immigrants. Lived experience is considered as valuable as professional experience, ensuring all youth connect with caring adults who share their background. UTEC has established DEI Committees, created a Human Resources Department to maintain equitable practices, and conducted equity surveys and compensation analysis. Their Leadership Team is now 85% people of color. UTEC recognizes that staff face the same systemic barriers as the youth they serve and secures to invest in thriving wages that promote financial stability, wealth building, and stronger advocacy.

LIFT’s Equity Statement: Accountability with Love and core values demonstrate their commitment to centering Race, Equity, and Inclusion (REI) at the center of their work. LIFT transparently defines how an REI lens shows up cross-functionally within the organization, and holds team members accountable to demonstrating progress towards REI outcomes within their organizational performance framework. 

Questions to Consider

• What are your hiring practices; how do you ensure they are inclusive and reflective of the communities you work in and with?
• How do you establish mechanisms that create transparency and hold those with power accountable for the actions or lack of actions?

Equipping teams with skills to engage in open and constructive discussions around equity is essential. By fostering this capability through trainings, organizations can build an environment where team members can address inequities, bridge misunderstandings, and cultivate a more inclusive culture aligned with their goals.

Leaders should prioritize collaboration, actively seek diverse perspectives, and encourage open and constructive discussions about issues affecting their teams and the communities they serve. This approach empowers individuals to engage in transformative practices that lead to meaningful change. Leaders should invest in and commit to fostering relationships that reflect the community’s diversity to create a coalition that understands and actively works to address unique challenges. 

Climb Wyoming recognizes that achieving equity and inclusion requires both time and intentional effort. Climb prioritizes leaning into discomfort through hard conversations and communication skills as part of their operating principles, allowing teams to address misunderstandings and inequities in a way that fosters learning and growth. This foundation of psychological safety ensures team members can take risks, share ideas, and work collaboratively toward solutions that honor the unique challenges of their communities. Climb’s staff undergo training on fostering inclusivity, recognizing and addressing biases, and implementing trauma-informed practices that support diverse perspectives and experiences. Decision-making processes are intentionally designed to challenge assumptions and mitigate unconscious bias, ensuring equitable and thoughtful program delivery.

Promise Venture Studio supports innovators and accelerates innovations for equity in Early Childhood Development (ECD). Courageous conversations around equity and justice are embedded in Promise’s values – putting equity at the center because opportunities are unequal. As such,Promise proactively seeks to build a team, venture community, and innovation ecosystem that is anti-racist and anti-bias. Through courageous conversations — both internally and externally with leaders of color in its network — Promise helped launch the Early Childhood Leaders of Color (EC LOC) Collaborative, a self-determined space for 300+ EC LOC nationwide. This work has also led to the co-creation of transformative spaces like the REST Conference, centering well-being, restoration, connectedness, and belonging. Promise’s commitment to equity extends beyond programming to reimagining industry norms in social entrepreneurship — shifting how pitch development, impact storytelling, and funding practices are shaped to center asset-based approaches that amplify the leadership and strengths of EC LOC and ventures in its community.

LIFT makes concrete investments in team capacity building to advance Race, Equity, and Inclusion (REI) practices and outcomes, differentiating supports by audience to attend to nuanced needs and growth areas. For example, LIFT created a cross-departmental and representative REI Committee, provides team and specialized leadership training and coaching (e.g. via multi-year partnership with Proinspire), leverages RAPID decision-making practices to advance transparency and power sharing, and recently made an investment in a new Executive Team leadership role to oversee REI strategy and accountability.

Questions to Consider:

• How do you create spaces of dialogue and learning around issues of race, history, and systemic racism to build a more inclusive and equitable environment for children, families, workforce, and communities?
• How might you identify and explore policies and practices that do not reflect the needs of historically marginalized individuals and communities? What would be your first step?

As we move forward, let’s commit to implementing equity-centered strategies to ensure that our efforts are grounded in the voices of those we aim to serve. By embracing these principles, we can transform challenges into opportunities and create a more inclusive and equitable future for families and communities nationwide.

If you have questions about the above, or would like to learn more from us, please reach out to:

• Erin Arango-Escalante – Founder & Principal, All Children Thrive (erin@allchildren-thrive.com) 
• Helah Robinson – Chief Program and Strategy Officer, LIFT (hrobinson@whywelift.org) 
• Megan Desautels – Policy Manager, UTEC (mdesautels@utecinc.org)  
• Rula Jaber – Early Education Director, UTEC (rjaber@utecinc.org)
• Sama Sabihi – Senior Program Manager, Ascend at the Aspen Institute (sama.sabihi@aspeninstitute.org)