Ms Sarah Haight:

I am the director of 2Gen practice at Ascend at the Aspen Institute. It is an honour to join the Chairman, Deputies, Senators and colleagues from Washington DC on the ancestral land of the Piscataway people. On behalf of our founding executive director, Anne Mosle, and our managing director, Marjorie Sims, along with our network partner colleagues at the Crann Centre, I thank the committee for this opportunity to speak about Ascend at the Aspen Institute and the two generation, or 2Gen, approach.

In 2010, in the aftermath of the great recession our founder, Anne Mosle, set out to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty and intentionally foster the well-being of children and the adults in their lives together. Our work from day one has honoured lived expertise and encompassed racial, gender and economic equity with an intersectional lens.

Ascend at the Aspen Institute brings together diverse leaders working across systems and sectors to create a society where every family flourishes. We have been building a national network to surface and spread innovative 2Gen approaches in communities across the United States. Today, the Ascend network includes 479 partners in every state in the US, as well as DC and Puerto Rico, and now reaches across the globe through our only European partner, the Crann Centre, and two other international partners. Together this movement of parents, practitioners, policymakers and philanthropists are working to transform systems impacting more than 10 million families.

Many programmes focus solely on the child or the parent, but 2Gen approaches do not focus exclusively on either a child’s development or isolate an adult’s needs, because their wellbeing is interconnected and interdependent. 2Gen approaches aim to integrate services and supports to move the whole family forward, benefitting both the child and the adults in their lives. 2Gen approaches recognise whole family units, as families define themselves. By design, we seek to understand the multiple dimensions of family life and consider a variety of pathways for promoting effective outcomes for everyone. We work with families as experts and meaningfully engage parents and caregivers in designing policies and programmes that affect them. Our goal is to develop holistic, integrated and equity-focused solutions.

A 2Gen approach can take many forms in policy and practice. One example of such an approach would be a care centre providing young children with early childhood education opportunities while also offering a workforce development programme for parents and caregivers. The Crann Centre is undertaking this important work by recognising the needs of both children with disabilities and their caregivers.

In 2012, in partnership with a group of philanthropic partners, Ascend published the Two Generations, One Future report that laid the groundwork for the growth and development of the 2Gen field. Over the last decade of accomplishments and learnings from our network, Ascend has advanced 2Gen approaches with more than ten US Governors' Cabinets, more than 100 fellows from across human services, non-profit, and philanthropic systems, and has engaged more than 60 parent advisers to translate their lived experience into new policies and programmes. We are thrilled to be partnering with the Crann Centre on advancing 2Gen for families with disabilities and creating a new way of working to lift up these families' strengths and centre their voices in the systems designed to serve them.