 So good morning folks, thank you so much for being here this morning. If I can ask you to get your coffee and sit down, please. So this has been an incredible past 24 hours for us. So much energy going through the room here, it's fabulous. So yeah, good morning everyone. We are eager to stay on time again today. So I wanted to just make sure that everyone can grab their cup of coffee and have a seat. Oh, and more coffee is on the way. So yes, that'll be coming soon. And it's going to become more interactive as the day goes on. So there'll be moments to get up and get some more coffee, get a little more food, all of that. We want to make sure you're as caffeinated as possible for that work ahead. This is going to be a day of doing a little more work. We want a lot of input from all of you. We want to hear what you are struggling with, what you're excited about. We want to also make sure that we're starting to really document and get down on paper what the big challenges are that are ahead so that those of us in research institutions like New America can start to really grapple with these and start thinking about problem solving from a policy perspective and from a networking perspective. One of the two of the key goals for us here is to be helping to build this informal network but also to be starting to think about what this means for policy, whether it's on the equity side of things, professional development, new emphasis on family engagement, what have you. So we'll get more into that this afternoon. What I want to do right now before I introduce our amazing speaker keynoter for this morning is I want to recognize and call out the incredible variety of cities and city leaders who are in the room with us here today. I want to preface this by saying that here at New America, we've been over the past year and a half really working to try to rethink the think tank so that we're not just this institution sitting in the middle of Washington D.C. inside the Beltway with our heads down and a bunch of white papers. We're really trying very hard to get out into communities. Many of the analysts that we bring on are half kind of reporters, half analysts. And from my background in journalism, I've been really kind of cheerleading this. I'm very excited to have more and more people getting out. And so this is to me an example of how we can do even more of that is to really understand what's happening in communities and then bring those stories, lift those up and help connect those to other communities. So I'm going to just call out a few of the cities that we know are represented in the room and if you could, when you hear your city name, if you can just stand up and we'll give you a little round of applause for being here. So I'm going to start down in our southern end of the United States here. Those of you who are here from Jacksonville, Florida, can you stand up? Awesome. Dayton, Ohio is here. Dayton. I know we've got a lot of fabulous and innovative folks from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the room. Wow, we've got a big Pittsburgh contingent. The Bay Area of California is represented in various places. Sheetal's here, Tiffany's here. Southern California, we've got some SoCal folks. Yoli and Witt. Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas. Thank you, Texas. We have lots of folks here from Chicago. Obviously, so many of our partners are here in the Chicago area as well. Roanoke, Virginia. Let's go Roanoke, man. So I'm a Virginia girl. I'm excited to have the Virginia folks. I should have brought my whole hometown here. Denver and the Colorado folks. Everybody from Colorado. Great. Kansas City, Missouri's in the room. So huge thanks to Kansas City. We have forgotten some cities. Anybody here that haven't called out that's New York City? Oh my God, Michigan. Awesome. San Antonio. Jackson, Mississippi's here. Two more Southern folks. Anyone else? Austin. Ben Kramer's here from Austin. This is giving me goosebumps. This is really, really cool. Thank you all so much for that. All right, so let's, I'm going to shift to just me talking a little bit about this amazing person who's going to speak to us for a few minutes named Ralph Smith. Won't do much this because I want to make sure Ralph has as much time as he can to talk to you all. Speaking of being able to really network cities, what Ralph has done is really, really remarkable with the campaign for grade level reading. So it's going to be exciting to hear him talk a little bit more about that. Ralph serves as senior vice president of the Annie Casey Foundation and managing director of the campaign for grade level reading. And he's also a nationally recognized legal scholar and leader in philanthropy. He's a recovering lawyer as I've heard him mention many times. So he is a member of the law faculty at the University of Pennsylvania with expertise in corporate and securities law, as well as education law and policy. And served as chief of staff and chief operating officer for the school district of Philadelphia and as senior advisor to the former Philadelphia mayor, Wilson Good, on children and family policy. And he's the founding director of both the National Center on Fathers and Families and the Philadelphia Children's Network and has helped to launch and lead what is now known as the Responsible Fatherhood Movement. So on so many fronts, Ralph has been there at the beginning to foment change and to lead so many of us in thinking much more deeply about these issues and how to actually really get something done for kids. So it's with great pleasure that I'll bring up to the podium here Ralph Smith. For Lisa's introduction and, you know, I'm never sure whether admitting that I'm a recovering law professor is a good idea. And I'm rarely sure that admitting in these days that my field is corporations and securities. I'm true. I think that's really a bad idea. But nonetheless, every time I say that I want to say, well, my good friend is Elizabeth Warren, you know, my good friend that formed a colleague for ten years. I'm delighted to be here. And, you know, that's, you know, you have to open every talk might be delighted. Why would you not be? But I've got to say that Lisa Guernsey and Michael Levine really take in a germ of an idea and done remarkable things with it. And it is their leadership and persistence and imagination, which brings us here today. I want to acknowledge that in the room, many of you know Yoli Flores. And so, you know, if I'm standing here, there's got to be somebody, there's got to be a brain someplace around. I counted Yoli really to provide the leadership, the ideas, and especially the work around parents. Thank you, Yoli. About four months ago, I had the opportunity, a couple blocks away, to stand in front several hundred people representing the funders, the local funders of the campaign for grade-level reading and really thank them for the work they've done over the last five years. We're really pleased that these local campaigns are supported by well over 250 local family foundations, community foundations, United Ways, folks who are voting with their feet, putting their money on the ground, really supporting this effort. Tanja Rucka and I were talking a little bit ago that this map, which now represents, I think if it's the latest one, yes, 285 communities in 42 states, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, you put it up. And on one hand, it sounds like bragging. On the other hand, Tanja knows, we put it up just to pinch ourselves, that when we started, and Tanja was right there with us at the beginning, we had no idea that this was even a possibility. And one of these days, somebody will write that the campaign for grade-level reading represents a really brilliant plan that was flawlessly executed, and when that report comes out, look for it in the fiction section of your local library bookstore, because it would be pure fiction. We are as surprised as anyone else, but I had this opportunity to stand before this group of folks who had worked so hard, invested so much, and lift up the fact that in 94 communities around the country, there's tangible evidence of progress, that folks are moving the needle on readiness, or attendance, or summer learning. The three major contributors to reading proficiency by the end of third grade. And there's reason for considerable optimism, but you know, part of being a lawyer is that whenever you find that silver lining, you're looking for the dark cloud. And here's what I have to confess to these folks, is that the progress we were there to celebrate was in some respects an illusion, because in virtually none of those 94 communities was the progress made on moving the needle sufficient to close the gap. And that is a really important realization, and it really pushed me to recall the question that has driven me for the last two decades as I've come into this area. You know, and I spent a lot of time looking at the area, and one of these days I'll have to spend all my time telling you how a securities lawyer views this sector and this movement. And those of us from the private sector, we have fun, give us two drinks and we have fun about this. But I came in and grew to really respect the folks who were in the sector, and that respect morphed into a question that really has driven me in fact, haunting me. How could so many people know as much as we do, spend as much as we do, care as much as we say we do, and accomplish so little for so many children over so long a period of time as permanently to compromise their chances to grow up, to be productive citizens and effective parents? And the answer to that question was no less encouraging than the question itself. The answer suggested that we don't know as much as we say we do, and all too often we lack the personal courage and political will to act on what we do know. We don't spend as much as we may need to, but until we do better with what we have, it's going to be difficult to make the case for what we need. We don't care as much as we say we do, because some children matter more than others, and some children matter not at all. You know, as I stood before that group of folks with whom I've had the opportunity to work, to struggle, to stay up late nights, to really put heart and soul, sweat equity into the work, I realized that that answer is overly harsh, probably unfair to many, and is too simple a response to a problem that is both complicated and complex. And as I thought about what to say to my own group, not just some audience which, you know, you can do a drive-by and leave, to people who I wanted to continue to work, I had to admit that there are a set of well-recognized conditions that operate to put a break on progress and even the most successful communities. I had to admit that even the most promising programs and initiatives find it difficult to fulfill their potential given the pervasive fragmentation, the duplication of effort, the proliferation of silos, and the challenge of gaining timely access to data needed for quality decision-making. And admit that this is especially debilitating for those communities