605. 2025 Social Impact Trends That Matter: Advocacy is Non-Negotiable. (Sixto Cancel)

Meet Sixto, the Founder of Think of Us and a nationally recognized leader. 🤝 He’s driving systems change in child welfare using tech, research, and policy to transform outcomes for youth and families. 🫂

In this episode, Sixto breaks down why advocacy is essential for creating lasting change. He explains that vulnerable communities need advocates who bring lived experiences to the table, using data and stories to drive decisions. Advocacy isn’t just about making noise—it’s about harnessing these experiences to influence policymakers and push for real, systemic transformation. 🗣️

Sixto talks about how Think of Us connects young people with foster care experience directly to lawmakers to help influence their decisions.💙

Join us for this episode today. 🎧

💡Learn:

• How Think of Us' work intersects with advocacy, including co-designing with those directly impacted.
• Misconceptions around advocacy that typically keep organizations from getting started.
• How Think of Us collected data from 27,000 young people to advocate for policy changes during the pandemic.
• How advocacy is not just an option but a necessity for impact organizations today.

Episode Highlights:

• Understanding the Necessity of Advocacy (5:29)
• Misconceptions About Advocacy (12:28)
• Empowering Youth Through Advocacy (26:36)
• Confronting Social Issues in Education (20:39)
• Research and Lived Experience (33:34)
• The Power of Storytelling in Advocacy (36:46)
• “Keep your advocacy simple. It’s not about the number of people; it’s about being strategic. A smaller, capable team can be more agile and responsive, while a larger team may be slower to act.”- Sixto Cancel’s One Good Thing(30:17)

Episode Shownotes: www.weareforgood.com/episode/605

Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/d5RpcOu6iDaC73ruubu3sPdgK9c?utm_source=copy_url

About our Sponsor Jitasa

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Chapters

• 0:05 Youth Advocacy
• 5:30 Community-Driven Advocacy Strategies
• 18:07 Youth Advocacy Through Community Engagement

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

We're living in a time where I believe that, more than ever, children, young people and families who are living in the most vulnerable conditions are going to need someone to be able to speak up and say here's how these needs need to be met, based on their experiences and what they've shared with us. But also, here are the structural changes that are being made in the country that actually are advancing or harming the outcomes of our youth and families.

Speaker 2: 0:36

Welcome to. We Are For Good's Social Impact Trends that Matter in 2025,. In partnership with our friends at iDonate, we have hundreds of conversations each year, both on the podcast and offline, with incredible changemakers around the world. In this limited series, we're lifting the eight trends that have cut through to us over the past year. These ideas and shifts hold the power to transform your mission from the inside out, and so, in these eight episodes, we're breaking down the trends, one at a time, and inviting a subject matter expert in to take us deeper and to put it into practice. All right, let's get started. Hey, becky.

Speaker 3: 1:12

Hey John.

Speaker 2: 1:13

So I mean, here we are. We're back in the social impact trends that matter in 2025. I got to give a shout out to iDonate. Thank you for bringing this series to life. Today we're leaning into the topic of advocacy is non-negotiable and y'all I know a lot of you listening are passionate about this topic. But, bea, I want to give you a little bit of a second to tone set of what you're feeling in this moment before we tee up our incredible guests for the day.

Speaker 3: 1:36

Oh my gosh, our guest is next level. But let's talk about this. Who is scared to death to approach and start the work of advocacy? I feel the collective hands of everyone raising and I can assure you, Becky, five years ago would have been one of those people. Who is worried that their donors are going to be turned off by having what some could construe as a strong political stance? Hands up. Who's worried they're going to upset their base or lose funding as a result of taking a strong stance? More Hands up. Who's worried they're going to upset their base or lose funding as a result of taking a strong stance? More hands up. We all have fear about this. But I want to ask a bigger question to you. What happens if we don't? And this is what I want you to hear today before we introduce our guests. You don't have to do this alone. The collective is what really moves the needle on how to get attention, how to get facts out there, how to get advocacy and story and lived experience. And I got to tell you there is no one doing this better in our purview than Sixto, Cancel and the Think of Us team.

