Agenda
Summit Day 1
Thursday, October 22, 2026 | 8:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.
8:00 - 8:55 a.m.
Registration & Breakfast
9:00 - 10:15 a.m.
Opening Plenary
Birthing Our Futures: Indigenous Knowledge, Ancestral Lineages, and Food Sovereignty
How Indigenous communities are protecting ancestral wisdom, reclaiming their histories, and creating new possibilities for generations to come.
10:15 - 10:30 a.m.
Break & Transition
10:30 - 11:30 a.m.
Concurrent Sessions: Block A
Education Panel
Radical Belonging: Reimagining Early Childhood Leadership Through Community, Workforce, and Collective Care
This signature panel brings together two visions of community power: civic engagement that equips people to shape their democracy and meet their communities' immediate needs, and the belief that the village itself is the intervention, holding the wisdom, relationships, and cultural strengths that help children and families thrive. Exploring how informed, active civic participation and asset-based community leadership reinforce one another, and invite participants to shift power, build authentic partnerships, and turn community strengths into sustainable, equitable change.
Community Food Systems Workshop
Strategies for the Solidarity Economy
An overview of the Be, Build, Block Theory of Change, with small-group breakouts that use problem trees to trace the root causes of food insecurity and build narratives that reframe how communities talk about and organize around hunger.
Birth Justice Workshop + Film
"Go Back and Get It": Sankofa & Cultural Revitalization as a Source of Knowledge and Healing
Rooted in Sankofa wisdom to go back and get what is precious before moving forward, this storytelling workshop shares the Sankofa Infant Mental Health History Project, retrieving the under-told stories of providers and communities of color in the care and healing of infants and families and inviting participants to recenter healing, ancestry, and culture in their work.
Relational Health Workshop
Centering Liberation: Partnering Across African Communities to Reimagine Reproductive Care
Examine how relationships, knowledge, and power shape reproductive health initiatives in African communities across the globe. Consider approaches to build reciprocal, liberatory partnerships that center community expertise and reimagine reproductive care
11:30 - 11:40 a.m.
Break & Transition
11:40 - 12:40 p.m.
Concurrent Sessions: Block B
Creative Arts & Healing Experiences Workshop
Time Out! Press Play!
A playful, hands-on session that reignites creativity, connection, and engagement through the art of play, sending participants home with ready-to-use tools of joy for any learning space.
Community Food Systems Learning Lab
Seeing What's Already There, Building What Comes Next: Asset Mapping for Neighborhood Wellness
This interactive learning lab brings together asset mapping, a real-world case study of the St. Louis Avenue Wellness District, and practical planning tools to help participants identify overlooked community strengths, explore how assets can be connected across sectors, and imagine new possibilities for neighborhood wellbeing.
Birth Justice Workshop
When the Mission Outgrows the Leader
An interactive workshop that reframes burnout, turnover, and stalled progress as a capacity problem rather than a commitment problem, giving leaders, organizers, educators, and healers language for what quietly drains them and practical tools to protect the energy, systems, and relationships their radical dreams depend on, with one Mission-Rich action to carry forward.
Relational Health Workshop
Building Beloved Community: A Parent-Led Framework for Collective Action, Healing, and Systems Change
Altorice Frazier and Erica Beverett
An interactive workshop introducing the Beloved Community Framework from Parents Engaging Parents New Jersey, a parent-led approach that centers trust, healing, shared leadership, and civic engagement to move communities beyond transactional engagement toward authentic partnership and lasting systems change.
12:40 - 1:30 p.m.
Lunch
1:30 - 2:30 p.m.
Concurrent Sessions: Block C
Education Workshop
Curiosity and Connection: Using Storytelling to Build Belonging Across Difference
An interactive workshop from Everyday Boston on how curiosity, storytelling, and deep listening can bridge differences and build belonging, giving participants hands-on practice in story exchange, active listening, and follow-up questions that help people feel genuinely seen and heard across lines of difference.
Community Food Systems Workshop
What Feeds a Community Beyond Food?
Angel Hammon, Carl Harrison Jr., Shy Palmer, and Alexandra Sossa
An interactive workshop using personal food stories to uncover the memory, knowledge, and belonging that hold a community food system together, and to identify what participants can carry back into their own work.
