Be Strong Families is closing its chapter as coordinator of Illinois' Youth Advisory Board network — and opening a new one. CEO Kathryn Leigh Goetz reflects on a decade of youth-led advocacy, policy wins, and what comes next for BSF's growing youth leadership work nationwide.

More than 850 people filled the Robert Crown Community Center for our 3rd Annual Evanston is Family Strong Back to School Family Fun Fest. We gave away 1,000 backpacks, 500 books, and a whole lot of joy. Here's a look at the day that reminded us what community really looks like.

For the first time in over six years, we came together in person. Our staff-board retreat centered on equity leadership included a full-group viewing and dialogue around Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequity, reaffirming our commitment to anti-racism.

Most adolescent development charts were written with a narrow lens. BSF's new version expands that lens deliberately by dropping binary gender language, challenging the myth that teens must separate from family to grow up, and naming the awakening to structural inequality as a normal part of adolescence. A draft open for community feedback.

In 2019, BSF trained 1,500 people across 25 states, collected feedback from nearly 2,500 Café participants, and welcomed new Certified Training Partners. A look back at a landmark year for the Parent Café movement.

What Di discovered about giving is that it’s so much more than a good feeling; giving is an act of service, a way of uplifting humanity. Giving requires that we open our heart and be willing to share from a place of vulnerability because we see a need in others that is a reflection of our own self. Giving is also a powerful way to support the people and causes we believe in and to assist them in advancing their hopes and dreams.

Eighteen months of conversations, World Cafés, and Appreciative Inquiry led to our 2020-2025 strategic plan that charts BSF's next chapter and makes youth development a core programmatic priority for the first time. Here's how our process of Discovery, Dreaming, and Designing plan together and what it means for the organization.

Everyone is recovering from something. That insight is at the heart of BSF's new Recovering Together Cafés — a peer-to-peer conversation model co-created with recovery organizations to meet people where they are and affirm that healing is possible regardless of where someone is on their journey.

Be Strong Families has been hosting Parent Cafés and teaching others how to host them since we began in 2012. Our original Parent Café deck of questions was bilingual, in Spanish and English. As we've evolved, we've worked with communities to translate Be Strong Families Parent Cafés into other languages and to develop Parent Café decks specific to cultural needs.