 I have a brief announcement first before we get into our afternoon plenary and it goes along with what Dr. Bigelung was talking about, about mobilization and advocacy. SAA, EYC, the San Antonio Association for the Education of Young Children, Family Service Association and Voices for Children will be hosting advocacy trainings, both beginning advocacy and more advanced. So this would be a very good thing to be involved in if you have not previously worked as an advocate and worked with our elected officials, especially during the interim before the next legislative session. You can find information on dates and levels of training on the SAA, EYC or the Voices websites. This afternoon, we don't usually have an afternoon plenary, but we first learned about the Keeping Kids in Families campaign about a month ago at a press conference at the Children's Shelter where folks from the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities and Congressman Lloyd Doggett were talking about this campaign, which is extremely important. It gives children the chance to stay in their own or a permanent family to keep their attachments, to have the nurturing that that we know they need to have. Anne Myers, who'll be with us today to describe this national effort, is leading the mobilization for Keeping Kids in Families campaign through her position with the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities. Keeping Kids in Families is helping to develop and support policy solutions that help to strengthen the nation's child welfare system through investments in prevention, early intervention and treatments that keep kids in safe and permanent families. The Alliance for Strong Families believes the solution lies in federal public policies that align federal financing with child and family success. Anne is the Director of Network Mobilization and also is managing this campaign. And I will just turn this over to Anne Myers to tell you about this exciting national effort. Thank you Kathy. I'm really thrilled to be here with you all today to talk about the Keeping Kids in Families campaign. The Keeping Kids in Families campaign is really about engaging the powerful voices of individuals, organizations and agencies nationwide who work directly with children and families every day and are focused on ensuring that the best interest of both children and families are at the center of all decision-making and reform efforts. I'm going to spend time explaining to you the need for child welfare reform, although I'm sure many of you know that all too well already. I'm going to share with you the evidence for it and introduce you to our campaign's guiding principles. Then we're going to really focus in on the campaign and how you can join us. But first, I want to give you some context for how the campaign fits overall into the Alliance's commitment for better outcomes for children and families. So throughout this session there's going to be times when I really want to have input from you all, and we're going to test this out right now. I'm aware that most sessions you sit in, presenters ask you or hope that you'll put your cell phones away, but in this session I'm going to ask you to pull them out. So the Adverse Childhood Experiences study really provides a substantial foundation for how we approach child welfare, education, juvenile justice and more. And I'm going to share with you some background on the ACEs study, but first it would be really helpful for me to know how familiar you already are with it. And so if you'll take out your phones, you'll be able to text to this number at the top of the screen. You'll be able to text one of those codes for your answer. If you don't want to text it, you can go to that mobile website as well and enter your answer on the code. Good. Keep it coming. Okay. One more second. Get your answers in. Okay. Good background. Well, I'm going to share with you some information on the ACEs study. It really invites significant breakthroughs in human knowledge. Major findings from the study represent a real paradigm shift and our understanding of the drivers for human health. This ties right into what you heard Dr. Bigelan talk about earlier today. And I want to share, oh wait, I skipped, there we go. I want to share that the original ACEs study that I'm talking about was conducted in the mid-1990s. More than 17,000 adults participated in the study, the largest of this kind. It included a physical examination and a survey about child abuse and neglect. So the study was designed to identify factors that predispose individuals to risky behaviors or develop conditions that put them at risk for cardiovascular disease or other chronic health problems. Participants were asked if they had experienced one of these 10 adverse events before the age of 18. For each, yes, an individual received one point on the ACE score. So, for example, if someone answered that they'd experienced physical abuse, witnessed their mother being hit and had an alcoholic father, they received an ACE score of three. Okay. So here you're going to see some of the key points from the ACEs study. And the power of the ACEs study really lies in its simplicity. ACEs are extremely common. Only about a third of the 17,000 participants in the study had zero ACEs. Additionally, ACEs rarely occur in isolation. So more than 50% of those that had a positive ACEs score had two or more adverse childhood experiences. ACEs are cumulative and they're strongly correlated with health and well-being outcomes. The more ACEs you had, the higher your risk for just about every social, behavioral, and physical health problem. Here you can see the increased risk of those who have four or more ACEs compared with people with zero ACEs. In addition to these data