Birth Justice Workshop
The Village Begins Here: Community-Led Peer Support
An interactive workshop on how community-led peer support can strengthen maternal and infant wellbeing by fostering belonging, reducing isolation, and weaving together peer supporters, parents, doulas, breastfeeding counselors, providers, and local organizations into sustainable ecosystems of care.
Relational Health Facilitated Discussion
From Black Joy to Fatherhood
A facilitated conversation connecting Black Boy Joy as a community protection strategy with father-centered community building, tracing how belonging, leadership, and wellbeing are cultivated across the lifespan from boyhood into fatherhood. Craig Aarons-Martin and Anthony Henderson draw on the “village blueprint” and Father Engagement frameworks and invite participants into dialogue about how schools, families, and organizations can affirm identity, engage fathers as assets, and build the village that helps Black boys and men thrive.
2:30 - 2:40 p.m.
Break & Transition
2:40 - 3:40 p.m.
Concurrent Sessions: Block D
Education Workshop
Centering Youth Voice: Moving from Asset-Based Language to Authentic Empowerment of Immigrant and Undocumented Students
An interactive workshop on centering youth voice and moving from asset-based language to the authentic empowerment of immigrant and undocumented students.
Community Food Systems Panel
Organizing Toward a Food Sovereign Detroit: Reflections on the Dream Tank Event
A panel of Detroit community food leaders and graduate food systems fellows reflects on a recent Dream Tank leadership retreat, where they gathered to “dream big, organize smart, and build the future of food together,” then invites the audience to imagine solutions for food and nutrition systems that are democratized, decolonized, and community-centered.
Birth Justice Lightning Talks
Reclaiming the Seeded Lineage: From Postpartum Nourishment to Neighborhood Food Power
Femeika Elliott and Cassandra Loftlin
Spotlight talks exploring the connections between land, growing, and nourishment, from reclaiming food traditions that support birth and postpartum care to transforming neighborhood yards into sources of fresh food, education, and community food power.
Relational Health Facilitated Discussion
Flourish: Centering Connection in Perinatal Care for People With Substance Use Disorders
Lauren Graber
Lessons from Flourish and the Perinatal Substance Use ECHO about creating relational, trauma informed, and stigma free care for pregnant and parenting people with substance use disorders. This talk explores how centering trust, connection, and relationships can transform perinatal care and strengthen support for parents and families.
3:40 - 4:00 p.m.
Break & Transition
4:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Day 1 Closing Plenary
Building the Movement's Capacity to Care: Healing Justice, Immigrant Organizing, and Collective Power.
This conversation invites us to reflect on what it means to move toward collective systems of care and how we can build the power needed to confront the challenges of our times. Drawing on ancestral sacred traditions and the healing justice work emerging from the immigrant rights movement through the Latinx Therapists Action Network, this plenary explores what becomes possible when we understand healing as collective and political practice. Together, we will consider how collective care can strengthen our movements, sustain our communities, and shape how we organize for liberation.
Day 1 Evening | Extended Programming
5:30 - 7:00 p.m.
Boston Breastfeeding Coalition - 10 Year Anniversary Reception
Summit Day 2
Friday, October 23, 2026 | 8:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
8:00 - 8:55 a.m.
Registration & Breakfast
9:00 - 10:15 a.m.
Day 2 Opening Plenary & Keynote Speaker
We Will Rest! We Will Dream Ourselves Free
Tricia will present an immersive lecture on the principles of rest as resistance with a guided collective daydreaming activation. This is a moment to uplift the power of dreaming and imagination in our community care practices.
10:15 - 10:30 a.m.
Break & Transition
10:30 - 11:30 a.m.
Concurrent Sessions: Block E
Creative Arts & Healing Experiences Workshop
P.A.U.S.E.D: Equipped to Declutter
A reflective, collage-making session on the power of P.A.U.S.E to quiet self-doubt and decision fatigue, reminding participants that the space they occupy is not ill-fitted, just cluttered.
Community Food Systems Panel
Community Power in Practice: Research, Policy, and Engagement as Tools for Change
Three practitioners working across community-based research, policy and advocacy, and community engagement explore how these disciplines reinforce one another to build lasting community power, followed by a hands-on skills-and-assets mapping breakout.
