Since 2020, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Casey Family Programs, and the William T. Grant Foundation have partnered to revolutionize child welfare. This session presents a National Research Agenda and an Equitable Framework for shifting power dynamics by centering those with Lived Experience. Attendees will gain strategies ensuring Lived Experience partners are compensated as true collaborators, not symbolic participants. We will debut our Capacity Building Tool, an adaptable framework providing actionable steps for teams pursuing bold systems change. Participants will leave with cost-effective resources and a practical roadmap for building a 21st-century well-being system that treats Lived Expertise as a core pillar of systemic change.
Date: June 11, 2026
Time: 10am-11:30am PT; 11am-12:30am MT; 12pm-1:30pm CT; 1pm-2:30pm ET
Meeting Link:
Presenters
Alisha Agee-Cooper received a master’s degree in social work from the University of Washington and has a Clinical Social Work License (LICSW). Alishia works as a Race Equity Social Justice Administrator for the Washington Department of Children, Youth and Families. She is a member of the Birth Parent National Network with the Children's Trust Fund and an alumnus of the Washington State Parent Advisory Council.
She sits on two boards: Tacoma Probono and Rainer Scholars. Alishia is an innovative collaborator who utilizes her lived, educational and professional experience to promote social justice, race equity, and inclusion of those impacted by systems to participate in the solution, aiming to increase positive outcomes for children and families. Alishia has over 13 years of child welfare experience and lived experience as a parent who has been impacted by the child welfare system. She collaborates across sectors to promote the inclusion of lived experts in all child welfare processes from research to employment. She creates space for critical conversations with community members and organizations using a wide lens offering unique perspectives to presenting issues facing the impacts of child welfare on the community.
Robyn Robbins is a Resource/Foster parent from Northern California who has been supporting families and their medically fragile infants in the Child Welfare System for over 20 years. During this time her focus has expanded to include advocacy, training, mentorship and teamwork specifically geared to help create strength based, solution focused practice and policies that allow families to heal and thrive.
At the national level she is actively involved in speaking engagements, trainings and participation in groups such as the National Birth and Foster Parent Partnership and others that focus on relationship building and community collaboration practices that thoroughly embed people with lived experience in order to create successful child and family outcomes. At her local county level she and her birth parent mentor partner have succeeded in creating a partnership program that now functions as a regular unit in their county child welfare department. She thoroughly believes that children and families deserve racial equity and strong loving homes and communities where they will thrive.