2025 National Summit - Reach Out and Read

Strengthening Connections Among Health Care, Families, and Communities to Improve Support for Positive Early Relationships

Hosted by Reach Out and Read and Nurture Connection
Nov. 5-6, 2025 | Washington, D.C.

A national conversation is taking shape around how to build a society where all families can thrive. At the core is a vision of strong, connected communities that nurture healthy family life, ensure access to essential resources, foster Early Relational Health, and support families by offering space for learning, reflection, healing, and hope — elements urgently needed in today’s world.

In November 2025, Nurture Connection, Reach Out and Read, and the American Academy of Pediatrics will build a bold coalition for learning, convening a diverse cohort of communities and partners in Washington, D.C. Elevating community and parent voice, together with leaders from health care partners and other early childhood systems, we will host facilitated conversations on strengthening connections among families, health care, and communities to support positive early relationships.

This gathering will advance efforts to demonstrate how place-based, community-powered partnerships can transform systems and promote lifelong well-being for children and families. The summit will help shape a relational framework to inform research, policy, and practice — centered on parent voices and driven by communities.

Convene a “coalition of networks united for shared learning” — leading, innovative organizations that represent the nation’s early childhood community, child health systems, and networks of public and private investments — to share progress and meet the moment.

Discuss past, current, and emerging activities that advance policy, practice, and research in early childhood and child health system building, including breakthroughs in lived-experience impacts for early childhood system building with elevated family leadership, power sharing, and decision making.

Advance the wide-scale promotion of Early Relational Health by the innovative and evidence-informed activities of parent leadership, community collaborations, and the medical home.

The Summit will deliver:

A working coalition of organizations, families, and communities that seeks to advance child and family well-being, flourishing, and relational ecosystem change.

Identify an agenda for future coalition vision that:

Supports growth and development of a learning community of ERH-focused place-based communities.

Provides a baseline recommendation for Bright Futures and other relevant clinical guidance about relational ecosystem themes generated from families, communities, providers, and early childhood system builders.

Explores the collective adoption of meaningful population-level indicators of flourishing to measure community-based impacts of local activities.