Bri Deason

Brianna (Bri) Deason is from Pella, Iowa, but originally hails from Orlando, Florida. Bri aged out of Iowa's foster care system and has over fifteen years of experience with the child welfare system. She has spent the last few years growing her passion for advocacy, policy work, and systems change. Bri has taken part in advocacy work to advance the lives of foster youth, including extending the age to twenty-one. Through this advocacy work, Bri has focused on supporting people to utilize their own voices to incite change. She believes that those closest to issues are most often the people with the best solutions but they are farthest from the positions of power to change these things. Bri seeks to humanize the systems tasked with serving our people by using healing-centered, data-driven, and empowering practices.

Previously, Bri worked as a Youth Development Specialist. In this role she coordinated the State of Iowa Youth Advisory Council and Iowa Youth Congress, programs designed to support youth to be involved in government by learning and practicing research, gathering data, and more. Bri was responsible for creating engaging and informative content to aid youth in their advocacy work. During this time, she also served as the coordinator for the National Youth in Transition Database Ambassadors, a program to support youth who have aged out of Iowa's foster care system to use data collected by the NYTD survey to improve policy and practice in the child welfare system. Bri also worked as a Program Coordinator with Iowa ACEs 360, a nonprofit focused on supporting communities, organizations, and people to take steps to reduce childhood adversity. She is currently in the process of obtaining her bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa for Political Science and Pre-Law.

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