Participatory Research Panel
Evaluation in Two Languages: Today's Reflections on 50 Years of Supporting Greater Boston's AAPI Communities
BCNC program leaders offer an honest, mid-stream look at Operation Evaluation, exploring what culturally-responsive, bilingual evaluation demands of a multilingual, multi-program organization across 50 years of serving Greater Boston’s AAPI communities, and inviting attendees to trade practical evaluation moves across difference.
Relational Health Lightning Talk
Beyond the Budget: Whole-Family Wellbeing
This interactive Learning Lab explores how stress, trauma, emotional regulation, and executive functioning shape financial wellbeing, while introducing practical tools to support whole-family economic mobility.
11:30 - 11:40 a.m.
Break & Transition
11:40 - 12:40 p.m.
Concurrent Sessions: Block F
Education Workshop
"Are You Okay?" Isn't Enough: Healing the Village Through Collective Care and Moving Communities from Surviving to Thriving
Moving beyond “Are you okay?” this session explores collective care as a pathway to fostering belonging, psychological safety, and healing, offering practical strategies to strengthen support for children and families and help communities move from surviving to thriving.
Community Food Systems Workshop
Food as Ceremony: Ways to Assert Who We Are
Cami Fredericks, Grant Gliniecki, paradyse oakley, and Dulce Mirian Porras
A hands-on, experiential workshop in which we join together in altar-building, collective art-making, and eating as a practice of ceremony — honoring ancestors and asserting who we are.
Birth Justice Lightning Talk
The Village Around Birth: Community-Led Solutions for Maternal and Infant Health
A featured Birth Justice session bringing together three community leaders for short spotlight talks on culturally affirming, community-led maternal and infant health, followed by shared discussion. Featuring: “Building Beloved Communities Through Queer Birth Work and Reproductive Justice” (Tayla Kelly); “Breastfeeding & Pumping Support: Community-Centered Strategies to Help Families Meet Their Feeding Goals” (Brittany Regan); and “Birth Justice in Action: Community Solutions to Maternal Health Inequities” (Brandy Watts).
Relational Health Workshop
Healing Beyond Systems: Community-Centered Approaches to Supporting Immigrant and Refugee Families
A community-centered workshop exploring approaches that heal beyond systems and support the wellbeing, dignity, and belonging of immigrant and refugee families.
12:40 - 1:30 p.m.
Lunch
1:30 - 2:00 p.m.
Poster Session
2:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Concurrent Sessions: Block G
Education Workshop
Expanding our Understanding of Power to Actualize Our Radical Dreams
This session invites participants to expand their understanding of personal and collective power, explore how fear can hinder our capacity to dream and act differently, and identify concrete ways to deepen relationships, build trust, and actualize our radical dreams.
Community Food Systems Workshop
There is No Agriculture Without Culture
In this hands-on workshop, program managers and aspiring community organizers learn the co-design process and map the networking community already present in their region, so the food systems they build grow from local culture.
Birth Justice Learning Lab
Planting Intentions: Using Creative Expressions to Cultivate Community Healing
An interactive arts-based learning lab using storytelling, grounding practices, and a symbolic planting activity to show how creative expression can support emotional wellness and community healing, sending participants home with replicable, culturally responsive strategies for schools, youth programs, and community spaces.
Relational Health Lightning Talks
The Ties That Sustain Us: Connection, Dignity, and Relational Wellbeing
Christy Moulin, Vicente Sanabria, Grace Ejiwale, and Lathan Singleton
Spotlight talks on connection, care, and the relationships that sustain wellbeing, followed by shared discussion. Featuring: "Aligned Masculinity" (Vicente Sanabria); "From Lost in the System to System Navigator: Building Community-Led Health Navigation Programs" (Lathan Singleton); and "Collective Calm: Lessons from the Caregiver Assist Line of Massachusetts Launch" (Christy Moulin).
3:00 - 3:10 p.m.
Break & Transition
3:10 - 4:30 p.m.
Day 2 Closing Plenary
Held by the Elements: Circle Keeping for Community Healing - Remembering What Sustains Us
What holds us when the world feels uncertain? Through ori, earth, water, fire, wind, and iron, Ruth Ifakemi Jeannoel invites us into a collective experience of reflection, connection, care and healing. Drawing from circle keeping, ancestral wisdom, and the elements of nature, we will explore what sustains us, what helps us persist, and what becomes possible when we remember that we are held by something larger than ourselves. Through sensory experience, reflection, and conversation, this closing gathering invites us to carry forward what we have tended together and imagine how we will rise.