Presidential Innovation Fellows #Hackfostercare

By Emily Ianacone, Wendy Harman, and Puja Balachander Presidential Innovation Fellows

The Presidential Innovation Fellowship was created to help solve the toughest, most ambiguous problems using the best practices of the private sector, and we couldn’t be more excited to use our talents to enhance the quality of technology in child welfare.

The outcomes for youth in a system that’s inherently traumatizing are far from ideal: half of foster youth won’t graduate by age 18, 1 in 3 experience homelessness, 4 out of 5 males are arrested by their mid 20s, and the rate of PTSD and drug abuse is 5x higher than in the general population.

Even in the face of these sobering statistics, these are normal, great kids who deserve the opportunity to thrive in society. When social workers, supervisors, resource families, and biological families and communities have access to technology designed for them, we can improve and transform processes to prevent children and families from touching the child welfare system in the first place, saving $7 for every $1 we spend on behavioral health prevention. We can also help those who do enter the system reach safety, permanency, and well-being quickly and in a more human-centered way.

Through our research, we’ve met social workers who spend more time on data entry than interacting with families despite their preference, and families and youth who don’t know about the services available to them and feel voiceless in the monolithic child welfare system. We’ve talked to resource families who don’t have access to essential information about the children in their care, kinship guardians who struggle to navigate a system that’s new to them, and supervisors who are unable to measure the success of new programs and policies in real time because of bureaucratic barriers.

At the same time, we’ve spoken to entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and changemakers who have developed products that work towards alleviating these problems. We’re excited by their potential to address some of the most challenging management, collaboration, and accountability issues faced by child welfare stakeholders.

But there seems to be a disconnect between the innovative work that’s happening, and the people who need these products in the child welfare system. There’s also a disconnect between the entrepreneurs working to improve child welfare, and the technologists and innovators who could build and scale these solutions. This week PIF is developing a prototype to serve as a template for bringing together these disconnected groups to move innovative technology to where it’s needed most: into the hands of child welfare stakeholders.

We hope that by developing this model and bridging these gaps, more technologists will be inspired to lend their talents to help empower some of the most marginalized communities and families in our nation. We also hope that more child welfare stakeholders like social workers, supervisors, resource families, biological families, and youth will be able to make use of and give feedback to improve the innovative technologies and solutions that are already out there. US CTO Megan Smith has often talked about the longstanding American tradition of the innovator’s seat at the table. We hope that our model, and this event, is a catalyst to bring more innovators to the table, and improve the lives of our youth.