Press Release: 6/18/2025

Amy Izen

 

 

Alyssa Haywoode

JUNE 17, 2025

Amy Izen has a unique, hybrid role at MGH Chelsea that captures her dedication to support children, families, and communities holistically. She is a speech-language pathologist who splits her time between working with individual children and developing systemic solutions that will enhance the lives of more children and families in Chelsea.

“My work seeks to make stronger connections and partnerships between medicine, early education, local organizations, and the communities where families live, and exploring these themes—within Strategies for Children’s Advocacy Network, 9:30 Calls, and the Early Childhood Agenda—has been enriching, encouraging, and inspiring.”

Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, Izen was interested in being a teacher. Her mother reminded her of a family friend who was a speech-language pathologist, and after shadowing this friend at work, Izen chose to join the profession. Thanks to a minor in Spanish, a semester spent in Valparaíso, Chile, and the advice of a college professor, Izen entered the field as a bilingual practitioner, taking a job at MGH Chelsea HealthCare Center.

“MGH Chelsea was a place where many people are motivated to best serve families with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

“I was fortunate to start my career working there with the population in which I was most interested, two-to-five-year-old children who were exposed to Spanish in their homes. I enjoyed making sure a child’s speech/language skills were accurately measured in languages I didn’t speak by working with interpreters.” 

Izen quickly saw that the families she worked with had common barriers to helping their children thrive, and she began to ask questions and seek learning that deepened her understanding of the intersecting factors of child development and prompted changes in practice and collaboration.

“The discipline of speech-language pathology trained us to first and foremost look at the language challenges within the child, but I wanted to have more tools to consider the entire family, consider delays or challenges that have not yet been addressed, and document and influence social determinants of health.”

Wanting more dedicated time to consider children holistically and to promote program collaboration and innovation led Izen to take a part-time role at MGH Chelsea as Program Manager of the Early Childhood Initiative, a coalition-based public health approach operating out of the MGH Center for Community Health Improvement’s Healthy Chelsea and the Revere CARES Coalitions. 

“A collaborative approach allows partners to influence child development beyond what one organization can do independently and also influences practices across organizations,” Izen explains. 

For example, Izen led a community-wide effort to implement IRIS (Integrated Referral and Intake System), the first direct referral system in Massachusetts for early childhood services. It was an approach that addressed the barriers and needs Izen saw within each speech-language pathology patient and the needs identified across MGH and its community partners.

Instead of leaving families to connect to referral services themselves, IRIS builds referral bridges between community agencies, so a pediatrician can more easily refer a family to Early Intervention services, or a speech-language pathologist can more easily refer a child to a local Head Start or playgroup. 

“Launching this initiative required many partners to simultaneously agree to use IRIS, and we accomplished this with 14 partners within the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Izen says. To date, more than 1,200 families have been connected to needed referrals and there are now 25 agencies and departments within the Chelsea-based IRIS direct referral network.

Nonetheless, there remains, Izen says, a great deal of untapped potential in collaboration between medical, early education, and community. “The amazing thing about the medical sector is that pediatric care and obstetric care reach 98% of children and parents, while early education and care, at least in Chelsea, reaches about 10% of families. There is therefore a huge opportunity for the medical sector to be a bridge to community resources and connections between families and young children.”

Izen adds, “Pediatrician colleagues tell us they can’t possibly cover everything related to child development in a 15-minute annual visit, nor do they know all the community resources that can help a family.” 

That’s why there’s also a need to expand and sustain the very limited resources that connect pediatricians and clinic-based practitioners to community initiatives, to support children with delayed and/or neurodiverse development, and to advocate for more connections among public health services, early intervention support, and early education. 

For her Advocacy Network project, Izen is exploring how to expand supports for young children with suspected autism or new diagnoses of autism. Izen’s motivation stems from the steep rise in diagnosed autism she has seen among the children she works with, from 5 to 10 percent when she started as a speech-language pathologist over a decade ago to 90 to 95 percent of her caseload now—an increase that requires significant change in expanding individual treatment approaches and in implementing systemic cross-disciplinary supports for these children.

“I don’t believe that information and resources regarding neurodiverse child development should be kept behind a gate of autism diagnosis or in information silos,” Izen explains. Instead, there is general knowledge that families should proactively have, such as social language, play, and sensory development. There should also be, Izen adds, “broader conversations about the needs and gaps in accessing autism evaluations, robust services, and appropriate supports, particularly for children with diverse linguistic and socio-economic resources.” 



Izen summarizes her project with a hopeful, honest tone. “Through naming the current needs and gaps directly, we can collaboratively build the world that we believe should exist for all children. The Advocacy Network and the work of Strategies for Children is illuminating the power of policy change and collective advocacy that can positively impact children in a more sustainable way.” 

Izen looks forward to continuing to lend her perspective, expertise, and advocacy voice to building this more positive world for children with diverse backgrounds and needs.