What advice do you have for folks that want to make sure they really are listening truly and engaging with young people? Because you have literally done that.

I think it's starting early.

Don't have your whole idea baked and then go, hey, here's what we're thinking.

Tell us your reaction to it.

Co-design is really very beneficial.

So engaging people very early.

Young people are experts in their own lives and we pay other experts that we access, financial experts or consultants, pay young people for their expertise.

How did years of listening and research and relationship building eventually lead to policy change, true influence?

And as you've put all these programs into place and been in this space for as long as you have been in it, are there stories that have stayed with you?

Absolutely.

There's a young woman named Patty Chin.

She's from Hawaii.

She's a former foster youth who helped design an intervention that I'll tell you about.

It's called the Soul Family Framework, based on her own lived experience.

At age 16, Patty reentered the foster care system after her mother died.

How are you supporting communities across the country to support their young people?

Why are they so foundational from a brain science perspective?

Well, they're important because, first, um, relationships are the ways, that's the context for young people to grow.

Um, although they are in a period where they are deeply interested in what their peers think about them, they still need the guidance and support of adults.

And so that's why relationship is so important, especially when young people make mistakes.

They need adults to help them process what happened and figure out how to get back on the right track.

They need opportunities because it's in the context of those opportunities, whether educational or, um, employment opportunities, that's how young people learn how to be resilient, how to be responsible.

And if they don't have those opportunities, then they can't build those skills.

And how can our policy, our public systems better meet the needs of adolescents in particular?