Our 10th annual Children's Rights Summit was hosted by Salesforce in San Francisco, with an option to join virtually. This year, we lifted up some of the most important issues that the child rights community has focused on through a decade of Summits.
- In My Shoes, the Youth Experiential Learning Simulation helped many of us – both those experienced as well as those new to the work – understand the perspective of young people navigating a system that often feels like it was not designed to help youth succeed. Special thanks to the Bigglesworth Family Foundation for making that possible.
- Mental health was a focus because, as we learned from experts at the California Children's Trust and the Youth Law Center, children in systems are lacking the community-based resources that the system could provide if great advocates work to secure them.
- Benefits and social services can be the glue that holds an older youth's life together but only if every community takes advantage of the ways to secure those benefits for the most vulnerable children, as we learned from experts at the Public Law Center and the Youth Law Center.
- Education is where most children should spend the majority of their time and energy, but we learned from advocates from the Youth Law Center and Equal Justice Works that this requires advocacy to stop push out and discrimination against black and brown children, and engagement and enforcement of laws to meet the needs of youth experiencing homelessness.
- For LGBTQ+ children and youth, the landscape of laws and practices aimed to discriminate against them and harm them grows daily across the nation. It is only through support of important organizations in the fight against these dangers like Lambda Legal and their partners on the ground that will help reverse this course.
We look forward to our next Children's Rights Summit in 2024.