Health & Human Services
The 2026 Human Services Summit
Leading into the Emerging Future
When & Where
October 23-25, 2026
Harvard University | Cambridge, MA

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

Apply Now

About the Summit

The future of human services is emerging all around us. Rapidly evolving societal needs, powerful social and digital technologies, and new methods of engaging with communities and families are upending past practices in human services and opening entirely new ways of generating outcomes. Now is the time for human services leaders to not just respond to this change – but lead into the emerging future.

Leading the future of human services will require making decisions amidst uncertainty and complexity while building services and organizations that are agile, resilient, and collaborative. Success will depend on leaders who foster innovation and endurance and enhance the public trust that enables people to engage with human services. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine human services as a more effective, trusted, and enduring force for strengthening lives and communities.

To help forward-thinking leaders address this momentous time, Leadership for a Networked World, in collaboration with Vimo, are convening the 2026 Human Services Summit: Leading into the Emerging Future.

The summit, taking place October 23 – 25, 2026 at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will bring together human services leaders along with leading academics and industry experts to learn how to cultivate the organizational capabilities and especially the cultures that enable and sustain a new path forward. Together, we will learn and share ideas on transforming human services, guided by four key themes:

  • Building Coalitions & Ecosystems: Government agencies must remain humble, recognize they do not hold all the answers, and actively seek out allies across organizations, systems, policymakers, and community groups to build broader coalitions, co-create solutions and services, and generate holistic outcomes.
  • Growing Organizational Capacity and Culture: As social, technological, and economic changes shift what outcomes communities and families need, leaders in human services must be adaptive and develop new organizational capabilities and foster the cultural competencies that enable new and improved services and solutions.
  • Enhancing Trust & Legitimacy: Leaders must help communities make sense of current outcomes and changes on the horizon, as well as address shaken public trust from unresponsive systems, real or perceived fraud, and confusion about changing policies and programs. Building trust is now fundamental to community engagement and progress.

Innovation and renewal don’t happen in isolation – they emerge from shared dialogue, mutual learning, and collective ambition. At the Summit we will create a dedicated space for leaders to reflect, absorb, stretch our collective thinking, and learn from one another and leaders outside the industry so they're fully equipped to bring innovation back to their large, complex organizations.

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.

In Partnership With:

The Executive Leadership Group

Michelle Barnes
Executive Director
Colorado Department of Human Services
Michael Becketts
Director
Fairfax County Department of Family Services
Reggie Bicha
President & CEO
APHSA
Tikki Brown
Commissioner
Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families
Rebecca Jones Gaston
Commissioner, Adminstration on Children, Youth, and Families
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Stephanie Muth
Commissioner, Department of Family and Protective Services
State of Texas
Antonio Oftelie
Executive Director
Leadership for a Networked World
Rachel Pierre
Director
Washington D.C. Department of Human Services
Stacie Weeks
Director
Nevada Health Authority
David Weitz
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics
Harvard University
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.

read more

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.

read more

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...

read more

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...

read more
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
Latest Episode
A Year in Review: Antonio Oftelie and Lauren Hirshon Look Back on the Summits of 2025
Listen Now

Previous Reports

Purpose, Passion, and Impact for the Future: A Report from 2019 Health and Human Services Summit

Go to Report

What’s foremost on the mind of forward leaning and resolute leaders is igniting the vision and mission for a generative future – one in which services and solutions not only address the complex root causes and barriers to better health and human services outcomes, but also invest in community-driven innovation in order to build the social and economic mobility that help individuals and families to flourish.

This level of purpose, passion, and impact for the future requires courageous leadership. It is imperative for health and human services officials to not only leverage the bold innovations, disruptive business models, and radical breakthroughs that lead to new and better solutions, but also embed the technology, tools, and cultural attributes which lead to creativity, agility, and adaptability. And urgently, leaders must address challenges and opportunities that can make or break progress including: How do we intentionally put the “person at the center” of human services? How will we strive to achieve equity in opportunity and outcomes? How can we invest “upstream” and “downstream” via the social determinants of health and two-generation solutions?