points, which I find quite staggering, people with six or more ACEs, on average, had a lifespan of nearly 20 years less than those with zero ACEs. And this graph portrays just a few additional findings from the original ACEs study. As you can see from the graph, the more ACEs in individual reports, the more likely they are to engage in high risk behaviors and experience negative health outcomes. As an example, 18% of those with four or more ACEs had attempted suicide as compared to 1% of those with zero ACEs. As ACEs scores go up, on average, the exposure to developmental effects of toxic stress increases. So since the original ACEs study was conducted, significant research has been done and we now know a lot more about brain development and the importance of early childhood experiences, both positive and negative. Neuroscience helps us understand why ACEs are so important. Experiences from zero to five greatly influence the architecture of a child's developing brain. And his or her subsequent emotional, cognitive, social and neurological functioning. When a child is exposed to severe, frequent and unrelenting stress, also known as toxic stress, it can profoundly alter the child's ability to self-regulate, to form normal, healthy adult relationships, and to think abstractly. Biological responses to toxic stress during childhood are adaptive and we know that the memory of human experiences lies in the body, not just in the mind. There can be significant implications for later adult physical and mental health outcome as shown through the original ACEs study. And in fact, the discoveries about the effects of toxic stress on the developing brain provide biological plausibility for the ACEs study, which makes a really strong case for concluding that the relationship between the number of ACEs and later health problems is a causing effect relationship. The alliance places such a value on these principles and problems bought forth through the ACEs study that we've created a two-country cohort that's focused on integrating the brain science research into and throughout the nonprofit human-serving sector. There's an emphasis on creating systems change and influencing policy. The participating organizations will serve as leaders in their community and across the sector to really accelerate the knowledge and inform widespread adoption within their organizations, their communities and the public sector systems that they're working into advanced policy regulatory and fiscal changes. So I told you that I was going to share with you how this campaign fits into this overall commitment to better outcomes for children and families. And the point is that we must be innovative and how we apply the findings of this study and other studies that are being done on how to best get the best outcomes for our children. And we must be innovative in how we tackle such a large issue as the welfare of our children. That's exactly what these three organizations have come here to do. I'm here today not as a representative of the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, but as a representative of this public-private partnership that we call the TRIAD, who developed the Keeping Kids and Families Campaign. Our three organizations were all seeing the same need for comprehensive child welfare reform at the federal level. Independently, members of these three organizations were sharing stories of how an outdated system was negatively impacting outcomes for children. Just over a year ago, our three organizations came together to develop and support policy proposals that would help strengthen our nation's child welfare through investments in prevention and front-end services. Those services that keep children safe and impermanent families whenever possible. Since that time, we believe that we've been instrumental in advancing and influencing the conversation around federal child welfare reform. As many of you are aware, we've been operating under a model that does not allow us to best meet the needs of our children for far too long. A model that's driven by outdated national policies that focused on investing resources after children have been removed from their homes. There's no question that there's an urgent need to strengthen our child welfare system, and now is the time to adopt a modern, comprehensive approach that helps us do a better job of helping families much earlier on. Every day that our country uses an outdated system, children and families continue to lose. For over 30 years, far more federal funding has been available for children once they're removed from their homes, then is available for prevention and early intervention services that could prevent that removal in the first place. Child welfare financing proposals attempting to reallocate funds from foster care to prevention services date back almost as far. They date back into the 80s, and there's another attempt happening right now. The largest federal financing stream for child welfare is titled 4E of the Social Security Act. 4E provides an open-ended funding to states, and the majority of the money from 4E is restricted to out-of-home care for families, for children from families living in poverty as set by 1996 poverty standards. This funding totaled $6.9 billion in 2014. In contrast to 4E funding is titled 4B funding. 