2025 Change Maker Highlights
We invite you to explore the PowerPoint presentations shared at the 2025 Building Bridges Removing Barriers Summit—a powerful collection of insights, ideas, and strategies from leaders committed to equity, collaboration, and systemic change. These presentations capture the depth of the conversations, research, and lived experiences that shaped this year’s summit, offering practical takeaways and inspiration for continued action. Whether you attended in person or are engaging for the first time, reviewing these materials is an opportunity to reflect, learn, and carry the momentum forward as we continue our collective work in our communities.
Sandra Gasca, Vice President, Center for Systems Innovation, Annie E. Casey Foundation
Inspiration around innovation that occurs when youth and families are meaningfully engaged in designing and improving the services, policies, and practices that affect them. Youth and families with lived experience are leading the way and creating sustainable change in child welfare—asserting their voices, expertise, insights, ideas, and action in ways that are improving prevention and permanency.
Michael Mitchell, Lead Researcher, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
How significant changes to Medicaid and SNAP will impact families and how these policy changes will reshape the state fiscal landscape in the years ahead. Attendees also gained insights into other emerging policy challenges that could define 2026.
FROM INTENT TO IMPACT: BUILDING THE ALLIANCE FOR ADVANCING OUTCOMES
Across the nation, Black children and families remain overrepresented in systems intended to protect and support them. Decades of reform have yielded progress, but not parity. To achieve transformational change, system leaders, community partners, and policymakers must move beyond incremental improvements and re-imagine how equity and accountability take shape in practice. Enter The Alliance for Advancing Outcomes—a bold, cross-sector effort launched in June 2025 at the Morehouse School of Medicine.
IT’S THE LAW IN MINNESOTA: MINNESOTA AFRICAN AMERICAN FAMILY PRESERVATION AND CHILD WELFARE DISPROPORTIONALITY ACT
Minnesota Child Welfare leaders discussed the implementation of systemic changes following the historic passing of the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act. How the murder of George Floyd led to Hennepin county declaring racism a public health concern, elevating the disproportionality act.
TEXAS FAMILY WELLBEING INITIATIVE: PUTTING POWER BACK INTO THE COMMUNITY
Texas Family Wellbeing Initiative leaders highlighted the core mission and theoretical framework for its grassroots approach and the profound impact it has had on children and families in Texas.