Foster America Overview
America’s Child Welfare Crisis
Every child belongs in a safe and loving family. That’s why our goal for the millions of American children who are neglected, abused, or orphaned is to help their families heal, when possible, and to make foster care more loving and far less traumatic, when it is needed.
But right now, the child welfare system – the state and county public agencies charged with this responsibility – has been stretched beyond its expertise and capacity. The system places too many poor and minority children in foster care who could be kept safely at home, shuffles children between multiple foster homes and institutions, and further traumatizes them at each step.
This isn’t just devastating for individual children and their families – the failures of the child welfare system are at the root of some our nation’s biggest challenges. As many as 70 percent of youth in the juvenile justice system have been in the child welfare system. One-third of homeless young adults were previously in foster care. And as a result of our country’s disparate treatment of black and white families, black children are twice as likely as white children to wind up in foster care and land on its conveyer belt to other broken systems.
Foster America’s Approach
Imagine if we could bring the same innovation that pervades every other part of our lives to child welfare. Imagine if child welfare agencies could use best practices from marketing, customer service and data analytics to recruit, select, and retain loving foster, adoptive and kinship families. Imagine if social workers could access data analytics to match struggling families with the services they need to stay together. By bringing these kinds of modern tools to the child welfare system, we could vastly improve outcomes for individual children and families while avoiding the downstream costs to our society of our failure to protect our most vulnerable kids. This is Foster America’s vision.
We scour the country for talented professionals who have skills and expertise in the areas child welfare agencies need to address the field’s biggest, most persistent challenges in new ways: skills in data and technology, design and marketing, finance, and strategy and planning. We then give them the training and tools they need to succeed as 18-month, full-time fellows in child welfare agencies across America, where they lead major reform projects that require their skills. In the long run, we aim to scale the innovations our fellows develop and build a movement of fellowship alumni who will assume higher leadership responsibilities and transform child welfare outcomes nationwide.
Our Progress
Since launching Foster America two years ago, we have found a robust supply of accomplished professionals eager to use their skills from other sectors to improve the lives of children. Out of 900 candidates considered, we have placed 38 talented and diverse fellows in the field, a highly competitive selection rate of four percent. At the same time, child welfare agencies across the country have proven to be interested and engaged partners. We have already placed fellows in 20 agencies nationwide, and that number is growing. Nearly all of our agency partners have paid for our fellows’ salaries, which further demonstrates their commitment and increases Foster America’s sustainability and scalability.
We have also seen our fellows make tremendous progress on the ground. For example, our fellow Adam Williams used his marketing and human-centered design skills in Rhode Island to help the state increase by 25 percent the number of foster families they recruited and licensed and thereby decrease by 30 percent the number of foster children they placed in orphanage-like institutions. Our fellow Jason Kolter is using his software engineering skills to help Washington State integrate data across its early childhood and child welfare agencies to identify and match the highest risk families earlier with needed services that prevent child abuse and neglect.
The success of our fellows stems from our rigorous recruitment and selection process, as well as the ongoing training and support we provide them through a faculty of national experts on child welfare, human-centered design, and results-based leadership.
The Next 1,000 Days
Over the next 1,000 days, we plan to recruit and prepare at least 100 new cross-sector leaders for the child welfare field and place them in at least half the states in the nation. Given the size of the child welfare field, this group will be large enough to have a major influence on how the field serves children and families.
As our initial fellows have demonstrated their impact, demand for new fellows has grown among public agencies. As a result, we are now positioned to place 30 new fellows in public agencies in 2019 alone.
Over the next 1,000 days, we also plan to form learning collaboratives among our fellows, fellowship alumni, and agency partners across the country to accelerate their pace of innovation and progress in two major areas of reform: (1) Preventing abuse and neglect, and thereby safely reducing the number of kids who enter foster care; and (2) Improving the quality and quantity of foster, kinship and adoptive homes and thereby decreasing the number of foster children placed in institutions.
Founding Team
Founder and Executive Director Sherry Lachman has devoted her career to improving government systems that serve vulnerable children and families. Before founding Foster America, she was a domestic policy advisor to Vice President Biden, a senior policy advisor at the Department of Education, a senior education counsel to Senator Al Franken, and a lawyer at the Juvenile Law Center. Sherry is a graduate of Columbia Law School and Harvard Kennedy School. Her commitment to child welfare stems from her experience in foster care as a child.
Co-Founder and Chief Program Officer Marie Zemler Wu is a creative community builder with extensive child welfare experience. In past roles at the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Center for the Study of Social Policy, Marie consulted to child welfare systems across the nation. Marie is a graduate of Macalester College and Harvard Kennedy School. As an adoptee, her work is informed by a personal mission to see every child rooted in family.
Support and Partnerships
Since starting Foster America, we have been fortunate to be joined by an incredible board, advisors, pro bono partners, and funders, without whom our work would not be possible. Our key partners include the Center for the Study of Social Policy, Halcyon, Casey Family Programs, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Aviv Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, McKinsey, Akin Gump, GLG, Harvard’s Government Performance Lab, and family foundations in the regions we serve.