4B allows flexibility to states and how they use it, and the funding is generally used by states to pay for early intervention services to prevent abuse and neglect. It's fixed at $650 million a year. This lopsided financing mechanism incentivizes children being removed from their homes. Their researchers, Lawrence Berger and Sarah Fott, who wrote an article earlier this year in the future of children, and they state in that article that placement may promote children's health by protecting them from additional maltreatment, but at the same time foster care may disrupt family and community ties, and thereby diminish mental and behavioral health. The CPS system has a very clear role to play in preventing maltreatment and promoting permanency for the children who need it, yet many referred children already face health and developmental problems by the time they come into CPS. A spectrum of services will always be necessary, but doesn't it make sense to focus on prevention as a means to promote child health? The truth is we have long focused on treating the symptoms of child maltreatment rather than addressing the root causes of what puts our children at risk. As a result, we're not meeting the unique needs of all our children and families, and we must take a media action to update our system so that it can serve as the symbol of hope that it should for struggling families. So with that, I realize that many of you work in different fields that intersect the child welfare system in different ways. Whether you work as a child welfare provider, you work in the court system, focus on early education, focus on health, addiction issues, human services, or elsewhere, there are countless intersections. And we must look at our child welfare system comprehensively to really achieve the best outcomes for children. So I'll appreciate if you take out your phones again. Thank you. Hi Skinny and Jumpstart. And join me by sharing how many of you are seeing this play out in your work. I must admit that in coming here, I feel a lot like I'm preaching to the choir. The more I hear about this community about the state, the more impressed I've been with your commitment to better outcomes. From additional funding for prevention services to efforts to create a baby court model. It's really remarkable commitment and action. And good one more second. As a nation, we must also make that commitment to ensuring that every child has a safe and loving family and the best chance of success. Unfortunately, our current child welfare system isn't allowing us to meet the unique needs of far too many children and systems. It focuses its resources and energy at the deeper end of the system. And we know that we can do a better job of strengthening families and we should be doing it. Strengthening the lives of our children and families will benefit the entire community. There's increasing evidence that quality early intervention programs can address family issues earlier on and prevent the need for foster care and more services later. Those researchers that I mentioned, burger and font, they cite two ways that public policies may be able to positively influence the family's impact on child health. The family's investment of money and other resources in their children is the first one, and the second one being the level of care that families can provide to their children. Broadly speaking, resources and better care yield healthier children. So it makes sense to promote public policies that provide more resources for children and build better parenting. On the resources front, there are examples like the earned income tax credit. The EITC is currently the largest anti-poverty program in the U.S. The EITC is a refundable tax credit for low income workers and the subsidy has been linked to increased birth weight and thereby improve child health and cognitive achievement. The topics of programs promoting better care are more complex largely because CPS generally doesn't become involved until after abuse or neglect has occurred. Outside of CPS, though, there are several examples that show the promise of prevention and early intervention services. We've already heard some of that this morning. Some of those include programs like Triple P, which was discussed, Durham Connects, and Brevard Cares. Triple P Positive Parenting Program, as Dr. Viglin stated, works to identify families within a community who are facing problems in parenting, and it features five different levels of intervention. If you remember, it starts with the broad-based media campaign really educating the community on how good parenting can lead to positive child development. And from there, it has increasing levels working directly with parents to improve their skills. An analysis of the programs have cited improvements in both parenting skills and child behavior. Durham Connects is another program that's had great results. The large majority of babies born in Durham County, North Carolina, are assessed in their homes by nurses using a standard assessment that evaluates four main areas, health, parenting and childcare, household safety, and parents' mental health. For families with serious needs, this begins a referral program to a database including about 400 community organizations providing a whole variety of services. When children reach six months of age, parents going through the program and using these services showed significantly more positive parenting behaviors than the control group did. Infants had fewer emergency room visits and an 80 percent less overnight hospital stays. The use of emergency health care by infants in the control group was three times greater than those that were involved in the Durham Connects program. A recent study was done with the Brevard Cares Wrap-Around Intervention, which was launched by Florida-based Brevard Family Partnership and Alliance member. And it was found that children and families that completed the Wrap-Around Intervention program had reduced incidents of maltreatment just six months after the program. Ninety-three percent of families who participated in the Wrap-Around Intervention had no verified maltreatment as compared with 30 percent of families who didn't participate in the