with little in the way of standing capacity and less in the form of deployable resources. I had to search for rationale why so many good people could work so hard, produce increments of change that are insufficient to the task. And so as, you know, you've got to rally your troops, you can't leave them sort of down in the dumps, you can't leave them and say, not good enough. You've got to figure out how to move forward. And so my job was to focus our energy and attention on bigger outcomes. The work for the second half of the decade is to produce bigger outcomes, which means bigger increments of change within the same interval. As from a campaign standpoint for us, bigger outcomes mean doubling down on readiness, attendance, and summer learning. We're right about that when we started and we're right about it now and we are not going to run away from it. We're doubling down on readiness, attendance, and summer learning. But that's not going to be enough. So we're lifting up two of the major determinants of early school success, and that is healthy development of children and ensuring and promoting and supporting parents' success. Those are the two pillars. And we're going to prioritize children in public housing and make special attention to the more vulnerable children, dual language learners, kids in foster care, kids who are homeless. We've got to do more if we're going to see movements in the middle. As we're doing all this, we have got to find a way and find many ways to use technology and technology-enhanced platforms for all of the above. So in many respects, that's what brings me here because I'm understanding in a way that Michael and Lisa will tell you about the glimmer at the beginning of this effort when we talked about using technology to enhance parents' success and the two of them took it and ran with it. So that brings me here. And I love the energy in the room. I really like this set of ideas that says that we may use technology for new, different and important interventions, especially interventions that can respond to the children who need 24, 7, 365, two-generation supports and interventions. And when we say 24, 7, 365, two-generation, what we've said is that the school-centric approaches can't work because what do we know about schools? They can't do 24. They don't do 7. They don't do 365 and they don't do two-generation. So 24, 7, 365, two-generation really communicates that we need new platforms. We've got to get help and public libraries and public housing developments and a whole range of folks involved in helping to move the needle on students and student outcomes. And there's some great ideas in this room and across the country for new products and services that will address this particular population. But let me raise the ante a bit because I owe so much to every conversation I have with my longtime friend, Ellen Galinsky. You know, and as we were sort of just talking informally as we try to do as often as we can, you know, what occurred to me based on her observation is, you know, what you heard me say is that what operates as a break in progress is the fragmentation and the proliferation of programs and the like. Is it possible that the energy of this room five, ten years from now will be thwarted by continuing fragmentation and in fact is it possible that technology could escalate the fragmentation? And is it possible that technology could ensure the proliferation of even more hardened silos? You might say, that is a possibility. In fact, I'm not from bed against it. So if that is a possibility, then what is it that we're going to do that's going to be different? You know, in about, in a couple of months we will turn attention to the anniversary of 9-11. And there will be a whole lot of symbolism and images attached to that. For me when I think of 9-11, what comes to mind is the report of Governor Cain, the report of the 9-11 Commission. And he said, 9-11 was the product of a number of things. But more than a product of the failure of policy, the failure of capability, the failure of management is a failure of imagination. It was a failure of imagination. So as we sort of get together and embark in this wonderful new era, can we sort of acknowledge that maybe the truly disruptive potential of technology and technology and hence platform really will be realized only if we can imagine, only if and to the extent we can imagine a very different world. And if we can imagine it and work toward less fragmentation, less proliferation. But that won't be enough. You know, let me give you my list. I made a list here and if you have problems with the length of the list, blame my friend Ellen Galinsky because I was thinking about her as I was making this list. We have got to figure out how to demand more from the research community. And we have got to resist research studies after research study that's disconnected from the world of practice, that ignores practitioners. The only, the practitioners are just one step above parents and we know how far away that is. Research that is driven more by the reality of the academic pressure to produce a dissertation than it is to solve a problem. We've got to worry and do more about an evaluation industry. And notice I say industry. An industry that continues to essentially do one thing. When it does it well, it tells us which programs and interventions help some low-income kids to do better than other low-income kids. But think back, how many of those evaluations really tell you anything about how to close the gap between low-income kids and the kids with whom they'll compete? Virtually none. But that industry essentially is a thriving industry. We have got to ask whether technology could do something different about advocates who take much of the irrelevant product from research, who essentially depend on evaluation, and who essentially make the case that public dollars ought to be spent to scale programs that we're not sure will work anyway, and in the process create more public cynicism. We've got to ask whether technology will take on philanthropy. To get into philanthropy you almost have to say I didn't go to kindergarten, so I don't play well with others. We've got to provide that explanation. That is sort of required for membership in the club. So because we don't play well with others, including others in philanthropy, when we see a big problem, none of us could solve a truly big problem. So what we do is we shrink the problem to fit our mission, to fit our budget, to fit our resources, and to fit the idiosyncrasies of our leadership and our board. And I'm looking to my left and I'm seeing Lisa Conferring and Michael Sweating. So it tells me that I've got two minutes left. We've got to figure out how to use technology to change philanthropy. To change research. To change evaluation and to change advocacy. Because quite frankly, if all we do is add a new set of products and services onto the ones we have, to add additional competitors for limited resources, and to really continue an environment that is based on scarcity, we would have basically guaranteed that a decade from now we will be back in a room like this, celebrating the next bright, shiny new object, going for something, and maybe technology, maybe something else by that time. And we will say that we have gathered at a time when we've expended a whole lot of energy and done too little for so many kids that their futures are deeply compromised. We ought to commit to imagine that we can do different, that we can do better. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, Shroff. Always stirring, I think, to hear him talking about this. Renews commitment on many levels. I want to take a moment now, we're going to shift to a short, but I think really helpful talk from Rebecca Perlachian around some new survey results from zero to three. And so I'll take a minute to introduce Rebecca and then come on up here. And I think this too will just plan another seed, and then we're going to move from that into the breakout session so we can really start talking about all of this. So Rebecca serves as the senior director of programs at zero to three. And she's managing a portfolio of privately and federally funded projects that are designed to support the healthy development of infants, toddlers, and their families. And prior to this role, Rebecca served as the director of parenting resources, where she developed some many high quality resources related to parenting and child development. And as a mom who had my first baby in 2001, and then another in 2003, I was a devout consumer of these materials, so I just want to thank you for them. And she's been working on many other issues at zero to three, including the development of apps and trying to think about where digital media fits. But she's also part of this new survey and the results that come out of it. So now I'll turn it over to you, Rebecca, and you can tell us what it tells us. Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here. So just as a frame, why a survey? So at zero to three, as you probably know, our mission is to support the healthy development of infants, toddlers, and their big people. And over the last 15 to 20 years, we've done a number of parent surveys. But over the last few years, we've really noted kind of a sea change in how millennials are engaging with the experience of parenting. And so we worked in partnership with our colleagues at Vroom and the Bezos Family Foundation to complete a comprehensive nationwide survey of parents to talk about what their beliefs and practices are and what their challenges are when it comes to parenting. And we took a different approach to this survey than we had to surveys in the past because we really wanted to truly hear the stories and experiences of parents. So in addition to the quantitative part of our survey, which was 2,200 parents nationwide, and we oversampled for three populations that we felt we didn't know enough about. And those were African-American parents, Latino parents, and parents living in poverty. But in addition to that, which is what we had typically done in the past, we also did a series of focus groups in four cities across the U.S. in English and in Spanish with mothers and with fathers. And these focus groups were really discussions, two-and-a-half-hour-long discussions about parenting. What is your experience? What do you believe? What influences you? And I'm happy to say that we learned so much from those discussions and you're going to be hearing from some of those parents today. So without further ado, let's move on. This kind of takes us into our first winding, which is that there is more that unites than divides parents today. And that was a surprising finding for us just because the media is constantly pitting different parenting groups against one another, right? And so what our data showed at kind of the national level was that parents of various backgrounds and circumstances show strikingly similar levels of passion for their roles as parents and an even more common desire to keep doing better. The vast majority of moms and dads from all backgrounds say that they're good parents already. Across all segments, race, age, ethnicity, about 8 and 10 parents agreed with the statement, I feel as if I'm a really good parent. At the same time and with the same level of universality across backgrounds, nearly 9 and 10 parents say they're working hard to do even better. We also saw a lot of commonality in the challenges that parents are facing. Among parents of all backgrounds, circumstances, and education levels, about 6 and 10 said that figuring out the most effective way to discipline is one of their biggest challenges. And that's a theme that we are going to dive into more deeply today. So our next finding was that we're calling it a quote unquote missing first year. But what the finding was is that parents have a general understanding about what happens in a child's early years. And they know that those early experiences can last a lifetime, which by the way parents reported as being equally motivating and terrifying. But they did underestimate just how young babies and toddlers can begin to feel complex emotions and be affected by their experiences in the world. And a notable portion of parents missed the mark by months or even years. So one third of our parents surveyed believe that the time of most rapid brain development is 3 to 5 in that kind of preschool years. And that's not what science tells us, which is that birth to 3 is the time of greatest neurodevelopment. 