Speaker 3: 2:40

So I'm going to introduce Sixto and I hope this is not the first time you're hearing his name, because we're kind of super fans of his and he's been on the podcast several times. We've met in real life. We adore him, but he is a nationally recognized leader that's driving systems change in child welfare. He's working across tech, service delivery, research and data, and he's also the founder of Think of Us, a research and design lab for the social sector, and they are led and guided by people who have been directly impacted by the child welfare system and they're publishing groundbreaking research. They work with cities, states and tribes to co-design and implement solutions to longstanding challenges and they advise federal and state policymakers on effective bipartisan solutions that are grounded in the lived experience. So, Sixto, welcome back to the podcast. I think this is your third or fourth time. I'm so glad you said yes again.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Of course, becky, johnny, I know when y'all call me I'm going to be here. I love the podcast, I love the listeners, I love being in a relationship with you all.

Speaker 3: 3:47

Well, we love you too, and I love that you don't even talk about your nonprofit as a nonprofit. You call it a design lab, and I think that alone is shifting the way we talk about ourselves, the way we think about how data and story moves from inside our offices and outside to our community. But I want to start with the big picture on this topic. Why is advocacy not just an option but a necessity for impact organizations living in the right now?

Speaker 1: 4:19

We're living in a time where I believe that, more than ever, children, young people and families who are living in the most vulnerable conditions are going to need someone to be able to speak up and say here's how these needs need to be met, based on their experiences and what they've shared with us. But also, here are the structural changes that are being made in the country that actually are advancing or harming the outcomes of our youth and families, and so we're in a time where advocacy is not an option. It is literally lifeline for so many children and young people who are literally in the most vulnerable situations. When we're looking at what families can do for their child, for their young person, we're going into an age where the traditional supports just are crumbling.

Speaker 2: 5:14

I mean, what a way to tone set this conversation. We've talked about this season already about the power of narratives, the power of truth-telling, and this moment is now to be those voices to correct the narratives that are out there, that aren't raising, the voices of those that are maybe missing from the conversation. And so we learn through case studies, we learn through examples. I wonder if you would talk about the work that you do at Think of Us? Where's that intersection of advocacy and your mission? Walk us through what that looks like in practical terms.

Speaker 1: 5:39

Absolutely. I think one of the most kind of under the radar advocacy is actually co-designing problems, and the way that we have done that is to help people who are making decisions get very close to the people that it impacts. And so for us, there's a couple of different ways that we've done that For the federal agency staff and for lawmakers in Congress. What we've done is been able to gather young people with lived experience in child welfare to say, hey, come to DC, but let's train those young people to attend listening sessions of kids who are currently in foster care. Let's train them on how the system actually works. Let's ensure that they have done a literature review of the body of evidence that exists there, and then, on top of that, let's make sure that they are actually reading the recommendations of other impacted people and being a bridge to those folks.

Speaker 1: 6:36

And so during the administration, both the first time that Trump was here and during the Biden administration, young people were organized and we were able to bring them to Washington DC to play these type of roles. Now it's not enough to have the people in the room. We actually have to make sure that we hit the mark around, scoping to the right problem and in order to scope to the right problem, you need that lived experience data, this systematic collection of people's experiences, in a way that you can then make decisions on it. And that, to me, is one strong form of advocacy, because you are helping determine not just the education around a problem, but where should you actually have the tactical lever that you pull? With a lawmaker, with a federal agency staff person?

Speaker 3: 7:28

I am feeling every bit of this and, if this is something you want to go more deeply into, how Sixto and Think of Us curate this qualitative data that sorry we're from Oklahoma. We say data, not data and so how they're actually using story data, lived experience, and translating it into those hard stats. I mean, you did an incredible episode with us. It's episode 523, how to use storytelling, data partnership and advocacy to drive that system change. We'll drop it in the show notes, but this is not just something you talk about or you move the data around. You are actively present in showing up and activating your community and your believers and the people who are surrounding this in such a human way that I could not look away from those stories, from what a kid is experiencing right now, and I just think it's a different way to look at advocacy. It is truly advocating with community, and so I want to know like what are some of those misconceptions about advocacy that you think keep organizations from getting started in this process?

