Same Sky · Founder's Statement
Why I Built
Same Sky
A personal statement from the founder on the evidence, the gaps, and why this work cannot wait.
A personal statement from the founder on the evidence, the gaps, and why this work cannot wait.
I was born in a small town in rural West Virginia. My family had lived there for generations, and most of my extended family still calls it home.
In elementary school, my family lost everything. What followed was a period of instability that took us back and forth to Florida, where we eventually settled. By third grade, I had changed schools six times. We stayed with friends until we couldn't, and for a time, we lived in government-assisted housing.
The uncertainty of that period leaves a mark on a child. I remember what it felt like to live in the middle of forces I did not understand, where the pressures on my family became part of my daily life. Kids absorb those moments. They carry them forward.
Growing up, I did not have language for these experiences. I did not know about housing policy or food insecurity or access to care. I did not know that federal decisions shaped so much of what we were living through. I just knew what it felt like.
I eventually found my way to medicine and became a pediatrician. In caring for families, and in the data I have spent years studying, I came to understand something that changed how I see my own story.
My childhood was not exceptional. It reflects the experience of millions of children in the United States today. And it is, in large part, the result of one simple fact: the United States has no sustained federal policy agenda for children.
"The uncertainty of that period leaves a mark on a child. I remember what it felt like to live in the middle of forces I did not understand."
I have had the privilege of working inside the federal government, including serving as a Senior Policy Advisor in the Biden White House, focusing on families affected by substance use as well as hunger and food insecurity. I have also worked with the Trump Administration on the opioid crisis and its effects on infants.
But I have also seen that none has had a coherent, sustained agenda that puts children at the center. I have sat in rooms where consequential decisions about children's lives were made by people with genuine commitment. And still, children were not the organizing principle. Good intentions are not enough when the structure itself is missing.
Beginning in 2019, my team conducted annual polling of parents, first in Tennessee, then in Georgia, and eventually nationally. The findings have been remarkably consistent. Across income, race, geography, and political affiliation, parents want the same things for their children: food security, mental health support, access to healthcare, a strong child welfare system, and safety from gun violence.
These are not partisan priorities. They are parental ones.
A national voter survey published in JAMA Health Forum in 2024 confirmed this at scale. Majorities of Americans across every demographic group support action to improve children's health and well-being.
Same Sky is my attempt to build what I never found in Washington: a specific, public, nonpartisan federal policy agenda for children, one that is tracked and sustained across administrations and election cycles.
The idea has also been shaped by my experience as a scholar in the Presidential Leadership Scholars program — a national initiative that brings together leaders from across the political spectrum who share a commitment to service and to the country. The program is built on the conviction that cross-partisan engagement produces the most meaningful and durable change. What stands out is not what divides those leaders, but what they are willing to build together.
Same Sky is grounded in that same belief. That it is still possible to define common purpose. That children can be that common ground.
Our ideology is simple: children come first. Our legitimacy comes from parents and children themselves, a constituency that is national, politically diverse, and too often absent from the center of policy conversations. We earn our voice in communities. We carry it into Washington.
The investments we make in children today will shape the country for generations. That is not an abstract idea. It is measurable, visible, and urgent. Same Sky exists to make that case, clearly and persistently, until policymakers have no choice but to act.
Same Sky exists to make that case, clearly and persistently, until policymakers have no choice but to act.