50% of parents said the quality of a parent's care has a long-term impact on children's development beginning at about 6 months when in fact it starts at birth. Almost 60% of parents say that children begin to feel sadness or fear starting at about a year or older when this happens actually at about 3 to 5 months. So these findings are really critical because given the rapid growth of the brain in the first months and years of life, gaps in parents' understanding that children are processing experiences even before they can talk about them really can affect them into the long term. So if parents are missing the mark even if just by a few months it can make a big difference in a child's early experiences. And that's because one of science's most important contributions over the last 5 to 10 years is that the quality of a parent's care, the quality of early experiences, the degree of responsibility from a caregiver, how sensitive and attuned that person is to the baby is a powerful indicator of a whole range of outcomes into the long term including success in relationships, school and work. So if parents aren't aware that how they interact with and respond to their babies matters so much, so early, they're less likely to be tuned into the importance of these responses. And our second finding, our third finding theme is that while parents underestimate how soon children are capable of feeling some experiences. Oh, sorry, this was all animated. Okay, I hate when I do that to myself. It's always a good plan when you're doing it. So while parents underestimate how soon children are capable of feeling complex emotions, they actually overestimate the age at which children master some other important developmental skills. And we're calling this the expectations gap. So about half of parents, 43%, believe children can share and take turns before age two. And well over two-thirds of parents believe children have this ability before age three. In fact, if you've worked with children like we have, we see that this skill develops between three to four. And if you've ever driven on the beltway, you know that it happens sometime before the age of 75. And then about over a third of our parents said that children under age two have enough impulse control to resist the desire to do something forbidden. And over half of all parents said this happens before age three. In truth, most children aren't able to master this until three and a half to four. And you know, I think we're probably all guilty of this to some extent. I know at one point my daughter woke up when she was a toddler. She woke up at four o'clock in the morning once demanding waffles. And my husband rolled over and turned to me and he said, I'm going to handle this and it's not going to be the zero to three way. So, you know, it happens to all of us. But you know, I think what we think is so important about these findings is the expectations gap. So if parents interpret the meaning of their child's behavior from the point of believing their child is capable of that, they may respond from a more punitive place than if they understood a behavior in the context of typical development. And that's what we think is really important. You know, parents in truth are dealing with limit setting all day, all the time with young children. And their responses can either be supportive to learning and guiding, or be punitive and have a child really feel, feeling bad. And we want children to focus on the learning piece of discipline because that's going to be supporting their development over the long term. And that really leads us to the question of discipline. And parents reported feeling a real dilemma when it came to finding discipline methods that work. In essence, what parents told us is that, you know, they are using harsh methods, but they don't like to. And they're experiencing a catch-22 because even parents who are using harsh strategies don't feel good about it and report that these strategies don't work. So they also are saying, yes, we recognize that shaming isn't a good strategy either, and we recognize that shaming doesn't work, but they don't know what else to do. This is what the central struggle is. And I wanted to share a video, again, some parent voices from our focus groups. This particular clip features a parent who echoed what many parents shared during our discussions, and that was reflecting on the impact of her own history. So we can play the video. So here we see both the challenge and the opportunity. Parents are making discipline choices they don't feel comfortable with because they just don't know what else to do. And I think this is really the sweet spot for us, for community organizations, to offer parents the relevant, reliable, research-based information that engages parents' partners in understanding and solving these dilemmas. So I have about five minutes left, so I'm just going to kind of go through and give some additional top lines. But essentially we learned that parents want more information about effective discipline techniques. And I think that also includes anticipatory guidance about how the toddler years are tough, and there's no solution that's going to work every single time. And many strategies take repeated and consistent use to really be, to experience the effectiveness of the intervention, and that's something that can be very hard for parents. Parents want to be respected, not feared. They want to feel confident. They want to be able to handle challenges in ways that will support the children's development, and they want to learn. We also heard a ton from dads, very powerful information. The vast majority of dads across all demographic segments are passionate about being a dad. 90% of dads said it was their greatest joy in life. 73% of dads said their life began when they became a dad. As you can see from this slide, today's dads are creating a new roadmap. They're doing things differently than what they experienced with their own parents. Overwhelmingly, they report that they're more present and loving. They tell their children, I love you more. They show more affection. They participate more in playtime. And they read more with their children than they remember themselves experiencing. Many dads in our discussion groups talked about working to break the cycle, that their own dads weren't there for them, but they are dead set on being there for their own children. Yet, dads still feel shut out. 40% of dads want to be more involved in raising their children, but feel their parenting partner interfered with their involvement. And 43% of their dads feel their parenting partner often takes too much control of the parenting. So, the takeaway for us, and I think is that just because a father doesn't appear involved with his child doesn't mean he doesn't want to be. And I wanted to share some voices of dads from our groups. So, if we wanted to just run this video about a minute and certainly worth seeing, we'd love for you to meet these guys. So, I know these guys were amazing. So, in our last two minutes together, and if I don't cover everything, you can either grab me today, or you can go to either vroom.org or 0-3.org. And I know on 0-3's website our survey link is from the home page. And my contact information is in the participant list. So, you can just grab me and I can send you the link directly. But we know also when it comes to obtaining information about parenting, there's a trust gap. Parents desperately want advice. They want more information on becoming a better parent. But we know that they're both overwhelmed by the volume of information and conflicting advice, but they're underwhelmed by the usefulness of the information. What we learned is that just because parents turn to a particular resource doesn't mean they find it very useful. And so, the takeaway here for us is to become that trusted resource. And we do that by engaging parents as partners. And I know that all of us are thinking about innovative ways to do that. And we welcome the opportunity to discuss how to do that today with you more deeply. Thank you so much for having me. Isn't that great? I'm crying. Thank you so much, Rebecca. That was really, really fantastic. Okay, so just one more session before you guys get to sit and digest and bring your issues really to the fore for the rest of the day. And this is, I think, a real treat. I want to invite my panel to come to the stage. So, this panel was originally called Scaling Success and Learning from Failures. And I'm going to submit a change of panel idea here. We're going to call it No More Shiny New Objects. But, I mean, but seriously, this is, so those of you I've been speaking to last night and this morning are all calling for, let's get a deeper dive into what's actually going on in community-based programs, what's going on in research-informed programs, how are we thinking about whole communities. And this is the panel to begin this discussion. So, beginning on my right and she's been quoted today and should be quoted often is my friend and colleague, Ellen Galinsky. She is a remarkable person. She has taken on a new role recently. Some of you may not know. She is now the Chief Science Officer at the Bezos Family Foundation and is the mastermind behind many things that you'll hear about today including, of course, mind in the making and the next phase of the room. To her left is Dr. Jeanette Bettencourt, my colleague at Sesame Workshop. Jeanette is a Senior Vice President at Sesame Workshop whose remarkable commitment to community engagement and philanthropic impact you will be hearing about. She'll be talking a bunch about, I think, Sesame Communities which is a really, really interesting initiative