This week, I’ve been in Oakland, California. This is my second trip out to California in less than 3 months, and I love having any excuse to make it over to the West Coast (or the Left Coast, as some of my friends like to call it.)

Along with having a mini-vacation, I traveled to Oakland to participate in the 2012 Strong Families Summit, hosted by Forward Together. Strong Families is a 10-year national initiative to change how people feel and think about families, and how lawmakers can develop more policy that is reflective of the fact that many families do not fit the stereotypical image of the nuclear family. Attending the Summit gave me an even better understanding of what Strong Families represents.

The Summit brought in over 130 individuals (representing themselves, their families, communities, and organizations) to collaborate, engage, and build more around the core principles of Strong Families: building alignment and synergy based on the work organizations and communities are already doing and leveraging the unique strengths of this work, cultivating valued-based relationships that build foundation and capacity building, and expanding opportunities and resources to move beyond their community and organizational needs in order to work collaboratively.

There was so much rich information, tools, and conversations I received at the Strong Families Summit. Here are some of the highlights:

Policy Priorities and Analysis

Strong Families is expanding the definition of “family” by generating a cultural shift towards broad public support for policies on the local, state, and national level that support more families that have the least amount of resources and are the most under attack, including low-income families, immigrant families, LGBTQI families, single parent families, young parents, and families of color. There were several strategy sessions, including “Building Momentum for Strong Families Policies”. We were given two awesome tools: Policy Priorities and Policy Analysis. We were able to choose which area we wanted to focused on–LGBTQI, reproductive justice, Indigenous, immigrant rights, environmental justice, criminalization of families, safety nets/budgets, youth–and discuss what we feel should be priorities for policy makers.

Policy Priorities

The following questions gave us the opportunity to generate conversation:

1) The policy, administrative rule or budget line item we are trying to pass or stop is:_________________________________

2) The decision-maker(s) for this policy, administrative rule or budget line item is/are:_____________________________

I intentionally came to the Summit to focus more on youth, so here’s an example:

The policy, administrative rule or budget line item we are trying to pass or stop is: We are trying to pass federal and state comprehensive sex education for young people.

The decision-maker(s) for this policy, administrative rule or budget line item is/are: United States Congress. Congress continues to allocate million in federal funds for abstinence-only-until marriage programs.  (more…)