intervention. There's also one last piece that I want us to take into consideration on this topic of programs that have worked. And that's that 30 states and one Indian tribe are currently utilizing 4E waivers to implement demonstration programs. These demonstration programs vary greatly, but the majority of them are focused on avoiding out-of-home placements or reducing the amount of time that the child spends removed from the home. They do so by providing services including family counseling, increased community support, addiction therapy, and more. These waiver demonstrations rely on capped funding from the 4E foster care payments, and the number of states that use them truly shows the willingness to trade in open-ended funding for increased flexibility. We're seeing really great potential from programs such as these, a potential for a national community-based strategy that identifies struggling families early on, addresses problems as they arise, and reduces later risk. Congress has the opportunity to allow for funding flexibility for states to place money where it will be most effective, while having accountability to ensuring the well-being of children is promoted. Keeping kids and families is helping to develop and support policy solutions that help to strengthen our nation's child welfare system through investments in front-end supports. We truly believe that the solution lies in federal public policies that align financing with child and family success. Our shared principles for child welfare policy and practice alignment, which can be found on the Keeping Kids and Families.org website and their entirety, they really serve as a framework for innovative child welfare finance policy design. In this work, the single most important guiding principle is to place the best interest of the child and family at the center of collective decision-making and system reform efforts. With that as a focus, we lead with this complement of guiding principles that are very bold down on the slide. As we develop and assess policy proposals, these are the principles that we base our decisions on. We're really excited to have launched the Keeping Kids and Families campaign last month and especially excited to be here with you, asking you to join us as we raise our collective voice of advocates nationwide to promote our shared commitment to ensuring that every child has a safe, caring, permanent family. Federal child welfare funding has been stagnant for more than a decade and while we've seen advancements on our child welfare laws, long has been done to improve the way that we fund child welfare at the federal level. For far too long, the financing mechanism has not allowed us to best meet the needs of our children and there's an urgent need to change that trajectory. As states continue to lose money and more families reach the point of crisis, we recognize that we must advocate for strong policy solutions. So we've come together to let members of Congress know that we need them to act quickly to bring policy solutions that put the needs of children and families first. This must be a national priority for our country and keeping kids and families will be a vehicle for raising awareness of this issue and moving our lawmakers into action. This campaign is about elevating this issue as part of state and national discussions. As a triad, we're actively working with policymakers to develop and support solutions that will help us realize our vision for child welfare reform. And the really exciting part about this is that we're seeing a lot of movement. Fills have been introduced in the Senate. We're expecting bipartisan legislation to be rolled out soon. Your very own Congressman Doggett is introducing a companion bill to center Wyden's Family Stability and Kinship Care Act. It's really an opportune time and we need to seize this moment. I want to underscore that this campaign is all about an outside and approach. Your local voice is needed to build pressure on members of Congress and their districts and states to enact reforms now. Each day that goes by more and more federal dollars are lost to your state while limiting the flexibility that we all know is necessary for better outcomes. While we're having conversations with policymakers in Washington, the work we do at the state and local level will be really critical to our success. Members of Congress need to hear from you. You heard this from your state senators and representatives earlier today and it's the same on the federal level. They need to hear the rally cry coming from advocates coming from their constituents across this nation. What's really amazing is that the more diverse voices are engaged in this campaign, the stronger our message is going to be. And the child welfare providers, members of the juvenile justice system, family court representatives, educators, housing providers, whoever you represent, whatever experience you're bringing, the unique perspectives are going to continue to strengthen our collective voice and it takes our entire community, our entire nation, to best care for our children. We must be comprehensive in how we best meet their needs. In just a bit, you're going to hear me talk about some of our participating organizations, how they're engaging in the campaign, and you'll gain a better sense of how you can participate with us. But what the most important part is is that you make a commitment to join us. And I can't stress enough that this is a really crucial time for our country and our children can't wait any longer. It's simple and really efficient to join the campaign through the campaign website. When you visit keepingkidsandfamilies.org a pop-up box will come up that asks you to join us. You'll be able to enter your email into that box and doing