Speaker 1: 8:43

You know, the first misconception I want to talk about from an organizational standpoint is this misconception about advocacy, is about making noise and pointing to the problem and that if you magically point to the problem and you magically say it in the right way, that all of a sudden the solutions will come and that people will be so moved by the injustice that everybody will start working on it. That is not the truth. The reality is is that people sometimes know what is happening but they don't know what's next. They don't know where to start. And so when we center lived experience and we understand the systematic experiences cross county lines, and we understand the systematic experiences cross county lines, you know, cross classrooms, cross states what ends up happening is that then we are able to see, well, what is this collective experience that multiple people in different places are having. That indicates that it could be systemic.

Speaker 1: 9:38

And so the big misconception around organizations is that if they point to the problem, that magically that is going to trigger a ripple effect. And even though we see use cases there, it is not always the case. Another misconception when people who have been impacted, folks with lived experience, whether that be young people in foster care, young people who have experienced JJ or some other traumatic experiences. Sometimes the misconception is, if I share my pain with the world of what happened to me, that change will immediately happen. And without a real intentional process around going from the education of that painful moment to evidence to act, evidence of progress and what works, you can't have the full story arc of advocacy.

Speaker 2: 10:28

I mean, holy heck right. Bookmark this part of that podcast, because I can't help but draw the parallels to another convo we had just a few days ago about how measurement of impact needs to shift, and that it's not just about like counting activities, it's like really figuring out the outcomes, like actually figuring out what's moving the needle connected to the bigger thing we're solving for. And, if I'm hearing you right, we don't want to just want to create a racket, we want to actually say, hey, here's a path, here is a solution, here's the hope. We know what it is. We just need the backing to make it possible. Is that part of it? How do you bundle the solution? How do you say this is the way. What does that look like for you to translate that? I'm just curious to connect the dots.

Speaker 1: 11:14

I think it's leaning into those experiences that people have.

Speaker 1: 11:18

When I left high school, I was already involved in this advocacy and I had had this belief that for kids who can't go back home, who are not adopted, who turn 18 or 21, that the best thing that the government could do for us is ensure that we're ready for life, to live life on our own, by giving us training how do you buy a car, how do you rent an apartment, how do you budget. And it wasn't until I really started to listen to other young people who were in the system, and specifically 200 young people who were in five different counties in a research sprint that we did that. I realized that we really do have to lean into Kim, into young people's family members, and it was not a belief that I had right. And yet here I am, leading an organization doing systems reform, but it was by getting so close to the folks who are impacted and the problems that they're facing. Is that that was able to go ahead and advocate for a new position, even for our organization years ago?

Speaker 3: 12:25

I got to say, when we talk about six-dose childhood, I mean I have your New York Times op-ed headline in my head every single time, op-ed headline in my head every single time, and I'm sorry if I get this wrong, but it was something like I will never forget that I could have been within a family who loved me and who was related to me, and I think this notion of kin and what you've done with kinship care to advance that legislation I mean we could have a whole podcast on that it gives me so much hope for how we can reimagine child welfare.

Speaker 3: 13:02

But I also think that is an interesting case study that was derived from your live experience and I know each of us are listening in different communities around the world and the way we got to show up for our missions for kids, for animals, for hunger, insert the cause that you're most passionate about has just got to be different and I love this sort of systems approach to it and I want to get your opinion on this. Sixto, for organizations that really have shied away from advocacy what would you say to leaders who fear that this work is too risky, it's too political and it's just something that may alienate their base. What would you say to them?

Speaker 1: 13:46

The thing that comes to mind for me is for a leader who's really struggling is if you are struggling, you already know your answer. You're being called to lean into it. Know your answer. You're being called to lean into it. There is a calling to be able to do the work when you are responsible for being in service to the most vulnerable and as nonprofit leaders, we are called and we have an intuition and we have a gut feeling in the direction we need to move. There will be consequences. There'll be consequences for acting and not acting.

