Connect Our Kids

Connect Our Kids builds free software to help foster children and orphans find and connect with their families. Every year 20,000 U.S. youth age-out of foster care without ever having found that "forever family." These youth face a daunting future without the network of support that a family and childhood adult supporters usually brings. By age 26, two-thirds of these youth will have been homeless, incarcerated, or they are dead. We can change this. Connect Our Kids has already built and successfully piloted our free software to scale up an approach that works--connecting youth to their extended family and supporters. But most social workers need help, not on how to use the software, but how to find and engage family. I would use the Elevate Prize to take our software to this next level--guiding child advocates worldwide in building connections for and with the children they serve, finding contact information for those supporters, and engaging positive adults in their lives. To do this we will build a "Guide Me" feature in our software--walking the user through the proven steps used by successful programs in many countries. 

My background is nuclear engineering and national security. Before launching Connect Our Kids, I worked to counter nuclear materials smuggling and terrorism worldwide. In 2011, while pregnant with my third child, I read an article about aging out of foster care, and the impact on a youth's life. As a mother, this was painful to imagine. But this article also described the concept of building out a child's connections--family and supporters--until someone who can become that child's family, for life, is found. On average, if 200 adults connected to a child (whether they even knew of the child or not), can be found, at least 1 will step up. This made a lot of sense to me. At the same time, I'd seen specialized software in the intelligence community to map and track terrorists' families. Surely, I thought, we do at least as much for our own children? I set out to find out. The answer was no. I spend 6 years researching why not, what would it take, and how could it be done. I realized that I was uniquely positioned at a crossroads of knowledge and abilities, to change this. So I launched Connect Our Kids.

Over 600,000 children experience foster care in a year in the U.S. Many are eventually able to reunify with a parent, but many do not. Black, indigenous, LGBTQ, and disabled children are disproportionately represented in foster care. Globally, millions of children are in foster care or orphanages--only a lucky few ever find families to join or rejoin. Many factors contribute to this problem--poverty, governance, cultures--and Connect Our Kids cannot directly solve those problems. Modern technology in some ways has contributed to these problems. But it can also help, by providing free, scalable, easy-to-use software that helps child advocates find and engage a child's supporters--including finding extended family and others who will help. 

Connect Our Kids not only builds that software, we are advocates for children and youth in and at-risk of foster care. We help social workers and other advocates learn about family finding and then apply the techniques on behalf of the children they serve. We design our software in thought partnership with those who will use it. Because of this approach, we are able to tailor our work specifically to empower those who serve foster children. 

The technology revolution passed by the field of child welfare. Not only are child welfare professionals left to work with 30 year old technology, most in the field are not even really aware of what they could and should have at their fingertips. We have built software based on that used in the intelligence and counter-terrorism fields, but we are applying it to the purpose of finding families for foster children. For decades, child welfare has operated on the principle that because their work is human-based, technology was mainly only useful for database storage of manually entered information. We take a different perspective--that technology can be used to speed up many of the predictable and tedious aspects of the social worker's job, leaving their energy for the most important work--helping children and families directly. Social workers constantly gasp during our demos, exclaiming over how our software will allow them to do so much more to help the children they serve. They say things like "This tool is revolutionary for what we need to do!" and "It's like the future of child welfare has arrived!" 

We completed our year-long pilot in March 2021. During this time, we served several thousand children. Pilot testers told us our software cut their search time in half, while increasing connections found sixfold. Post-pilot, we are  implementing lessons learned as we work towards our vision that every child should grow up in a caring family with supportive connections. Our next steps are: 1) Make family finding more accessible for everyone serving foster children--by building the "Guide Me" feature into our software. Most social workers would do better for their children if they knew how. 2) Create a multi-language option so that the software can be used anywhere. It is extremely flexible and can easily be used in various languages and environments. 3) Increase trauma awareness among foster youth. Foster children are diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder at twice the rate of returning war veterans, but are often completely unaware of their own PTSD. The healthcare field knows that childhood trauma has a significant impact on adult health. We are designing a trauma awareness video series aimed at teens and young adults to help increase their understanding of what happened to them so they can build more successful supportive relationships.  

Our software tools are being used by social workers, lawyers, Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) and other non-profit professionals in 38 states. So far, we have served over 6,000 children in foster care and counting. Over the next year, we anticipate we will serve more than double the number of children in light of our new and growing partnerships nationwide. We have recently partnered with the Department of Children and Family Services in Los Angeles County, which serves 33,000 foster youth. We are also collaborating with the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption to train all 500 of their Wendy’s Wonderful Kids (WWK) recruiters nationwide. These are not our only new and expanding partnerships but they alone guarantee we will be serving at least 11,200 foster youth in 2021-2022.

