Staying at the table: Reese's Purpose in Brussels

In September, Reese's Purpose Founder and Executive Director Trista Hamsmith traveled to Brussels, Belgium, for the ICPHSO International Symposium. She was a plenary speaker, joining a panel on the extended collaboration process and how partnerships can move product safety forward.

The panel focused on working together. Families and advocates bring lived experience and a clear understanding of how hazards affect children. Industry can develop and adopt safer designs. Regulators and policymakers can set expectations and put protections into practice. Standards experts can turn safety goals into technical requirements. Each perspective matters. When people share what they know, listen to one another, and put their heads together, they build ideas stronger than any one person or organization could create alone.

Trista spoke about the collaboration behind Reese's Law and the Energizer Ultimate Child Shield battery, and about the wider possibilities that open up when people come together around child safety. The lesson is the same in both: progress depends on partnerships among people with different experiences and expertise. Those partnerships solve immediate problems, build momentum, encourage others to get involved, and inspire change across organizations and industries.

The work does not end when a law passes. Safer product design, strong standards, effective implementation, clear communication, and continued innovation all help turn progress into protections families can count on. Ongoing collaboration lets people share what is working, identify where more is needed, and keep improving together.

The international setting underscored that product safety is a shared concern. A hazard that affects a child in one country can offer lessons for families, advocates, companies, and safety leaders elsewhere. By sharing experiences and ideas across borders, people build on one another's work and advance safer products for children everywhere.

For Reese's Purpose, the symposium was a chance to bring families' experiences into an international conversation, strengthen relationships, and carry new ideas into the organization's advocacy, education, and prevention work. Trista's participation reflects what Reese's Purpose does: bring perspectives together and turn shared concern into action.

Trista also emphasized that collaboration requires more than an invitation into the room. Having a seat at the table means more than having a chair with your name on it. It means choosing to walk into the room, sit down, take part, and remain present. Real collaboration asks people to listen, contribute, and stay engaged, even when the work is complicated or the conversation is uncomfortable. A seat only has meaning when the person who holds it chooses to use it.

When people keep showing up and working through challenges together, good ideas have a better chance of becoming practical protections for children. And when we work together, great things can happen.