that is just really getting an incredible start. Tony Raiden, who is the Chief Marketing Officer. Senior Vice President. Senior Vice President. That's wrong. Senior Vice President of the Outs of Prevention Fund. I know I looked at that and said, really? Tony, get a different role. Anyway, Tony Raiden who oversees many of the research and scaling opportunities at the Outs of Prevention Fund which is based in Chicago but operates around the country. Claudia Haynes who is a Youth Services Librarian. Youth Services Librarian and Homer Alaska Remarkable Plays. I wish that you could see more about where she comes from. And also the co-author of Becoming a Media Mentor with Ken Campbell. A book that's coming out rather soon. Next week? Oh my gosh, okay. By the way, there's another report from the libraries which we'll be mentioning in a moment. And Kristen Burns who's the Associate Director at the Grable Foundation. Claudia's going to be talking about media mentorship which is a really, really interesting concept that's getting a lot of legs. And Kristen is going to be speaking a bunch about the Remake Learning Initiative that Pittsburgh has pioneered and is a model, I think, for the rest of the country that's beginning to grow. So I'm going to stand up here because there's not enough room on the stage. But also to kind of sort of direct this really, really, you know. And everybody's sort of going to start with an opening statement of, I told them, four minutes. I'm going to keep into it. Mainly about the work from their vantage point that they're doing that's most important relating to the themes of the conference. But also to really sort of dig into some of these challenges, these big challenges and opportunities that sort of are associated with early literacy, family engagement, and the uses of technology. Lots of you have heard a bunch about Vroom over the last day. I mean, it was just on the last slide. Mind of the Making is an important partner with Vroom. And so Ellen is going to begin with a little bit of a discussion about these two really interesting programs that are scaling. And then we're going to move from there. There are also some materials that are being handed around from the really interesting community engagement work that Vroom and the Making are doing as well as Sesame that will get around to your tables. Ellen, what do you have to say? Well, I wanted to start yesterday with how much we all loved hearing the latest research from Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and again this morning from zero to three. So I wanted you to imagine a world where you could have access to that research but access to that research in ways that you could understand. And this is a digital solution. So for the last 17 years, we have been filming. Mind in the Making has been filming that kind of research and in ways that are actually understandable to people at all levels of education. You don't have to have a graduate degree to understand it. We've been taking virtual film trips to the labs of researchers and filming them so that we can share them all over the country. And these are very useful in a number of ways. When the whole issue of the 30 million word gap came out and most people were quickly interpreting that as you've got to say more words to children, we could go and film Kathy and the study that she told you about yesterday showing that it's conversational duets that make the difference. We could go film Kelly Fisher when people are sort of getting rid of play to talk about how children learn through guided play, not just necessarily through free play but guided play. And when my daughter got a text from a very well known texting to new parents organization that said, you must never baby talk to your child. And we know the difference between baby talk and parent ease and adult kind of talk. We could go film Patricia Kuhl showing in a meg machine what happens to a child's brain before they can talk. It shows you that the part that's rehearsing the speech before that they can talk is so important. But speaking parent ease, that is slowing your speech and speaking across a range of octaves in the way that Kathy was talking to you yesterday, dramatically speaking with dramatic faces makes a critical difference. And so I think this is so important. Now imagine a world where we've now filmed more than 100 of these research studies. This is a digital solution. And we can turn them into all kinds of materials that are culturally relevant. For example, we... the first thing that we did was to develop teaching modules. And we wanted to create materials taking the research to action that could result in actually measured change. We agree with you Ralph that not enough happens that brings the kind of right outcomes. So we began with our wonderful partner, Quasie Rollins and IEL. And we went to the schools. We didn't go to early childhood organizations. We went to community schools because it has a zero to eight solutions because we hate the siloed nature of the work. We went to bringing together the community leaders. This is the anti-silo effort because I've been dealt with these silos for all too long in my career. And we brought together the people who for very good reasons were warring partners in their community because they were competing with that scarcity of resources. But we brought them together to learn the modules together. They were not just doing show and tell. They were actually engaging in a learning journey, sharing a very transformational experience where they take this research and bring it to action. And we have families, as Erin said yesterday. We have families learning this with teachers because we hate the silo between the parents and the teachers. And we partnered with community schools because they also meet, we were talking yesterday, with families at a lot of risk. You can't just take a one-generational view. You have to take a two-generational view. And you have to meet the needs of families for helping them with jobs or English as a second language or healthcare. And community schools are that old-fashioned community hub that brings together services on behalf of families. And then we talked yesterday a lot about cultural relevance. And we created these modules in different communities and we'd go home and change them. We're in our 18th version of the modules. And that's because we worked with all different kinds of, again, low-income but available for all families. We worked with them to create them. And we also have then taken a sectorial approach. So we understand that kids are only in school 20% of the time. So we've worked with museums and libraries and adapted the modules from museums and libraries and 30 leaders in 30 states have been trained. We're now working, and I'm going to talk more about it in a minute, the healthcare sector. We're working now with home visiting in bringing room and mind in the making to them. We have created book tips raising a reader. For example, first book distributed over a million books for children with tips of how to read them to promote executive function skills. Zero to three talked about discipline. We've been there. We've gotten the 100 most frequently asked questions about discipline and we are creating materials to turn that we have created materials that turn those into opportunities not to manage kids' behavior but to teach skills. It's a very different asset based approach. And then finally imagine a world where we could use behavioral economics to share this research with families. And that's room. I've been with room since day one and all those 1,000 tips are in my computer. And we have understanding that parents have no time and don't have money. We've taken the moments that families always had and are betting these with tips, with an app, on products, on Goya, on Johnson & Johnson. Many more to come. So that's what we've been doing. And it's a 17-year. I hope it's not a bright, shiny new object. But we always try to keep it shiny by addressing the latest problems. Great. And we're going to get to your notion of a mistake or a failure in a minute, Jeanette. Thank you so much, Lisa and Michael, for allowing me to be here. I think I'll start off with a failure, or failures, all right, and my work of dichotomy in Sesame Street. When I introduce myself, there's a big smile of Sesame Street in a discussion of what favorite muppet may be. And yet, a lot of the work that we do around community and family engagement, usually the response, which will be on my grade zone, was, I did not know you had that. And so our greatest failure, our greatest failure has been really the comprehensive work that we do around community and family engagement. Our work is really divided into three areas. We look at early learning basics and that really includes language development, literacy, early math. We look at health, really all the components that improve children's well-being health-wise. Nutrition, physical activity, oral health, asthma, lead poisoning. And then we have a third bucket that we look at and that are those really extreme challenges that all children face, but particularly those most vulnerable, and that includes everything from grief to death of a parent, even by suicide, food insecurity, autism, incarceration. And as you look at that, what we eventually started to discover was a couple of things. Our failure was that we were doing these, what we call initiative by initiative. In other words, suddenly there was literacy, suddenly there was incarceration or autism. As opposed to, as we spent a year engaging in research, the way communities work, the way we connect with families, and secondly, the power that we may have as a brand in Sesame Street to really include and engage families, especially those hard to reach. We don't believe that we're the dual and be all, but we do believe that there's an opportunity to use us to engage and recruit families uniquely. So we received some funding to really challenge that question, how can we do things better? And we discovered a couple of different elements. One, that now our nation and our drive is, as we've all been speaking about, being very community driven. You need to customize, enter communities directly, be part of the community, get feedback from the community on how to merge within the community. Second, we also discovered something that I think from a policy point of view we need to discover and talk about a little more thoroughly. And that's the concept of what we were discovering as the organizational digital divide. We've spoken about divides, and if you notice that school divide that many years ago came about really launched an incredible policy movement. What we discovered is basically that in terms of organizations, and when we're looking at communities, we're really looking at what we call a circle of care. That element that those stakeholders that are making a difference in children's lives include health, child welfare, early childhood education, home visit, it's a comprehensive network. But then when you once go into those networks and the use of technology within that context, it's