BUILDSense

in collaboration with the BUILD Initiative

Photograph of a family of four, smiling, while the kids are on the backs of the parents.

BUILDSense: A tool for collective learning, sense making and systems transformation.

BUILDSense is a collective learning, sense-making, and systems transformation partnership between the BUILD Initiative and the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities.

Throughout BUILD 2025, you will have opportunities to share your reflections, opinions, and thoughts regarding the overall conference, individual sessions, and your experiences. BUILDSense will help reveal emerging patterns, shared priorities, and cross-sector connections that might otherwise remain hidden. This partnership will utilize AI, which will function as a partner in sense-making as it organizes complex information so that BUILD leaders, practitioners, and communities can focus on interpretation, strategy, and action. The initiative models an ethical, participatory approach to AI, grounded in transparency, data integrity, and co-creation. 

Frequently Asked Questions

A collective learning, sense making, and systems transformation partnership between BUILD and the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities. Throughout BUILD25, there will be opportunities to share reflections, opinions, and thoughts regarding the overall conference, individual sessions, and experiences. BUILDSense will help reveal emerging patterns, shared priorities, and cross-sector connections that might otherwise remain hidden. This partnership will utilize AI, which will function as a partner in sense-making as it organizes complex information so that BUILD leaders, practitioners, and communities can focus on interpretation, strategy, and action. The initiative models an ethical, participatory approach to AI, grounded in transparency, data integrity, and co-creation. No personal or identifying information will be included. 

This project will assist BUILD in learning during the conference, while helping to plan future events, amplify the wisdom of the field, and accelerate equitable systems change for young children and families. 

BUILDSense opportunities to share reflections, expertise, and points of view to this learning process.  

  • The Survey link will be sent to the app after every session.  
  • Morning Pulses will provide opportunities to make sense of emerging themes and patterns. 
  • One Intensive Session, Mapping the Moment: A Collective Reflection will be a chance for participants to listen deeply and make meaning. 
  • Phone Booth and Garden  are fun ways to share ideas, reflections. 
  • The Closing Plenary will be another opportunity to synthesize learnings and use them to plan go forward actions. 
  • Post Conference Survey will be one more chance for participants to provide feedback. 

Participants who choose to opt in can access the BUILDSense survey through a QR code in the session room, via a link in the conference app or in the daily emails. After each session, you can share your reflections on what inspired, challenged, or shifted your thinking. Participants are also invited to participate in the Phone Booth and Garden and the post conference survey. We will use AI to organize ideas coming from these methods into themes that help BUILD understand what participants are learning across sessions. 

Only what participants voluntarily submit in the form will be used for analysis. No personal or identifying information will be included in the analysis. 

BUILDSense is a partnership with the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Healthier Children, Families, and Communities, which has Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for ethical use of AI in research. All data is stored securely and analyzed only in aggregate. The AI tool does not train the data collected or reuse it outside this event. 

No. AI will assist with synthesis, but humans remain at the core. Meeting participants will engage in sense-making during Morning Pulses and the closing plenary, and they will be invited to join UCLA and the BUILD Evaluation Team in a few sessions after BUILD25 to support the review, interpretation, and contextualization of all AI summaries. 

All participation in BUILDSense is voluntary. If you do not wish to participate, do not complete the BUILDSense surveys. 

 

 

Center Staff at BUILD 2025

Efren Aguilar is the Director of the Pomona and New Mexico Social Impact Labs

Efren Aguilar

Director, Early Childhood Ecosystems Transformation Accelerator

Leveraging emerging technology to enhance participation, elevate community work, and maximize impact.

The tools that power BUILDSense were developed to supercharge our Center's flagship initiatives. AI tools, when used responsibly and ethically, allow us to organize and make sense of complex information quickly and ensures that all voices are heard equally.

 

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Data Chats in Albuquerque, NM

As part of the New Mexico Accelerator, we used online tools to collect participant's reflections and used AI to identify patterns and trends in responses. Instead of waiting for weeks to debrief, we collectively were able to chart a path forward before the event ended.

Learn more about the New Mexico Accelerator
Participants from the Ecosystem Mapping Session sitting in round tables focusing their attention to the back of the room where the main activity is taking place

Ecosystem Mapping in Pomona, CA

With our partners in Pomona, CA, we have facilitated several ecosystem sessions where residents, families, city leadership, and other leaders have gathered together to map out all of the different tangible and intangible things that affect a family's ability to thrive.

Learn more about our Work in Pomona

For the past 25+ years, we've been building a future where all children thrive. 

We understand what it takes for children to thrive and finds new, more innovative and effective ways to make that possible - disrupting norms; creating new, equity-focused measurement systems; bringing disparate (often unlikely) expertise and perspectives together; building new frameworks; engaging communities as activists and engines for positive change; challenging and shifting power relationships - to inform, inspire, and motivate strategic investment and meaningful improvements in equitable children’s health, development and well-being. Working across multiple disciplines to understand and solve problems, we never forget that behind every data point, there’s a child. This inspires our efforts to develop better systems and improve the quality of services for vulnerable populations, and to create more effective child and family advocacy strategies at the community level.

DIF logo on Blue Box.

Data Informed Futures

Empowering the advocates, allies and visionaries striving to transform children’s lives by providing unique, neighborhood-level data and mapping about children’s well-being that reveal geographic patterns of disparity and resilience.

About Data Informed Futures
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Social Impact Labs (New Mexico + Pomona)

Redefining how universities, government, communities, and the private sector work together to make a sustainable social impact in communities.

About the Labs
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Life Course Translational Research Network (LCT-RN)

Bringing communities, families, practitioners, and researchers together to translate research into action.

About the LCT-RN
Illustration of All Children Thrive Logo.

All Children Thrive (ACT)

Reimagining cities as engines for activism, innovation and positive change so that all children, of all backgrounds, can thrive.

About ACT