Plenary Session 1 - Welcome - Opening Remarks - Breaking Myopic Tweaks: Is It ME That Must Change Before the System Can?

Corey B. Best is foremost, a dedicated father, and the founder of Mining For Gold. He is originally from Washington, DC and now resides in Florida.  This is where Corey began his transformation into adaptive leadership training, systems building, authentic family engagement, racial justice, promoting protective factors, social equality, and highlighting “good enough parenting” for those impacted by the child welfare system. Mining For Gold is the curator of community experiences and utilizes those ideas and expertise to shape new thinking within complex systems. Corey has utilized his platform as a Community Curator to re-build child and family serving systems that are responsive to sharing power among constituents with a laser focus on preventing and dismantling all forms of racism.  The idea began with the fact that each one of us have pieces of metaphorical “gold” flowing through our souls. This idea for Mining For Gold is directly influenced by the 402 plus years of racialized arrangement in our communities. In partnership with child welfare leaders, communities and parents, Corey has curated the racially just and equitable Authentic Family Engagement and Strengthening Approach. Since May 2020, Mining For Gold has held a brave container to explore the impact of racialization with over 1,500 child and family serving leaders and staff. Mining For Gold is a platform where leaders from social institutions think, stretch, and grow alongside other leaders within their communities who have experienced systems of oppression first-hand.  The design is to curate and magnify what is working within collective spheres of influences. 

Lynlee Tanner Stapleton, Ph.D. serves as a public health analyst for the Early Childhood Systems team in the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) Maternal and Child Health Bureau. In this role, she leads policy, technical assistance, and measurement work related to early childhood programming and is the project officer for the Infant-Toddler Court Program. Lynlee brings a combination of research, clinical assessment and treatment, and federal program experience to her work, and is a licensed clinical psychologist with expertise in child development, perinatal and early childhood mental health, and family processes. She has also led innovation programming, collaborative co-creation and program design, organizational change, and service delivery improvement efforts. Prior to HRSA, she previously worked at the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development, and Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Lynlee received her Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA, with minor concentrations in Quantitative Methods and Health.

Janie Huddleston, MSE, ITCP Director, has a unique background in healthcare administration, social service delivery, education, business, and management that supports her work overseeing the implementation and building knowledge of effective, collaborative court team interventions that transform child welfare systems. In her previous position as Deputy Director for the Arkansas Department of Human Services, she worked to build collaborative problem-solving teams to address the issues facing young children and their families. In 2011, Mrs. Huddleston directed the Division of Behavioral Health Services (Mental Health and Substance Abuse agency), leading a rigorous CMS and Joint Commission recertification process for the State Hospital that included a review of hospital policies and Continuous Quality Improvement processes. As Deputy Director, she led stakeholders in the development of a Medicaid program for pregnant moms and juveniles affected by substance abuse disorder. She also led a four-year collaborative process to overhaul the entire Behavioral Health payment system in Medicaid, following an outside analysis that showed too many children being placed in residential care and high use of psychotropic medications. In two years, usage was reduced by 70% for children under the age of five. She also participated in the development of Episodes of Care, which was a pay-for-performance initiative within Medicaid and strengthened the use of Medical Homes as a big component of care.