BUILD25

The Heart of the Matter: Building Community and Strong Systems for Young Children and Families.
When: Tuesday, December 2 – Thursday, December 4, 2025
Where: The Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles, CA
Who: The National BUILD Conference brings together leaders working to ensure the well-being of young children and families. Many of the participants work at the state level in government, focusing on education, health, and human services. Hundreds are advocates, researchers, or service providers. Hundreds more are technical assistance providers, coaches, or home visiting specialists. Some work at the intersection of systems; others focus on early education and care, community development, family economic support, and health (including prenatal, infant, and early childhood mental health and maternal health). Meanwhile, others work in child welfare, housing, or prevention. This is an opportunity to tackle important issues head-on, engage in meaningful discussions, and build community.

BUILD2025 Conference Goals: The conference will provide opportunities for early childhood systems leaders (at the state, regional, territory, tribal, and local levels) to:

• Learn from one another’s experiences
• Collaborate, strategize, and plan together
• Focus on community building
• Build bridges across differences
• Renew our spirit and passion for our work

We will achieve these goals by engaging in urgent, current topics such as: 

• What’s blocking us from creating an early childhood system that works for young children and families? What is working for whom? What barriers can be moved? What’s stuck that can be unstuck?
• Connected problems require cross-system approaches: How can education, health, family economic supports, child welfare, and housing work better together to meet the needs of children, families, and communities?

Together we will: 

• Network and build peer relationships.
• Collaborate on developing strategies that improve recruitment, retention, compensation, and professionalization of a workforce that reflects the children with whom we work.
• Exchange strategies to ensure high-quality early care and education services that are family-friendly, supportive of providers and teachers, and promote program improvement, reflecting the communities we support.
• Develop leadership and communication skills to enhance the quality of work that individuals and teams do for young children and their families.

Target Attendees: Attendees of this conference include public- and private-sector early childhood leaders as well as corporate and non-profit sponsors and funders. Leaders include cross-system representatives, state education, health, and human services leaders, early intervention specialists, social and emotional development researchers, child care and QIS administrators, economic development leaders, Head Start state and local leaders, technical assistance providers, coaches and mentors, quality improvement specialists, advocates, policy makers, evaluators and researchers, higher education faculty, and early childhood systems leaders at the national, state, territory, tribal nation, and community levels.

Submit a Session Proposal: We are excited to announce that the BUILD Initiative is now accepting proposals for sessions at BUILD25. We are seeking proposals from experts in the field to lead engaging and informative sessions. If you or someone you know are interested in presenting, we encourage you to submit a proposal here. The deadline to submit your proposal is July 1, 2025. Submit a proposal.