Whenever my parents went on a trip, they always brought home little tchotchkes for my brother and me. My brother collected key chains, and I collected pens and buttons. Over the years, our collections have grown to catalog the stories that my parents had attached to their memory of a place.
When the Steering Committee of the Early Relational Health (ERH) Funders Community set out to plan the 2026 Summit, our goal was to send people home with just that: a token, a story, and a memory.
The purpose of this year’s Summit was to strengthen the connections among our funder peers, find areas of shared interest, and discover potential opportunities for collaboration that advance our individual strategies and the field of early relational health at large.
Our group was welcomed by local leaders from organizations across Central Texas, who helped catalyze conversations about how funders and practitioners can foster and support relational health in early childhood across a variety of sectors and settings. The next day, we heard from Dr. Chan Hellman, Ebony Underwood, Michelle Culver, Frances Messano, and Hélène Biandudi Hofer, who offered thought-provoking presentations about the science of hope, the impact of parental incarceration, the challenges and opportunities of AI, and the art of good conflict.
These conversations and insights helped ground our final day together and surfaced ideas for shared learning and collaboration for our group to undertake in the year ahead.
Aside from the Austin-inspired souvenirs, here are some reflections that attendees took home with them:
Hope can be intentionally cultivated and is a measurable outcome.
If well-being is the outcome and hope is the process, what are the strategies and initiatives that we support to get there?
There are so many different angles and approaches to tackling the same essential problem, but maybe narrative change can unite them to lead to the systemic change we’re working towards.
Families impacted by the justice system deserve connection.
Imagination paired with action is the vehicle to hope.
Who is investing in the capacity of community-based providers to innovate with and embrace values-driven AI and a tool to accelerate and increase impact?
Good conflict is a gift and a muscle that needs to be practiced.
I need to absorb the scope and scale of families impacted by parental incarceration.
The ERH Funders Community is full of professional commonality but is also a space where colleagues are friends.
Connection and collaboration are imperative to move the needle forward.
Reflecting on her role as a Steering Committee member of the Summit, Michelle Castillo of the St. David’s Foundation, spoke of her experience: “As someone still relatively new to philanthropy, it was deeply meaningful to be in a space with funders thinking about early relational health through the intersections of maternal and birth equity and immigrant communities, and to begin what felt like the start of longer-term learning relationships. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be part of that space, and for the relationships it helped spark.”
Ashley Ahlers of the John Rex Endowment also echoed this sentiment as a Steering Committee Member, “The best part of the conference was that it was small enough to connect and form meaningful relationships with others. I could share my thoughts and listen to what others had to say, creating a real dialogue. I was also surprised by how interested people were in building narrative infrastructure. I don’t often find places where I can gauge interest and create community around a change like that, so it was truly refreshing.”
When I arrived home after the Summit ended, just in time to have dinner with my husband and our kids, I was reminded of a lesson that I learned from my three days in Austin: Hope is a social gift that happens in relationships, and agency is a key ingredient of hope.
I’m grateful that I get to do this work alongside so many inspiring practitioners and funders across the country to advance early relational health for every child and their parents, and the ERH Funder Community is a gift that continues to give me hope in this pursuit.
