Cutting-Edge Practice

Authentic Family Experience: Using a Co-Design Framework

State/Jurisdiction: Colorado
Setting: Community Virtual
Population: CYSHCN Families & Caregivers
Topic Area: Family & Youth Engagement Primary & Preventative Care Health Screening
NPMs:

Assuring Better Child Health & Development (ABCD) is a Colorado-based nonprofit and nationally recognized leader in advancing effective early childhood policies and strengthening systems of care. Through our work across healthcare, early childhood programs, and community agencies, we identified a critical gap in Colorado’s developmental systems: families, especially those raising children with developmental delays or disabilities, were not meaningfully influencing the services designed to support them. Families consistently described fragmented referral pathways, limited access to services, and feeling excluded from decisions about their child’s care. These insights made it clear that traditional approaches to family engagement were not enough.

In response, ABCD reframed its approach around family experience, an intentional shift that centers how families want to feel in their interactions with systems and elevates their lived perspectives as essential to designing solutions. Through our Family Experience Model, built on a co-design framework, we partner directly with families to understand their journeys, identify limitations, and create more responsive pathways to developmental support. This model ensures that families from varying cultural, linguistic, and geographic backgrounds shape the policies, practices, and community systems that impact their lives. By grounding system improvements in authentic family voice, we work toward a future where every family can navigate early childhood services with clarity, dignity, and trust.



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Implementation Handout



CONTACT INFORMATION
Assuring Better Child Health & Development (ABCD)
Eileen Auer Bennett
eileen@coloradoabcd.org
Kara@coloradoabcd.org