Speaker 1: 14:20

The reality is is that people in this moment funders in this moment are trying to understand who are the leaders who are going to play at different levels, the level of direct response. When there is a new regulation, a new executive order, a new law, there's implication on the actual ground. Who is going to do that work? Then the second piece is who are the systems change leaders who are going to be actually saying you know what we are going to look at? The policies, the structure, the finance flows. They're looking at leaders who are going to be the data and evidence folks. Who's going to sit there and ensure that we have enough evidence collected in order to act in a certain way.

Speaker 1: 15:01

What we're living in right now is a moment where the structure of how this country has worked for the last couple of decades is fundamentally shifting around those who have been in need and have had to engage the social service system. But what I will say is that we cannot also get distracted around what we believe the traditional forms of advocacy are and shifting your organization in that way. So, if your superpower is marketing, if your superpower is communication, if your superpower is data collection, how do you use your superpower to plug into the larger advocacy machine that exists? People are mobilizing, understanding what our contributions to the larger strategy and mobilization is key, and one of the key sources to be able to understand how to plug in it is the funders. It is the people who are investing in a larger strategy and calling them and saying this is not about you investing in me, but it is about me understanding what our organization can do to align our contribution.

Speaker 2: 17:08

Yeah, I mean, these conversations are just stacking. I'm just over here smiling because last week we dropped that. We need your light. I mean we need our individual passions, our individual giftings, like in this moment, now more than ever, and you're just like threading this together.

Speaker 3: 17:25

Sixto and we talked about. I'm sorry to interrupt you we talked about how to be a change leader. We need people who are willing to step out and not only activate the change but be the change themselves. So last week is entirely relevant Both of those episodes to this episode this week. Yeah, go back to it.

Speaker 2: 17:45

I mean, something we love and admire about you is your just commitment to systems level change, and so I wonder in this moment if you would kind of walk us through how you have seen advocacy lead to systems level impact and change Cause I feel like we're all looking for an uplift of like what happens when it works, what happens when it clicks, what does that look like? Kind of take us to a moment.

Speaker 1: 18:08

Well, I want to talk about a moment that we had during the pandemic. It was the end of 2020. There were children all over the country turning 18, 21, and being kicked out of the foster care system. So, while the rest of the country was expected to shelter in place, our young people were being put on the streets, and so, as Congress was figuring out how to divvy up money, they were asking about the evidence and data. So we knew we had to go ahead and get voices to participate In traditional advocacy. We would have seen the fly into DC, talk to your constituents.

Speaker 1: 18:47

But we had to do things differently and we had to be louder than the airplane industry. We had to be louder than the hotel industry, and so we said you know what? We have to go countrywide and talk to as many voices as possible by having them do a survey. But we said listen, we need dollars in an investment to do a cash grant application and we'll get the people's consent to be able to use that data to do further advocacy in Congress and also to deploy resources via listservs and connect them to different cash grants opportunities that come up. And we had 27,000 young people from all over the country who had aged out of foster care, who currently were in care, share their data with us.

Speaker 1: 19:44

And this was during the Trump administration the first time and we were able to bring that to Congress.

Speaker 1: 19:49

We were able to bring it to the actual administration and we were the only agency that I know of to this date who was allowed to have a town hall in the first Trump administration, having the associate commissioner who was allowed to have a town hall in the first Trump administration, having the associate commissioner who was appointed by the administration, talk to young people about this pandemic and urging states to not to continue to let this happen.

Speaker 1: 20:12

But it doesn't end there. When we entered the Biden administration, that same data set turned around and informed the negotiations on Congress's floor around the farm bill and the result was that young people who age out of foster care, you have not been adopted, you have not gone back home, that you are entitled to be able to get the SNAP benefit right, get that food support, and if you're going to be in college, there are different situations, so you're not exempt from actually having to show the work requirements. And that is a shift in literally money going from the federal government to the pockets of young people who do not have parents for food, and so for us, this becomes about how data lived experience data can literally go ahead and have real-time effect on the ground.

Speaker 3: 21:05

Okay, I want to say this, even though I want to say something more profound than this for what I'm feeling. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for doing that. I just I cannot reconcile a hungry kid. I can't reconcile a kid who doesn't know where to lay their head at night. I can't reconcile a kid who doesn't feel security or hope for the future.

