In March of 2020, we were all collectively faced with an invisible yet terrifying threat. The group including fellows, faculty, and luminaries held each other over countless messy moments of uncertainty and loss. The result was a profound sense of connection and trust that fueled the explosion of creativity brought forth in their work. The impact will change the lives of infants and families throughout the world for years to come.

In in my role as faculty of the University of Massachusetts Boston Infant-Parent Mental Health program. I recently listened to a presentation by Dr. Barbara Stroud in which she placed caring for young children and their families in the context of systemic racism. Describing “voices that have been silenced” she cautioned us to “stop talking, teaching, and intervening long enough to listen.” When a month later Dr. David Willis spoke for the same program about Early Relational Health, he put my struggle with both “screening” and “assessment” into a new and interesting frame. Alluding to their judgmental nature, he looked at these constructs as “white dominant cultural products.” He spoke of the need to attend to power dynamics in supporting relational health with a model of promotion and prevention. His language resonating for me with the idea of protecting space to listen from a place of not knowing; to take time to imagine our way into another persons’s experience.