a bit more antiquated or the approach is a little more limiting. However, if you contrast that with families that we're trying to reach, what you find is a different mode of communication, even more vulnerable families. Those families are much more likely to engage in peer-to-peer communication, much more likely to look at on-vanned kind of content, also in the moment, and something that is what we're all talking about, very visual, very how-to-do. So that connection, that ability is really a gap between those servicing and those. Bethany Street and Communities is a simple model. It's aggregating all of our content much more deliberately. It's developing a digital hub that is going towards specifically for providers, looking at those three areas of content, and using our tools to go much more deeper into organizations and then finally providing something that we'll talk about later, what we call value added to professional development. And that value added, it's not always continuing education credits, but many times, hours and minutes. And I can talk about that further. Thank you. Tony. Okay, well, hello everybody. What an exciting two days. What is the Ounce of Prevention Fund? Oh, the Ounce of Prevention Fund. Let me tell you, so the Ounce of Prevention Fund, this flow is actually, has been pushing for early learning, program innovation, and system change for over 30 years. We're out of Chicago and we work nationally. And through this time, we've developed many lessons that have become foundational to our work. One of them is a strong belief that leadership and organizations are what drive effective practices. And we've now developed a whole body of work that's rooted in this insight. But I think an even more foundational belief, oh, my mic just went on. And it's actually one of the themes that I'm hearing throughout this conference is really the belief, the strong belief that engaging and empowering parents as partners is truly what's essential for lasting outcomes for children and families. And I think everyone in this room believes that. Looking at Ralph, who has told us what we all know is true, that in our field, we've had a lot of success, or some success, I should say, but there's been insufficient progress. And when we look at the outcomes, who here can disagree with that? And so I think we're coming together because we all are excited by the potential that we see in technology. And it is truly an exciting time in our field. But my point that I'd like to stress is that an even more important component that we need to be thinking about is how we can bring more rigor and creativity to how we're engaging parents and really partnering with them in the educational process. So when I look across the field, and particularly at the intersection of technology and family engagement, I do see a lot of tremendous work out there, a lot of really exciting ideas, but it also feels at times like there's a lot that's being done for parents, that there are a lot of apps that are being developed that are being thrown at parents. I've been part of it, being a judge on an innovation challenge that challenged developers around the country to develop new technological tools for parents. And at times... The word gap challenge. And just looking across what came in from around the country, at times, even the ideas that in themselves were exciting, you could tell that they were being developed in a vacuum completely removed from the parents who'd be using them. So one of the points I'd like to stress that we need to rethink as a field how we're going about developing tools, programs, initiatives, and models in really embracing the concept of co-creation with parents. And co-creation at all phases across the continuum. So just a couple examples to make this a little concrete. I'll be very quick. So in our Educator Learning Network, which is a network of exemplary birth to five schools, we're undertaking a multi-year process to pilot new practices and family engagement. And we're excited about the potential to scale some of those to the field. But at every point, we have parents in our programs deeply embedded in conceiving the work and helping to implement the work and eventually even being part of helping to evaluate the work. So that's an example. And then one other idea, and this is something I really love, last week I was in Boston meeting with a team at WGBH and they've taken co-creation to the point where they're now hosting hackathons with Head Start parents. Where they're combining the parents and developers in a room for 24 hours with lots of caffeine and letting the parents drive the new innovations for the future. So we're just really excited about that. So vision for the future is for us to really as a field become more committed to authentically engaging parents in the development of what we're creating for them. Great. Just wait. I'm also going to get Tony to talk about a WIPAP failure later. Okay. Claudia, tell us a little bit about where you're from and what you're working on. Okay. Good morning, everybody. So I am the Youth Services Librarian and media mentor at the Homer Public Library. So what does that mean? So what that means is that I support the media and literacy needs of kids and teens from birth to 18 and their families. So family engagement is a fundamental part of what I do on a daily basis, whether it's programs, every aspect of what I would do. But what that looks like in Homer, depends a lot on what Homer is. So I just need to give you a really quick look of Homer. I don't have any pictures, so I'm going to help you paint a picture. It won't be an odyssey. Please continue. It will not be an odyssey. That's for another day. But so Homer is about 220 miles south of Anchorage, Anchorage being Alaska's biggest city. It sits on Kachemak Bay. So we have this beautiful view of the water. About 5,000 people live in Homer. Our library and the community serve another 7,000 people dispersed all over. So we're kind of a hub for this area. We serve several communities across Kachemak Bay, which are only accessible by plane or boat. Two of them are populated almost exclusively by Alaska native families. We also serve many people living in small little pockets. Four communities are inhabited by Russian old believer families, whose primary language is Russian. We have two Coast Guard ships that are home based in Homer, so we have a dynamic Coast Guard community. We have at least 50% of Homer kids are qualified for free or reduced lunch. So it's kind of an interesting place. And what, several years ago, what being a librarian and a media mentor meant was, you know, we helped people find picture books, paper books. We helped them with audio books on CD or cassette even. And maybe access some databases and websites. But this crazy thing happened in 2010, right? You remember the launch of that thing called the iPad? And even in Homer, there were early and rapid adoption of mobile technology. At first it was adults, right? But then these full families started adopting mobile technology. And this was despite having spotting internet access. It was despite having low family incomes, despite working remotely for work. Like, we have a lot of fishing families. My husband drives a boat that delivers freight all over the state for half the year. We are a bedroom community for the North Slope, where all the oil industry is. And so all these reasons, they were still, well, wait a minute, maybe they were adopting this mobile technology because of those circumstances, right? We have families who are off the grid. They can't get a landline phone, right? They don't have access to public utilities. And so that kind of changed things. And so I was looking at my very unique community, and several years ago, I started talking to other librarians around the country. And while we were different, there were similarities. Quick adopters, how we were serving families was changing. And a group of us came together under the umbrella of Little Elit, which was this kind of grassroots think tank. And so we came together to share what research was out there, share promising practices, and really share successes. All right, great. So what media mentorship... You had your only chance to talk. Yeah, so what media mentorship looks like on a daily basis. And at that point, we weren't called media mentors. We have Lisa to thank for that. Because a few years ago, she gave a TEDx talk where she described who a media mentor is, and she specifically called out librarians as well suited for that role. And we said yes. The Association for Library Service to Children jumped on board with that, had a few of us write a white paper to kind of engage the library community and say this is what it should look like. And then Ken Campbell and I worked with the association over this past year to take the white paper the next step and say these are concrete examples of what it looks like to engage families and be media mentors. Great. And just so you're all, you know, taking sort of rapid notes and things like that, we're going to pull together a resource that gives links to things like the OCS paper and the new books. There's a lot of resources in the room and we're going to do some consolidation and some cohesion work to follow up with you all. That was great. Kristen. Thanks. Tell us about the Gravel Foundation. We're in Pittsburgh. We're a family foundation based in Pittsburgh. We focus on kids and learning in the Southwestern Pennsylvania region. We give roughly $10 to $12 million a year in support of kids and learning. But more importantly, I'm here to talk about the Remake Learning Network, which is a loosely organized innovation group of about 2,000 educators, artists, technologists, librarians, museum directors and others representing about 250 schools out-of-school time organizations, again, museums and libraries and early learning programs around our region in Southwestern Pennsylvania. And they're all brought together by a common desire to work together to reinvent learning for kids of all ages. Many of the folks from Pittsburgh back here are active members of the Remake Learning Network and they frankly could tell the story as well or better than I can, so I encourage you to talk with them over the course of the afternoon too. With 2,000 members, you can imagine probably 3,000 ways to tell this story. One of my favorite ones is to start with a Pittsburgh hometown hero 50 years ago. Don't panic, I'll be quick. Fred Rogers. I know. He's one of my favorites too. So for 35 years, Fred Rogers produced Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood in Pittsburgh. And 50 years ago in 1966, he started producing it there. Children's television at the time was still a very new and controversial frontier. And Fred was a visionary in that he could see that television attracted kids and he saw its potential to be used for good, for learning purposes. So fast forward to about 10 years ago in the early days of the Remake Learning Network, we again in Pittsburgh were at a new frontier in technology. There were screens, there were computers, soon there would be the iPad and mobile technology that families had in their pockets and at their fingertips. And it was controversial thinking about how kids could and should use this technology for learning. 