Speaker 3: 21:31

And this is why this is so deeply important, friends, and I want you to take kid or hunger, or housing, or whatever it is, and put your mission in there, because what you're doing is too important to be quiet. And I want to encourage you, because you have rabid fans and believers all around your mission who are looking for ways to plug in. And maybe it's a lived experience survey, maybe it's calling a representative, maybe it's storytelling in a way that's going to help us illuminate what real life is like for those of us who couldn't even imagine what someone's going through, and so I really want people to get activated. Sixto, for people who are feeling that pull, they're feeling that discomfort and that tension and that pull what is that first step? You think they should begin to take an engaging and advocacy.

Speaker 1: 22:32

For organizations that are just starting out. The first step is to get centered on the mission and your superpower as an organization. What are you uniquely positioned to do? Is it to tell a story? Is it to provide data? Is it to actually engage people with lived experience in different activities? But it goes further than that. There's a responsibility for board members to communicate to their executive teams not just the CEO, but to give the executive team and the senior leadership team within these organizations the unwavering permission to lean into the moment and to lean into change. When you sense doubt, when there is doubt, that becomes a limiting factor. And so, if we want to have change agents and leaders on the ground, lean into advocacy, we have to start with the power dynamics between the board and the actual individual leading, because what this means is that the internal functions of your organizations might have to shift. Resources might have to shift, staffing might have to shift, the programmatic activities might have to shift. Staffing might have to shift. The programmatic activities might have to shift. Being able to have the leadership of your company, with the board leaning into what could be a new era for your organization, is critical.

Speaker 1: 23:50

I will also tell you a quick story that when we saw what was happening between Israel and Palestine, some of our funders had very different perspectives and views about what to do, what was right, what was wrong.

Speaker 1: 24:04

Now, this is not an issue that our organization would engage in we work with United States children who are in foster care but yet I appreciated the funders who called and said, hey, we want to let you know, here's our stance. Who called and said, hey, we want to let you know, here's our stance. But in spite of our stance, we want you to know that you have the safety of being able to show up and make impact in your community. And even though our work is so distant and not overlapping with that work, I think it was a very powerful thing for a funder to lean in that way to make that communication, because that is about investing in the actual outcomes and mission, and so what funders say and don't say is also a huge influence on leaders being able to step in. Now, there are times when you're bored and your funders may not be there, and then, as a leader, doing the right thing when no one is looking right or when you could be quiet, is required for you to go ahead and speak to them.

Speaker 2: 25:05

Change leadership, baby, yeah, I mean what a real life example of doing the hard but right thing, and I feel like we just need a lot more of that. So we're amplifying this today in hopes that you find some inspiration here. But we talk about the power of community. Sixto, You've got 27,000 people to share their lived experience. You know that's the power of community and what a movement can be created when we get in lockstep. So we've talked a lot this season about the difference of building for community and with community, with community as the superpower. What does it look like when you really think about advocacy through the lens of doing that with community? I mean, how does that put a new lens on it?

Speaker 1: 25:51

For us. I think of us, we have a part of us that is doing research with folks with lived experience, and that means it's just not doing research on them, that they are involved in the execution right, that we're building new methodology where you share your story once and, with consent, that we can use that story in conjunction with others to turn it into data that then can be used for multiple different types of advocacy campaigns. And I think today what we see as the norm is tight research, that's done, you share your experiences, then a report is written and then, if there's another opportunity for advocacy, we come back to you and try to talk to you and you have to go and share that entire story again. But what if you can comprehensively share one time and know that your willingness to put your most painful moments for the learning of others in front of others can be used for multiple different systems change initiatives.

Speaker 3: 26:54

Sixto, maybe break this down for us, like how this looks within. Think of Us, maybe a case study of something that's been really interesting.

Speaker 1: 27:04

Recently we had one of the committees in Congress come to us and put in a request. They said, hey, this issue around states who are taking the social security check of children who are in their custody. So a child's being placed in foster care, they're supposed to get a social security check and the state is taking it and using it as a reimbursement for having the kid in foster care. And there's been a lot of advocacy around hey, that child should have this for college, right? That child's parent died or whatever the reason why you have that social security check should be honored.

