The 2025 Human Services Summit
Forging a Vibrant Future
When & Where
October 24-26, 2025
Harvard University | Cambridge, MA

Join your peers in designing the future of human services, and activating new levels of leadership in these dynamic times

About the Summit

The vision, creativity, and ideas that drive resilience and renewal are often fueled by uncertain and tumultuous times. Human services are no exception, and within today’s profound disruption and volatility lies an extraordinary opportunity to forge a vibrant future.

Immense pressure on human services organizations and the people they serve is creating a moment in which we can hone our purpose and reimagine the future. At stake is a world in which human services systems and institutions are not only more effective and equitable, but also better designed to help individuals, families, and communities thrive.

To meet this moment, the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and Leadership for a Networked World, in collaboration with Change & Innovation Agency, are convening the 2025 Human Services Summit: Forging a Vibrant Future 

The summit, taking place October 24–26, 2025, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will provide a setting for leaders to reflect on the purpose of human services, envision new outcomes for the future, and learn how to cultivate the organizational capabilities and especially the cultures that enable and sustain a new path forward.

During the Human Services Summit, participants will address issues that can make or break progress including:

  • How do we fuse operational innovations with community and customer voice to shape strategic goals and design the future of human services and solutions?
  • How can we cultivate cultures that are resilient, adaptive, and creative – allowing innovation to take root and scale and supporting transformation even amid uncertainty?
  • As technology – particularly artificial intelligence – evolves, how can we harness these tools responsibly to expand our capacity and drive better outcomes?
  • How do we support the people and teams who power our systems – ensuring they are not just equipped to manage change, but truly thrive through it?

Innovation and renewal don’t happen in isolation – they emerge from shared dialogue, mutual learning, and collective ambition. At the Summit we will leverage this ethos by bringing together forward-thinking practitioners, Harvard faculty, and experts across sectors to stoke our vision and creativity.

Summit participants will become part of a vibrant community of peers and experts, ready to leverage today’s opportunity to create newfound capacity for the future, solutions for people in need, outcomes that communities want, and legitimacy that society demands.

Michael Becketts
Director
Fairfax County Department of Family Services

Reggie Bicha
President & CEO
APHSA

Paul Bottino
Executive Director of Innovation Education
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Tikki Brown
Commissioner
Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families

Easha Canada
Deputy Commissioner
Connecticut Department of Social Services

Kelly Garcia
Director of Health and Human Services
State of Iowa

Heidi Hedberg
Commissioner
Alaska Department of Health

Dan Makelky
Director of Human Services
Douglas County, CO

Fariborz Pakseresht
Director
Oregon Department of Human Services

Kristi Putnam
Secretary
Department of Human Services

Gary Wilson
Assistant Commissioner
Tennessee Department of Human Services

Michael Wisehart
Director
Arizona Department of Economic Security

Who Should Attend?

Summit attendees are senior-level, health and human services executives, who aspire to improve outcomes and impact in the short term and design new solutions for the future. Regardless of title, all Summit attendees are “Chief Transformation Officers” in practice – leaders who strive to achieve equity in outcomes and build the social and economic mobility and wellness that help people, families, and communities thrive.

Admission & Participation

The Summit is an invitation-only program for senior health and human services executives. Other applicants will be reviewed and accepted on a case-by-case basis, depending in part on available space. We typically receive more applications than we can accommodate, so apply for your seat as soon as possible. This event is supported by the hosting and collaborating organizations, so there is no tuition fee to attend. Travel and hotel expenses, however, are the responsibility of individual participants.

Insights from Past Events

The Summit Series has consistently attracted and showcased leaders and vanguards in their field, whose insights and lessons have proven invaluable and inspiring to those they've reached. Below are a sample of lessons gleaned from past Summit sessions.


Generating Capacity in Human Services through Artificial Intelligence

Emerging into a pivotal new era of human services, the opportunities and challenges in advancing social and economic mobility have become more evident and dynamic. The impact of persistent health inequities, deep economic disparities, and rising environmental justice issues have shown that human services require broader vision and mindset, innovative services and solutions, and transformation in organizational capacity.


Making Lasting Cultural Change: Advice from Minneapolis and Hennepin County

Police Chief Medaria Arradondo of the Minneapolis Police Department will tell you that culture is like an iceberg: It hides more than it reveals. This is something that he, Deputy County Administrator Jennifer DeCubellis of Hennepin County, Minnesota, and other members of city and county leadership learned as they worked to reinvent their community’s approach to criminal justice.


Building a Platform for Equity

The noted poet James Baldwin once said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In this spirit, leaders at the Health and Human Services Summit forcefully faced the persistent challenge of ensuring that every individual, every family and every community has equity in health and human services opportunities and outcomes. The resolve in the room was palpable. In fact, 90% of Health and Human Services Summit attendees reported that improving...


Podcase: Joe Jones with Center for Urban Families

Located in the heart of West Baltimore, Center for Urban Families (CFUF) serves an area that is beset with significant poverty, crime, and racial inequity. Founded in 1999 with a mission to “disrupt poverty,” CFUF has served more than 28,000 members, placed 3,779 members in full-time jobs from 2010 through 2016, and touched nearly 62,000 children whose parents were CFUF members. The organization has received national attention for its work, hosting President Barack Obama in 2013. During the...

The Bending Steel Podcast

The Bending Steel Podcast, hosted by Dr. Antonio Oftelie, looks at breakthrough ideas and innovations, and gets in the trenches with real life leaders to show how they think about and move forward innovation and change. These leaders and organizations are breaking from hardened ways of working and, as like bending steel, transforming their approaches to deliver breakthrough outcomes and value.

The podcast features iconic executives and change agents as they share stories and ideas on growing the organizational and personal capacity to achieve breakthrough innovation and change and most importantly – generate outcomes that make a sustainably prosperous, equitable, and just world.

The Bending Steel podcast will help you lead organizations, institutions, communities – and yourself – into transformational levels of growth in outcomes and value.

View All Episodes

Previous Reports

HOSTED BY

Leadership for a Networked World’s applied research, student innovation challenge, and on-campus summit programs are an initiative of Dr. Antonio M. Oftelie, Innovation Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH), part of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. TECH is a hub for students, faculty, alumni, and government and industry leaders to learn together, collaborate, and innovate. LNW accelerates these efforts by connecting leaders across sectors and developing cutting-edge thought leadership on innovation and organizational transformation.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

Change & Innovation Agency (C!A®), part of the Vimo® family of innovative solutions for health and human services, helps agencies increase capacity so they can do more good.

By using our process expertise combined with our cutting-edge SaaS solutions, we have transformed safety net service delivery for over half of the states in the country and many large counties. As a result of our unique capacity-building approaches, agencies focused on safety net programs, including eligibility (e.g., Medicaid, SNAP, TANF), child care, child support, child welfare, and unemployment insurance, consistently serve at least 40% more customers 70% faster.


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