10 years ago, Pittsburgh itself was also at a bit of a transition point becoming a city focused on innovation and research, you know, turning away from its manufacturing history. And we have the advantage of having a growing tech sector and entrepreneurs and teachers and educators who are all independently thinking about kids and learning but what we lacked at the time was a way to bring that conversation together to make those connections across sectors on behalf of kids and leverage what Pittsburgh was developing and growing to be good for kids and learning. We started with a few small gatherings of people representing different sectors. Those small gatherings grew organically until eventually we needed to find bigger spaces. We hosted a gong show where people had two minutes to talk about what I feel like I might get a gong soon. Two minutes to talk about what they were doing so that others would know and then they could seek each other out later. Eventually those relationships developed into programmatic partnerships across again all age ranges but to mention a few related to early learning I feel like I'm setting up a joke but this is true of a roboticist a head start teacher and a got together to develop an app called Message From Me which is used to help elevate the voice of kids and put the tools of creation in our hands to develop messages that they can send in real time to their parents from school to foster the home school connection. Our local PBS affiliate who's represented here as well as a representative from the National PBS office also here got together and they're working to reach out and put the robust array of PBS tools and resources and apps into the hands of kids and families who may not know where to turn for high quality resources for their kids. Buzzword Pittsburgh is the collaboration of six arts and science organizations focused on one particular neighborhood in Pittsburgh an underserved neighborhood to bring opportunities for language building into that neighborhood and help kids and families learn strategies to build language. So today Remake Learning includes a grant making stream, field building activities, knowledge sharing, communications and that never lets up, right? The relationship building is critical to building the trust that allows these collaborations to happen. I want to reiterate something that was said yesterday that technology is never meant to replace the relationships meant to augment the relationships or spark new relationships and we always think about what is technology adding to this experience that makes it better than what it would be in an analog world. We don't just want technology for its own sake but how is technology improving these relationships? So there are a couple of articles on the back table about Remake Learning if you're interested. There's also a lot of resources online at Remake Learning.org but I'll stop there for now. It's wonderful. I'm honest. A couple of thank yous. One, the Pittsburgh team here is here through the sponsorship and generosity of the Grable Foundation and we're very, very grateful to you for that. And really, I mean, this initiative has been recognized. They're the winners of, for example, the Disruptive Innovation Prize for City and Community Change that's awarded by the Disruptive Innovation Foundation. So, well done. So I'm going to sort of get around to all of you on this issue of, you know, what are you most proud of and what, you know, which mistake or which failure did you learn from? I mean, obviously it's a multi, you know, facetive, multi-sector initiative that you describe as kind of growing like topsy. Sort of starting this. But it was, I would say, planned serendipity in that sense. Like what were the mechanisms, say a little bit more about the mechanisms, lots of cities here, lots of communities who are just at the starting gate, are fundamentally important and which ones did you kind of blow and have to change mid-course, correct? Yes. So first I want to mention, there is a playbook that Remake Learning has developed, and that's online, you can find it here. Stealer City. So yeah, it has to have a football reference. So please take a look at that if you'd like to learn more about how we did this. But a couple of things came to mind about mechanisms that were useful to the process. Number one, the network was designed for the intermediaries. We had a couple of really strong intermediaries in the Sprout Fund. The AIU, the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, which is other states call them regional educational service agencies, but it's a service agency serving 42 districts in our region. And then the Pittsburgh Technology Council to a lesser degree. It was important to us not to seed it in one place. It's not Grable's, it's not Sprout's, it's not the AIO's, it's a collaborative key roles, but different roles in making it happen. Second, we learned early to embrace the messiness of the language. It's about technology, it's about STEM, it's about STEAM, it's about maker education, it's about tinkering. Adults in the learning space find different entry points, different doors to walk in through, and that's okay because eventually all those doors will lead to remaking learning for kids and to learning innovation, but people can find their own way in. A little bit messy sometimes, and that's okay. We've also come to support extensive professional development opportunities. We know that improving child outcomes depends first on influencing adults in kids' lives. And so everything from early learning teachers attending an appy hour where they can get their hands on an iPad and see what it does in a safe space where they're not in front of their kids to play first with peers and with others who are more experienced to opportunities, of course, for teachers, for principals, for superintendents. We've just funded a cohort called School Retool designed at Stanford with IDEO to help principals think about small hacks, small changes that they can make in their school to change culture. And then finally, patients, this didn't happen overnight. This is 10 years in the making, and so long-term investment, bringing other funders in to join us to, again, identify the support for remake learning, but thinking about, again, building those connections and those relationships over time that will allow the collaborations to follow. Places where we've stalled out a little bit. So equity has always been a key organizing principle for remake learning, but we were not always very good at articulating that. We could have been better. And in the beginning, some of the early adopters, those early to engage were those places, those school districts had some capacity to take on something new. And they weren't all affluent districts, but some of them, they weren't high-poverty districts either. And so to some, I think early on it looked as if equity was not a core principle. I can say now that as momentum has built and we've gotten our scene going, that the folks who are represented in the network really do represent all of Pittsburgh. And I think we've moved beyond some of those questions that were initially being asked about equity, but I wish that we had been clearer at the beginning about articulating that commitment to equity. So, Claudia, media mentors, you're one librarian, one powerful librarian in a very interesting place, but it's a movement that you're describing. It's a new professional role. It would require, I imagine, training and support and professional leadership from others within a profession that you know, I'm hazarding a guess, has its own bureaucratic constraints. How do you move from being one person in one place? What are you intending to do with the media mentorship movement and what challenges are you facing? So, I think the media mentorship movement in one aspect is really the same thing that librarians have been doing forever is meeting the media and literacy needs of families. But media mentorship has really kind of forced and kind of tugged librarians along with this idea that we're a little bit vulnerable. We don't have every single answer all the time. Things are changing rapidly and we have to learn along with families in a lot of cases, but use this expertise that we have to apply it not only to new formats but to new ways of connecting with families and the way they connect with media and literacy. So, I am one librarian but I'm one of many librarians who because of the internet are able to connect even if we can't be in the same room together. So, that sharing of ideas has really kind of pushed things forward. Having the Association for Library Service to Children which supports librarians that work with kids from birth to 14 has really been essential. And essential because there are librarians who have not been able to move past what the media has said, what's either paper books or an app. You can't have both. And so, they're struggling to move past that and see what the space is for how we can support families that use both picture books for young kids are still a fundamental part of what libraries do. But families are multimedia families and how they get information and libraries have to be also. I imagine for the cities and the states who are represented here there are other mechanisms within the library movement for convening or for sort of connecting to them. Do you want to say a word about the local structure of library leadership and the local and state structure of library leadership? I'm not sure everyone knows. So, I was thinking can I just quickly talk about three types of media mentorship and that will kind of bring in the community really quickly. So, as we've kind of evolved this work we've kind of identified three types of media mentorship which we specifically talk about in the book and one of those is informal learning which you were talking about summer learning. Libraries do a lot of summer learning and this informal learning year round and so that's an obvious one. Whether it's story time whether it's a maker program what not. Then also media advisory which again is what we've been doing for a long time. We connect the right content to the child depending on what resources they have what the child's learning experiences is. And then this idea of supported access which you were talking about not only do libraries provide access to the tool or the device but there's a team of passionate people who are willing to help them problem solve or learn how to use it in positive ways. So, those kind of three ways and so you know I think there's libraries, library systems there's state libraries that support this and then there's kind of this national level. I think this is kind of what you're going at. And so there's all sorts of variations. You know I'm a one branch library right as part of this state that has libraries all over the place that are kind of disconnected and the state library kind of brings