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.

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 November 2018, we gathered staff, board members, parent leaders, and partners in Pasadena to dream about our preferred future and to ask our community to help shape it. Here's a look at where we were headed.

In July 2018, Be Strong Families started a year-long strategic planning process using appreciative inquiry, under the expert leadership of Yoland Trevino, founder of Transformative Collaborations International. The power of appreciative inquiry is that it taps into the stories of what an organization’s members believe is best and how those stories can be used to create new futures for the organization.