Speaker 1: 27:36

And the committee was split among this and it wasn't about party lines, it was about what does this actually mean for people on the ground? And so they asked us, and what we were able to do was reach out to young people who had had this experience and tell their story by going out, collected 200 stories in a survey and then bringing it to Capitol Hill. But we didn't sit here and say here's our interpretation. Only we sat here and we were able to say here's exactly what young people experience. Here's the answers that they gave. And so it was about being neutral but giving, being able to help that committee get so close to the people who are actually experiencing it, but in a way that was quick and nimble enough to be able to say okay, quickly, let me go through this report. Let me read these answers oh, wow, this is literally what a young person took the time to type and be able to share with us.

Speaker 2: 28:32

Brilliant example and something that I think connects to all of us. I mean, who is it you're serving? How can you help tell their story through data, through the in-between? What are the words that they're using to explain things? There's so much there. The answers are there.

Speaker 3: 28:48

And I also think it's going to build trust with the people who are making those policy decisions, because all of a sudden, you have the answers, you can get the data quickly, you know your business and you know how to be an ally to them. So I think this works on many, many levels. So thank you for that awesome example and I just think what you're doing for child welfare is such a beautiful case study and I love that we can study it here. And I thank you for your transparency. And I just want to tell each of you, as we're rounding out this conversation, you can do bold, beautiful and amazing things because you chose to go into this work, because it was called upon, your heart to serve, whatever the cause is that's close to you. So, sixto, round us out, bring us home with a one good thing we want to know what piece of advice or what's stirring up for you that you want to leave our guests with today.

Speaker 1: 29:43

You know when I think about leaning into this moment, the thing I want to say to you is as the leader know your story, as the organization know your story For the impacted people who you are serving, have them share their story. Keep your advocacy simple. It's not about the number of people, it's about the strategicness and the smaller the team, but with enough capacity, the more agile, the more nimble that they can be to be responsive, because there is a world where you could be slow to turn the ship. And the last thing I'll say is I think the most important thing in advocacy right now is being still being able to understand what is actually happening. Let things play out, keep it small, keep it nimble.

Speaker 1: 30:33

The ability for a team to move fast and agile is so useful, but one of the most important things, I believe, is right now it is about being still and understanding where do you contribute?

Speaker 1: 30:45

So being still means to me we're listening to the reports, but we're trying to understand what is noise and what will be the actual impact on the ground.

Speaker 1: 30:55

So letting things play out and then getting your damage report, it is a moment where you can go. So collect your data, understand what's happening, understand what events are occurring and then choose to make a decision when you have enough data to make a decision and it won't be all the data that you want and then you listen, sit still activities roll and then you do it again. But I think it is easy to be running from left to right up and down when there's so much happening that we have to choose anchor points along the journey to say this is where we'll make a decision, this is how we will move, we will learn, we will have to pivot, because emergent strategy, emergent projects and emergent advocacy is the advocacy that's most effective today, in my opinion and I gotta tether all of that to one of our values, john, which is we play the long game, and if there was ever an episode or a trend that tethered to playing the long game, advocacy is that this is the long game play.

Speaker 3: 31:57

thank you for, for that incredible, one Good thing.

Speaker 2: 31:59

Such a good thread. I mean Sixto. Every time we are in your presence, my friend, I learn I feel buoyed. I just feel so grateful to have you in our life. How can folks connect with you that are listening, how can they support your work and find you online? Where are you hanging out online these days?

Speaker 1: 32:22

If you are looking for us, definitely LinkedIn is the best place to find us at. Think of Us. Our website is wwwthinkofusorg. Wonderful.

Speaker 3: 32:27

Adore you. Thank you for making the time Keep going. We are truly rooting for you every step of the way.

Speaker 1: 32:34

Well, I couldn't thank you more for the work that you are doing. There is nothing more powerful than having a new thought, a new value and being able to take action on it. You're just the best.

Speaker 2: 32:45

Thank you, thank you.