To help leaders answer these questions and chart a path for the future, Leadership for a Networked World and Accenture, in collaboration with the American Public Human Services Association, convened senior-most leaders for the 2019 Health and Human Services Summit: Purpose, Passion and Impact for the Future held at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Summit provided an unparalleled opportunity to collaborate, learn and network with the world’s foremost health and human services practitioners, Harvard faculty and researchers, and select industry experts. Summit participants gained also membership to a community of peers and experts and left the Summit with actionable steps to build generative solutions that achieve better outcomes and more equitably for the individuals, families and communities they serve.

Creating the Future of Outcomes and Impact: A Report from 2017 Health and Human Services Summit

Go to Report

Challenging and uncertain times have always been a catalyst for looking at problems in novel ways, inventing fresh solutions, designing new organizations, and delivering better results and value. Now is no different. For leaders in health and human services, today’s challenges are bringing an unparalleled opportunity to create the future of outcomes and impact.

Creating a better, brighter, and more impactful future will require developing new forms and new levels of outcomes for individuals, families, and communities. This form of change and innovation will increasingly require health and human services leaders to build a “generative ecosystem” – a set of interconnected organizations, machines, and services that can coproduce new solutions that address and solve the root causes of individual, family, and community health and human services challenges.

Catalysts for Generative Outcomes: A Report from 2016 Health and Human Services Summit

Go to Report

What does the future of health and human services look like? Where can we see glimpses of the future? How will we scale up promising innovations to achieve our vision?

Even with all the positive examples of progress and innovation in knitting together services, more work must be done to envision and build the ecosystem of organizations that can work together to design and deliver solutions that address the root causes of individual, family, and community health and human services challenges.

Emergent Leadership: Turning Ideas into Outcomes: A Report from 2015 Human Services Summit

Go to Report

The question of how to achieve the potential of new ideas and business models is critically important in human services, given the powerful emergence of innovations such as Pay-for-Success and Social Impact nancing, collective impact strategies, executive functioning science, evidence-based service design, two-generation interventions, and many more capacity-building and outcome-driving ideas.

To help human services leaders acquire these skills and strategies, the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, Leadership for a Networked World and Accenture, in collaboration with the American Public Human Services Association, convened senior leaders for the 2015 Human Services Summit: Emergent Leadership – Turning Ideas into Outcomes.

The Dynamics of Convergence: A Report from 2014 Human Services Summit

Go to Report

To move forward, human services leaders must examine and appreciate how the dynamics of convergence will play out now and in the future. Based on insights from previous summits and research, we can forecast greater alignment and new partnerships between health and human services, education, workforce, and public safety to create pathways to community well-being.

To help leaders examine convergence dynamics and build capacity for the future, the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, Leadership for a Networked World, and Accenture, in collaboration with the American Public Human Services Association, hosted The 2014 Human Services Summit: The Dynamics of Convergence. This fifth annual Summit brought together the world’s foremost human services practitioners, industry experts, and Harvard faculty and researchers to explore these topics.

Leadership in an Era of Disruption: A Report from 2013 Human Services Summit

Go to Report

When disruption is the new normal, what does leadership look like? Successful leaders see opportunities to respond in innovative ways, and disruption becomes a catalyst for better business models that guide individuals, families and communities to self-sufficiency.

To harness and share these lessons, Leadership for a Networked World, Accenture, the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and the American Public Human Services Association convened human services leaders for The 2013 Human Services Summit: Leadership in an Era of Disruption. The fourth annual Summit, held at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., brought together the world’s premier human services practitioners, Harvard faculty, fellows, and researchers and select industry experts to explore these topics.

Stay Connected

© 2026 Leadership for a Networked World. All Rights Reserved.