About the Human Services Program

We center racial equity and racial justice to advance multi-generational family social and economic success, which includes social and economic mobility. We define social and economic mobility as the movement of families between social strata and their ability to improve their wealth and economic status. This includes a person’s autonomy, power and ability to influence his or her environment and personal outcomes.

The Human Services Program’s work is grounded in power sharing, partnership, co-learning and co-creating with organizations from multiple sectors, families and communities.

We adhere to a person-centered approach is strengths-based, grounded in the belief that people are resilient and inherently capable and operate with self-agency. Core to our strategy is a two-generation approach, developed by Ascend at the Aspen Institute. The approach is grounded in multigenerational family social and economic success,  which includes building family well-being by working with children and the adults in their lives together.

To realize multigenerational family social and economic success, we focus our grant making on fostering the next generation of public and nonprofit human services organizations, place-based opportunity ecosystems and developing supportive policy alongside robust field building efforts.