As we move into 2025, we know we have a lot of important work ahead of us. While administrations may change, along with their policies and priorities, organizations like the Center for the Study of Social Policy must not lose sight of this simple truth: the hopes, aspirations, and needs of families across the country have not changed with the recent election. People still need economic security, supportive and affirming health care, and to thrive in their families and communities with every child supported by loving and caring adults.
Our commitment is unwavering and we must create pathways forward—toward a brighter future, one that fully supports all of our people. Undoubtedly, there will be many challenges ahead. We need to use new strategies to provide opportunities for every family to achieve their goals. However, even with those challenges, there are also so many important opportunities to advance the policies that young people and families consistently tell us they need.
Now more than ever, we must continue to do the hard work of justice; to advance our shared vision of a society that truly has health justice, economic justice, and family autonomy, so that all families can lead happy and healthy lives. In that spirit, CSSP recently shared our top five priorities for the coming year in our 5 for 25 Campaign. These include:
- Pursuing unrestricted cash or guaranteed income, to ensure that young people and families can flexibly meet their needs;
- Affirming LGBTQIA+ youth by developing programming that actively celebrates young people’s full identities and eliminating policies and practices that marginalize any aspect of them;
- Advancing culturally responsive supports designed by and with the families they are intended to help, and that reflect families’ cultural values and customs;
- Supporting young children and valuing care providers by supporting the full variety of care arrangements families rely on and ensuring all providers are financially supported as they offer loving and enriching care; and,
- Making well-being a priority by focusing on policies that ensure people have access to a range of responsive, holistic, and healing-focused mental health supports.
Across all of these priorities, we must explicitly uplift those who face direct threats, the threats that have always existed, and the very real new ones presenting themselves now. This requires that our work focus on the barriers and opportunities that policies present for children, youth, and families who identify as immigrants, LGBTQIA+, Black, Latine/x, and Indigenous.
To do this well, we know that partnership is essential. Without working in meaningful partnership with youth and families, our efforts will be fruitless. Communities know the problems and opportunities they face, and have the best insight on what responsive, meaningful solutions should be. In our work together, we must take the problems in front of us head-on. If we shy away from openly naming the racism and bigotry that plague us, our promises of justice will be hollow – and our country will continue to build from policies and programs rooted in racism. We know we will be a stronger country when fairness, opportunity and justice are at the core of our policies and systems. That is why our priorities reflect our steadfast commitment to solutions that are co-designed with young people and families and that reflect our principles for anti-racist policymaking.
We believe in a healthy, thriving society, and that it is possible to achieve such a society. We also know that this is only achievable through collective effort. The work calls on us to be big in vision, practical in application, and to have the courage to speak truth, expose harms, and work to remedy wrongs. Though we may experience setbacks as we go, we have to keep pressing on, because our work is not done. And so, we keep pressing—just as those who came before us have done. As people who believe in freedom and justice, we must constantly recommit ourselves to the task with love, with truth, with gratitude, and with clear eyes toward the promise of a greater nation. We hope you will join us.