so signs you up for our alerts. Additionally there's a letter to members of Congress that you can send to your congressional representatives right on the website. I want to emphasize that we need each of you to help bring awareness to this issue and carry this message forward. As an advocate for children and families you provide a critical voice in conveying this message to members of Congress and we're asking you to engage in as many ways as possible. One of the most important tasks is to sign a campaign ambassador for your organization. Campaign ambassadors will serve as organizational points of contact throughout the life of the campaign. They'll be asked to communicate the current paint campaign asked to members of Congress, spread the word about the campaign and really be a part of community with other campaign ambassadors. We'll keep ambassadors up to day on conversations on the Hill, movement on legislation, current messaging points and what opportunities exist to leverage through special campaign webinars and regular emails that we have. You can sign up as a campaign ambassador right now by visiting keepingkidsandfamilies.org, hovering overtake action, and selecting the campaign ambassador button. It's really easy. In addition to campaign ambassadors, we're also in the midst of identifying state leaders for the campaign and we're really thrilled to announce that the children's shelter right here has taken on the role of state leader for Texas. So Ani's miracle is their point of contact for you all. Thank you and this role state leaders are going to share information with, mobilize and really coordinate the efforts of campaign ambassadors within their state. So they'll report back to us, let us know what's going on and recruit new campaign ambassadors within the state, develop state-specific talking points, provide some state-specific data when possible in your state. And so I appreciate you guys thanking Ani's for taking on that role, the children's shelter for taking on that role. It's really integral to the campaign. Thank you. In addition to the campaign website, we've developed several other tools to support your engagement in the campaign. The campaign toolkit which includes the items that are listed on this slide is conveniently located on keepingkidsandfamilies.org for you to use. We want to make it as easy as possible and as convenient as possible for you to participate. And so we've provided the tools to do so. We provided talking points to garner support from partners, community members and members of Congress. There's a letter that you can send to your listserv directing them to join the campaign on the website. There are sample letters to the editor, sample social media and more. We're asking that you engage in the campaign in as many ways as possible and I'm going to send the remainder of the session discussing five key advocacy tactics. So these tactics have been selected based on their past use and success and as you plan for engagement in keeping kids and families please don't consider yourself limited to these tactics. Additional tactics may be required and we highly encourage you to be creative and how you think about how you'll engage you'll hear about the alliance discussing discussing other tactics that we're using on other campaigns publishing research, developing policy but these five tactics included here we're focusing on right now because they're the most common and effective tactics identified for keeping kids and families thus far. Also keep in mind that local context will inform the type of tactics that might be acceptable and most effective it's going to be important for participating organizations and agencies to really understand local relationships, struggles and success, political dynamics that will affect tactical implementation. Speaking with colleagues who are working on child welfare policy is always a good place to start and your state leader can help be a resource for this level of coordination and insight as well. So for the remainder of this session to best know where to address my attention I really want to hear from you guys. So take a few seconds, take your phones out again and text your responses for where you think that you'll be focusing your energy. Okay. We have one more poll for you guys and that's that I'd really like to hear this is your last poll today so be ready for it. I'd really like to hear a little about how experienced you are in these tactics so please let me know which ones you've had, you've used before you've implemented before. You can do more than one vote on this one as well so text away. Thank you guys. Good information. Okay. Okay a couple more seconds, get those in. This is very helpful. Okay. Well we're going to go down our list and we'll work to spend some more time on some rather than others. So directly engaging policymakers. Policymakers can't monitor every issue and they rely on experts and well-informed constituents to tell you how policies are functioning and whether needs are being met. I was thrilled to hear our representatives up here earlier talking about the need to really share your voice as a constituent, share your concern, share what you think is important. In order to be an effective advocate it's really important to facilitate an ongoing relationship between your organization or agency and key decision makers and the go-to strategy that most organizations use is to build collaboration and it consists of inviting elected officials to events, attending and presenting at public meetings and providing personal briefings to elected officials. So consider inviting them to the events that you're already hosting. I know a lot of you are already doing this or host site visits which has been very successful where organizations