us together and then there's this national piece and so the libraries look different depending on where we are but we do have a common core mission right and that's to support families in their media and literacy. So, message from me involve libraries in your community planning. Tony so it's like three decades of experience. You haven't done that the answer three decades but the answer has sort of been evolving it's R&D and it's not really strengthening community based practices. Your point about parent involvement is fundamental parent leadership parent co-construction. You've actually been doing some experimentation with technology that has both benefited the sort of inside program improvement work of the ounce but also you've been using it to inform the field about what's working what's not. Can you say a little bit about that? Yeah, no I'd like to. So Michael asked me to give an example of how we learn from success and failure and I'm going to integrate it in one one approach. So a couple years ago we became very intrigued by the potential of new technologies in particular texting to support parents in engaging their kids at home learning activities. We'd seen a lot of innovations that were happening in particular internationally and the health sector but it was still an open question how texting could be integrated into early learning programs. So we ended up connecting with this educational entrepreneur the serendipitous connection who had created a pretty basic SMS platform to push out prompts to parents that gave them daily tips of engaging activities they could do with their kids. We looked at the content, we liked it and quickly set up an experiment among Head Start parents in Chicago and partnered with Ellen Wartella from Northwestern who's one of the great scholars in our country. So we did this experiment it was a randomized study and after six weeks we had some really promising findings. The parents who got these texts were significantly more likely to engage with their kids in learning activities at home. It was a really impressive finding. There was this interesting finding was particularly helpful for fathers, for parents of boys and the parents themselves loved it. So on the one hand this was a cutting edge finding. We wrote it up we published an academic journal Michael and Lisa highlighted a lot in their book. And so it helped to push the field forward. However, we went back and started to really think about what we've done here and what we believe contributes to lasting change and impact. And we also started to really talk to our parents and the parents about this study in particular. And they helped to lead us to one, seeing some of the limitations we think to this approach. But to help us conceive of a new way of going forward in how we're thinking about integrating technology. So I remember this one mother who actually loved this texting program but she said, you know it really would be great if this was texting material that was connected to what our kids are learning in school and talking to us. And of course, yeah, you know she was absolutely right. And so I think we now see that we while this was promising we had missed an opportunity to be much more intentional in using the technology to deepen the connections between parents classroom and everything was going on in school. And also in the content that we were pushing out we weren't being intentional enough in using digital content that was more aligned in scope and sequence with what was happening either in classrooms with the kids or in the work with the families. So that's been an important insight that shaped how we're now thinking about technology. So another idea and this again came from the parents themselves we had this one mother who was so taken with this technology she actually approached me and said can I talk to the person who created this it would be such a great add-on if we could take pictures of what we're doing at home and share those with other parents and begin having parents talk to each other and share ideas. So she had conceived a social network that could be embedded within this model which of course was a wonderful idea and it's something that's really led us to thinking more intentionally about the potential of social media. And that's kind of a direction that we've gone into and so I guess one of the points is it's very exciting to integrate new technology and to do something innovative and new and I realize we had kind of drifted a little bit away from some of our core beliefs and one is that that the most sustainable and lasting growth and change for both kids and parents happened within the context of relationships and so for us to just be more intentional and we have an exciting new partnership with PBS Kids and National Head Start Association in which we're going to be building out a new model based on some new learning. Good. Great. So actually building off of that notion of partnerships with educational media organizations Jeanette mentioned that there's sort of an R&D phase for Sesame and the Communities and really interested in the way in which you're positioning Sesame as a coalition builder as kind of a backbone organization and I'm sure Ellen will have something to say about this in terms of her own work with Mind in the Making in the Room too but what are you learning about the appeal of not only the research-informed work that is all about what Sesame does but the attractiveness of for lack of a better word the brand and the ways in which Sesame's witty over the years leads to a more interesting or a more coherent community conversation and then like from the research that you've been doing in the first phase if you can mention like some of the must-do corrective actions that you've taken based on the work that you've been doing over the last year or so. Yeah. So in terms of coalition building what's very very interesting is exactly why we're all here are really interveners we're all stakeholders in communities really bringing people together and to again reach out in a certain way and engage parents and caregivers in this very partnership approach what we found as as an ability is that when Sesame becomes a facilitator within a community to bring different networks together it's a very hopeful and aspirational positioning in other words it's really because there is not a particular direct agenda from Sesame but rather one to bring people together to discuss how to be most effective within that community and really drive greater and deeper family engagement but also with the consideration that many of these organizations and systems are already stakeholders within those communities and how to be respectful of that. So we have had the ability to use a wonderful brand to leverage that and actually form coalitions where there were very specific common parenting messages that sort of encapsulated all the work that was going on on the other hand when we went out into the communities and looked at parents and caregivers directly what we found was a sense, ironically and again very vulnerable communities and also the awareness of trauma. We found lots of hopelessness lots of stigma, lots of lack of wanting to reach out because the community was not speaking to me directly. When somehow Sesame organizations and parents came together to sort of reduce that sense of hopelessness it raised optimism it provided a sense of hope and connection. So as we're looking forward we're looking at how to brand and really build that as an asset as a way to go into communities and use our not only brand but messaging of really what is parenting? Parenting is a trajectory. It doesn't start at birth it doesn't end at 21. It's a trajectory. It's also in the moment and so the other things that we're finding is how to deliver information to stakeholders that help connect parents and caregivers in a way that promotes very positive in the moment comforting interactions and that's what we found in the end when those parents and caregivers are most vulnerable we asked more was how do I give comfort to my child even before readiness and the other component is how do I become a parent that is comforting my child in particularly these very traumatic situations. So Ellen 17 years and you know personally I'm so proud that I was working with you especially at the beginning of those 17 years it takes a while it takes a bit of a village but it also takes an inventive strategy once you're ready for it to take off and so I'm just interested in your perspective on mind making a room have really taken off I mean room, room, room in terms of how much you know how many communities are involved in this powerful combination now why did that happen what's important for others who either want to partner with you or who have complementary strengths who can do something else to learn from your experience and where did technology play a role was it an accelerant how is the height touch you know very very extensively researched work that you've done blend effectively I think it's both low touch and high touch I don't think they can be separate the reason that I think it's taken Jackie always calls broom Jackie Bezos calls broom the opening act and mind in the making the deep dive and we think that that goes together back and forth, back and forth I think that it's the conception of your role it's the conception of your approach and then it's the decision making all along the way that have led to what we're doing we see ourselves as research adventurers that is we are happier with what we don't know than what we do know and we don't call it we started by calling it co-creation but now we call it citizen science which is that everything has to be developed back and forth with the people with whom we're learning they're learning everybody's learning and we're all on Aaron calls it a learning journey we're all on a learning journey I want to start with one big mistake that we made that led to I think a very important direction in why it's taking off when we first started it was after you and I Michael worked on the I Am Your Child campaign and helped to try to create the notion that learning didn't start at school now we've gotten down to 3 or 4 we still need to go to before birth to do this but we started by thinking about how to translate the research into action and we hired an organization that had been very successful research known to produce results and they created a curriculum for us that started this is in 2005-2006 they started by creating a curriculum and here's what I'm going to tell you now I'm telling you now I told you and we went no no no no no and we went out and we talked to families and teachers and the thing that we learned there was you can't start with the kids you have to start with the adults if we really want to change the sticks if we really want that kind of okay we're going to be back in the same room in 10 years talking about the same problems and we haven't made the impact that we want we can't start with the kids we have to start with adults taking people on a very emotional personal journey about their own executive function