can really offer tours of their properties and reduce your family members and children and really build a foundation that you can later call upon. I want to really stress the importance of one-on-one contact with policy makers, regular meetings with them, supplemented by phone conversations to update each other on current activities, undertakings and accomplishments to really ensure that your organization and the policy maker continuing to align goals and work together. I know that many of you already have relationships with your members of Congress that's so fabulous and if you don't already, I don't want you to be discouraged. You may think if others already have relationships then why is it important for me to start building one? Why is my voice important? Well, you've probably already heard me a lot emphasize the power of a collective voice. When members of Congress start to hear common themes among their constituents coming from people in their districts and their states, they really start to pay attention. Sometimes these meetings may seem intimidating but don't let them be. You're the expert, you're the one in the field doing the work and they really want to hear from you. They're interesting in hearing what you have to say and value your expertise. As you prepare for these meetings, make sure you do your homework, have clearly defined goals, know the policy makers stance on the issue, know who they work in collaboration with, find out if you have common interests or backgrounds or connections that you can talk about and really be prepared to explain the issue at hand and make a clear case for it. We have talking points in the Keeping Kids and Families toolkit that really help make that very simple for you. Talk about the overall need for comprehensive child welfare reform so that they can see the big picture and then share with them the key bills which we'll get to that align with our principles. So we've even provided a leave behind for congressional meetings in the campaign toolkit. It has that the breakdown of shared principles in there as kind of a checklist for members of Congress to look at when they're assessing policy proposals so they can know exactly what our priorities are. Oh, one last thing on this. Be sure to follow up. Follow up with us so that we at the campaign know how those meetings went and that can influence our conversations that we're having on the hill and follow up with the member of Congress's office because that's really important to have as many touch points as you can. The more touch points that you have with them the more your view is a resource for their office and that's really critical to success. So mobilizing networks. Mobilizing net advocates is all about identifying people and groups to reach through grassroots efforts educating them on key issues and empowering them with practical, concrete ways that they can influence policy. A strong collective voice is one of the most powerful tools for influencing policies, systems and even attitudes. Grassroots efforts to build support conviction and passion for change among groups and individuals can be really effective and the goal is to make better outcomes for children and families important to all people so that it becomes politically popular for decision makers to address that issue. Identifying audiences to mobilize really depends on your context and your programs. So consider the individual individuals and groups that your organization already works with that you're already intersecting with including staff members, donors, board members, volunteers, communities and partner organizations those are all natural places to start with your grassroots mobilizing. The goal is to allow the message to spread so that each individual or group that's identified is educated and really inspired to educate others. The most effective way to leverage a growing base of advocates is to provide clear and simple suggestions on how they can advocate as an individual or organization that cares about the well-being of children. So for example you can direct them to the letter on keepingkidsandfamilies.org that they can send directly to their members of Congress. It's really simple it's a template on there all you have to do is press send. You can provide them with sample talking points and ask them to call their congressional offices and I encourage you to integrate them into some of these other tactics that we're talking about. So consider inviting an influential board member or community member to attend a congressional meeting with you or to place a letter to the editor and op-ed. So speaking of letters to the editor and op-eds I want to talk next about leveraging the media and to be clear here we're talking about using the media for advocacy. So the goal of media advocacy is community change and it involves strategic use of traditional and new media to support community organizing and the advancement of public policies. Media advocacy really elevates child welfare discussions out of individual communities and into the public arena where it can really influence decision makers. Media advocacy can provide information to the general public or target specific use groups it can visually illustrate a point focus on solutions and really generate a sense of urgency around them. Media advocacy can also shape public debate. It can help you speak directly to those who have influence and apply pressure to them. Media advocacy shouldn't be confused with social marketing or public relations so social marketing targets individuals based on the premise that if you change if an individual has the appropriate information they'll change their behavior and public relations really centers around building a positive public image of people or organizations and their activities. I will call attention to the fact that sometimes public relations goals and media advocacy goals can conflict particularly when an organization starts to consider that discussing areas where they may be having problems that they're facing may not always be in their best interest. So when leveraging the media here are some key avenues to consider. I want to really encourage you to be sure to connect to things that are already happening in your community. Bring in the voice of your organization and the people that you're serving and share stories. Storytelling is an effective means to work through all of these avenues listed. We even have a share your story feature on our website where we can collect stories that you're experiencing in the field so that we can elevate them from our level as well. So consider sharing success stories or stories really emphasizing that sense of urgency that we see. In addition to sharing this with you I wanted to share three fundamental steps for media advocacy. The first of which is framing for access. This step really ensures that your story is newsworthy and has a chance of being covered. So framing for access can also be thought of as determining the hook and the hook can be anything controversy, milestones, anniversaries, personal stories, injustice, breakthroughs and advances or many many other things that can be considered a media hook. The second step in media advocacy is framing for content which really focuses on the way in which your story is covered and it's thought of as shaping the debate. So I want you to take into consideration when you're framing for content that not everything can be said about every issue and every story and you have to really tell the audience what's important about the story and create the meaning for them and translate that individual or community problem into a social problem. So you need to be able to present a solution in the way in which the story is framed will really determine who the audience deems responsible for fixing the problem. The third fundamental step I'll share with you on media advocacy may seem like a no-brainer but it's advancing the policy and well-conceived and well-positioned media coverage can really have a tremendous influence on policy makers and the ultimate goal of media advocacy is to promote policy reflective of our agenda. So create that need that sense of urgency around child welfare reform and do that when you're gaining media coverage. So engaging partners I don't feel like I have to say that much to you guys but I'm glad you're interested in it because the more diverse partners we have in this campaign the stronger it is and so you've heard me talk about that a few times already that we really want a comprehensive approach and a collective voice and disruptive forces is the term that we use at the Alliance when we talk about bringing in different unique voices. Traditionally there's been low incentive for nonprofits to experiment and in the coming years organizations that aren't innovative in the way that they think may not succeed. The Alliance issued a report a few years ago that was titled disruptive forces driving a human services revolution. It was centered around these ideas and if you haven't read it I encourage you you can download it for free from our online store Alliance 1.org. What I really want to point out when it comes specifically to engaging partners as disruptive forces is that one of the main tools for effective advocacy is building and working in coalitions. A coalition simply being a partnership of individuals or organizations that form an alliance and agree to work together to achieve a common purpose or engaging a joint activity. The long term objectives of a coalition may vary widely but in most instances there's a common goal which is in our instance the desire to influence policy. Partnering with like-minded groups can really amplify your voice and extend your reach by creating that power in numbers and our primary objective is child welfare finance reform but keep in mind that those diverse partnerships in this work can really bring with them great strength. There's really a power to demonstrate for policymakers the diversity of support for an issue. Okay, our last tactic. This is a really critical time to be tracking policy proposals. As I mentioned we've already seen important legislative activity in Congress with the introduction of several bills focusing on adopting new ideas for improving child welfare policy and investments. Earlier this year Senator Baldwin and Senator Portman introduced the Family Based Foster Care Services Act to provide a standard Medicaid definition for therapeutic foster care and there was a companion bill introduced in the House. More recently Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon introduced the Family Stability and Kinship Care Act of 2015 and Senators Bennett and Crapo introduced the All Kids Matter Act. Both of those really focused on the expansion of 4E funding to provide for more front-end services. We're really excited to have had Congressman Doggett introducing this Family Stability and Kinship Care Act in the House as a companion bill to Senator Wyden's legislation. We're thrilled to have legislation in both the Senate and the House that aligns with the campaign's guiding principles and look forward to continuing to work with those members of Congress and their staff to ensure that those bills provide for better outcomes at the state and local level and we're excited to continue working to generate further support for these pieces of legislation that align with our principles as we work towards comprehensive reform. So we expect to see strong bipartisan legislation from the Senate soon and staying up-to-date