skills and then we get to the kids and that came now 10 years ago from talking to teachers and talking to families I want to use Mount Sinai as an example we're taking it out into the health sector we know that it's better to start with younger doctors than older doctors we were able to transform the modules for the whole hospital system but not for pediatricians and particularly not for residents because they don't have enough personal experience they're young they don't have families they remember being children but they're not parents yet by and large they've got to learn all this medical stuff they're pretty overwhelmed and so what we decided to do and this is this iterative process was to build the information and then have all child visits then have exemplar videos and then have the precepts who work with them give them feedback on did they actually look for that one good thing that the parent was doing did they, because we build on assets did they remember that the father was in the room if he was or the grandmother was in the room if she was it was not all high mom stuff and yes we've been in the fatherhood business together for a long time and he was ignored at every pediatrician visit that he did with our children even when I wasn't there he'd say tell your wife the doctor did so yeah I feel that really strongly and we're still in the middle of this adventure we're not quite sure where we're going to go one of the reasons that Mind in the Making merged with the Bezos Family Foundation was we want to move into adolescence because the early years aren't the only period of rapid brain growth the early years are critical and the context matters that is the brain growth happens in the context in which children are in in their families and in their schools and in their communities so we're working with kids now as our advisors we have an advisory group of young people we're going to be out filming the research again but we're having the researchers explain it to young people themselves and we'll be developing a curriculum for schools in ways that help them learn these skills and help them thrive so we're always on an adventure where I'm happiest when I don't know more than I do know because it's so exciting and then you begin to make a little bit of headway so I think the reason that we're growing and figuring out well should we partner with this community or that community is always what can we learn from it what difference can we make from it and can we evaluate it we do research like we're in the middle of a rapid cycle cycle trial which we'll do with them and we're also in the middle of a random school assignment trial so we're learning from this to figure out both from our own experience but from the research what we can continue to do better so okay on this subject of no new shiny objects and keeping in mind Ralph's vision of ten years that we want to avoid let's talk for a couple minutes about making you guys even more adventurous let's make you venture some so yesterday there was a panel and Jeanette you missed it but about ESSA and what are some of the real flexibilities and possibilities in using ESSA in sort of an integrated visionary way for young children at the beginning of that developmental sequence as Ellen just described okay we've got five million dollars to invest in family engagement family strengthening you know early language development programs where does tech fit into there if at all and all of you don't need to answer this but if you were investing in this area with the opportunities that ESSA and public private partnerships might provide I'm going to begin with Kristen because she's an investor what are you betting on and is technology a must have or a nice to have attempting in response to this question is to say see my grand history which you fancy this is what we do we think about this question a lot I'm going to go back to Fred Rogers he believed then and we believe now that technology is a medium that has great potential for good or not if we neglect it and I think that it's time right now for us to invest in making sure that technology is co-opted for good for these kids that's co-opted for good learning experiences for families so I don't think it's just a nice to have I think it's critical but you've created something of an umbrella for a whole range of different investments so I mean think about that because it's unusual others like your investors now Jeanette I would really love to see something that we saw around schools and when we started looking at technology was really a technology or media analysis on the state of media analysis within schools we have not done that from an organizational point of view really what is the state across our nation of key stakeholder systems that are influencing young children and what is the state of technology and I believe that if we're looking at that on a national level we have an opportunity to then really reflect what we use and how we use it and what the needs are any questions or comments from the audience no that's interesting wait so that's fine because I actually have a we need to get a microphone your way okay good even though it's for the live stream thank you so as we look at the issues of technology and the very very different kinds of families our small people are growing up across the country one of the continuing questions that I keep stumbling across is what do we do about the cost of data when we're talking about digital divide and digital literacy just simply having access to something in your home so you can play with it means you have a growing level of comfort and as we see some small programs here and there about enabling lower income families not necessarily families that are in transition or distress and so when I think about what can we break or how do we re-envision a future my question to you is how are we looking at this question of internet and cost and access to data I don't know whether anybody up here is thinking about that topic but are you I think libraries are a big part of this discussion because in my library I can right now think of multiple families who come to the library not only to just use our internet connections but they come to specific programs because their kids don't have access to those devices or to internet at home they specifically become because of that supported access and so that makes the playing field more level when those kids go to school and they're in school with kids who know how to use those devices or know how to search for things I mean that's a fundamental thing for school that a lot of kids get before they get there and so we're helping level that playing field well we're not part of the discussion of cheaper internet, cheaper data in the meantime we're offering that option to people and it's in that informal learning environment so kids are able to kind of and families are able to use it in the way that they need and then get that so again we're not part of that internet that cost of internet data but in the meantime we are an institution that's kind of a community anchor that provides options for people who can't get it elsewhere One more, no that's okay just go ahead Elaine Hi, thank you it's a great panel I think sort of following Ralph's candor I've been thinking as you've been understanding on three questions so one is how does change happen for children in our country and right now because I think we're talking about three critical things language development film engagement and digital but if we don't concurrently discuss how change occurs we may just drive the wrong car so it's sort of the verb under this if we can figure that out and another is why did the family get pushed out what was our role in it how much does institutional racism and class bias have to do with it and what's happening now that we're beginning to realize that we need to bring the family back and if we don't look at how and why the family got pushed out decades ago can we even get to bring in the family back in if we don't understand how it happened and then thirdly how do parents lead feel they have the right to lead this information and work peer to peer in a social capital way and I've shared this before in other discussions so forgive me if you've heard it before but I've always been taken by Ed Ziegler and Sherry Hayes study when they studied policy that moved in congress for children and they came up with this little list that feels to me somehow important in this conversation they studied successful passage of bills in congress like WIC and they were studying so what were the variables what happened and I feel like this is somehow a core ingredient though I'm not sure exactly how so they said nothing moves for children in this country without a constituency values media research a leader they called it an actor and context and so I wonder for us where is the constituency and what's the current context okay so we're gonna we're gonna thank you Elaine we need to move on but let's who wants to respond very quickly I I wrote a book a very long time ago called the six stages of parenthood where I talked to parents all over the country and tried to develop a theory about how adults grow and change not just how children grow and change and this was in the 80's so it was a long time ago one of the things that I found is that there is competition among anyone who's involved with children so it can be a mother and a father we talked about women pushing the fathers away in the zero to three panel the tension between teachers and parents I think is normal I think we should just understand that it's normal for anyone who gets involved with a child to want to push the other people away and say I'm the only one who knows I'm the best I call it parent as Elaine knows because we've been doing this together a long time racist sex this ages parent but the but I think that we have to combat the parentist prejudice in a sense and for adults to understand that we do normally push other people away therefore how do we get beyond this normal developmental phase and work to come together I think that the way we have tried and this is trial and error this is a citizen science to bring parents and teachers together which scares the hell out of them basically should I say that on the English stream but anyway it scares professionals that have to learn vulnerably alongside of parents and vice versa but when they do it and we are make in the 18 communities and states where we're working we are bringing families and teachers to share the science together have them set goals together and learn together then they become the constituents for change so it's in the way that smart start was able to outlast different governors and different political regimes where you had a real constituent for change that was very local and very community based in the way that you do with parent leadership okay so I think it's a great segue for the discussions that we're going to have in our smaller groups I can't tell you how much I appreciate the insights and the leadership of this panel and can we all just give them a round of applause