on this information as you reach out to legislators in your community will be really important. Joining the campaign as a campaign ambassador will ensure that you do stay up-to-date. Additionally, should you want to share any assessments of this legislation with us it would be of incredible value as we work to keep all our campaign ambassadors, all our state leaders up-to-date with the latest information and policy analysis. This campaign is all about that outside-and-approach and we've been very thoughtful about closely collaborating with members with organizations in states across this country to promote activity and engagement on the ground and we're seeing a lot of amazing things happen across the nation. Folks in Nebraska have placed editorials and hosted site visits with members of Congress. Florida set a goal of hosting a meeting with each congressional representative to talk about the need for comprehensive reform and share information on the campaign. They are already a large part of the way to that goal. Michigan hosted a session on the campaign of their State Child Welfare Conference and here I am. So in your very own community we're seeing a lot of support and movement. Last month the Children's Shelter hosted a press conference with Congressman Dogget highlighting the keeping kids and families campaign. Community members in your area are leveraging relationships with legislators in Texas and nationwide really making a push for change. It's really a very exciting time. So we have a few minutes left in our session and I want you to take out the handout in your program that looks like this. This handout is developed to really assist you with developing an action plan. We're excited to have this opportunity to talk to you today to invite you into the campaign to invite you to participate with us as a very concrete action step coming out of this conference and we don't want this to be one of those things that's like oh yeah I heard about that campaign at this conference. We want it to be one of those things where you come into the office on Monday morning and you have concrete action steps that you're ready to take and implement and that's the purpose of this handout. And so I asked in the next few minutes you guys take time right in some of your ideas think pie in the sky, brainstorm, be as creative as you like and I'm gonna ask you to do that before I close us out. So if anybody has a desire to share a couple ideas I'll bring us back in in a few minutes and we can hear some from you. I'm gonna pull you guys back in just for a couple minutes before we wrap up. So do we have anybody that's dying to share what they came up with ideas for how they'd like to engage in the campaign? Anybody who'd like to share their ideas? We've got a couple of good volunteers Mike Holders over here. Any ideas that want to be shared? One over here. Well I was thinking about mobilizing the advocates had an idea to share the work on the Family Stability and Kinship Care Act with our Texas AEYC State Board and maybe have them locate some more information about that from Representative Doggett's office and the timeline. We have a board meeting in October so hopefully we can get that piece started. Look forward to connecting. I think we might have time for one more person maybe two more people to share. Yeah Connie. Thanks. Well I question the timeline. I always hate when I commit to stuff. But you know the Texas Supreme Court has a Children's Commission on Children, Youth and Families which has been a leader in the state on several of our reforms. So I think that could be definitely an avenue to support some of this. I mean they already do so much. Representative Zerwas has played a key role in our legislative sessions and he's also a physician and has I think a big commitment to children's services and represents sort of that Fort Bend Harris County. I'm from that other area of the state. Sorry I should mention that. And I think the other thing too is for me data is really important. So I need more data so that I can speak better about the issues. I know the stories get the attention but the data and the fiscal impact is I think what moves the needle to where we want it to go. It's good. Good. And that's why I need data. We'll work on it. That's something that as you engage in the campaign please feel free to be in touch with me, be in touch with Anise. We at the campaign staff really want to be a resource to you guys and get you the information that you want that can be helpful to you and just generally hear about what you're doing to engage and be able to support your work and however we can do that. So keep the ideas coming. We look forward to hearing more. I'm really excited for us to raise our voices and I look forward to having you all as part of the campaign and encourage you to contact us, the emails up there for info at keepingkidsandfamilies.org. If you have any questions with that I'm going to turn it back over to Kathy. Thank you so, so much. Thank you Ann. Nothing more important than for children to have loving, nurturing families obviously. During the you will have now a break. During the break we'll be breaking down this big room into three large breakout sessions for the rest of the afternoon. It's been a long and we hope very productive day for you. There will be no closing session. So after this go to your sessions and then we look forward to working with you over the next year and look forward to the next Congress on Children. Please don't forget when you're in your sessions or afterwards there are boxes. There are going to be boxes labeled evaluation at the back of each room. Please put your evaluations in there. Thank you very much. And we will see you next year and have a good rest of the afternoon.