We measure our impact by the permanent supportive connections a foster child has in his or her life, as well as our users’ feedback on the value the software provides to them as they serve these children. Following the success of our pilot, we are now working to scale-up our reach and training throughout the U.S. by outreaching and making our software available to as many social service agencies and nonprofits as possible. Our pilot identified several paths to expanding family finding for foster children. One crucial path is to build a “Guide Me” feature into our software. This feature will help social workers who are not already trained in how to actually find families for foster children and walk them step-by-step through the search for family and kin. Guide Me will complement existing kinship search programs by providing a general platform by which to implement those programs. With this guided software, any organization will be able to conduct family search and outreach with minimal additional resources.

Our Family Connections software, while designed to be extremely user-friendly, still requires the user to have a general understanding of how to search for family and supporters for a child. Training on this skill can be very resource intensive and many counties and organizations are not able to afford it. As a result, many social workers who are otherwise able to use our software, aren’t sure what to do with it. We are addressing this issue with a step-by-step interactive guide for family finding that will be embedded in the software itself, walking the user through the steps and best practices of finding a child’s family and supporters. The Elevate Prize will allow us to create a first version of this “Guide Me” feature so that social workers who have not had the opportunity to be trained on family searching can find families and support networks for every foster child in their care. Without the knowledge or any tools to help them do better, social workers revert to business as usual--simply trying to house the child.

Our vision is to transform the child welfare system into one in which children and families that are struggling, whether in foster care, or trying to avoid foster care, are able to be surrounded with the support they need. In order to achieve this vision, we need a substantial platform, a significant audience, and brand recognition. The Elevate Prize can help us achieve all of these. We are currently working with several state and county governments, and the impact of having the credibility and substance of the Elevate Prize would help these bureaucracies have confidence that they can take this innovative step, and that leaning forward on behalf of their children’s futures is the right thing. Child welfare is a field mired in habits and reflexive risk avoidance. There are many fairly simple tools that would help the children in foster care enormously, with the only significant obstacle being “we don’t do it that way.” While we’ve made significant progress on our own with those in the field who hunger for change, the status of the Elevate Prize would accelerate our efforts substantially.

Equitable partnership with the community we serve--both social workers and the youth they serve--has been exceptionally crucial in the development of our organization and software. We have had and continually seek input and participation from diverse leaders across demographic groups throughout all stages of our software development and deployment. We are partnered with a foster alumni group, Foster Strong, that includes diversity of race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and different abilities. This group is part of our training core, as well as of our software design team. Black and Native American communities have been particularly devastated by child welfare’s practices of disproportionately removing children from struggling families and moving them quickly to be available for adoption. We believe this destroys the fabric of Black and Native American families and communities. LGBTQ+ and differently abled children and youth are also disproportionately impacted by rejection from birth families, or birth parents’ inability to adequately parent these children.  Many of our team, board, and key advisors are from these diverse communities, and we are continually seeking additional perspectives from experts in the field, those with lived experience, and other thoughtful contributors.

As CEO and co-founder, I bring decades of experience researching and untangling difficult problems, finding cross-field synergies, and applying practical solutions, all vital to the Guide Me project's success. Jessica Stern, my COO and co-founder, leads our outreach and communication work in seeking feedback from our users. Her own childhood experience living with a foster family allows her to convey a deep sense of the importance of this work, and the unshakable confidence that we must persist, no matter the obstacles, because the lives and futures of our nation’s children depend on it. Together with our CTO, Travis Collins, we led the team that designed and built our existing software tools that have already helped over 6,000 foster children to have permanent families and supportive connections. We have built a knowledge base that includes hundreds of discussions with social workers, lawyers, foster alumni, foster, adoptive and biological parents. We have conducted dozens of feedback sessions, trained hundreds of users of our software throughout our pilot, and both listened to and observed their challenges. We are uniquely and perfectly positioned to address the issue of expanding access to finding families for foster children.

I was working in the countering nuclear terrorism field when I learned about the 400,000 plus kids in the U.S. foster care system and how desperately they need supportive connections. Although I’ve led soldiers overseas and nuclear non-proliferations teams around the world, I knew little about child welfare at that time. I suspected that technology we were using in counter-terrorism could help connect foster children to families--but I needed to learn more. I spent the next six years researching foster care and learning from those in the field. One person I learned from is an alumnus of foster care, Jessica Stern, who became my co-founder. My leadership style is collaborative, so Jessica and I worked together, building a small, dedicated team, a large group of advocates, and raising over $1.5M in funding to build our first 3 software tools. With this team, we conducted an incredibly successful pilot of our software--which pilot testers described repeatedly as “game-changing.” I have led soldiers, teams, and organizations all of my life. Leading this work at Connect Our Kids has been one of the most rewarding and impactful experiences of which I have been part.

Jessica and I have been featured on television, a popular podcast, radio program, at live events speaking to diverse audiences and our Connect Our Kids awareness clip was featured in a foster care documentary. 

ABC News 8, Connect Our Kids is Positively Richmond: https://www.wric.com/news/connect-our-kids-is-positively-richmond/

Jennifer Jacobs, talk at The Officer Women Leadership Symposium, 2019 Fostering Change Podcast interview

Fostering Change Podcast, Connect Our Kids with Jennifer Jacobs & Jessica Stern: 

https://www.comfortcases.org/podcast/2020/9/15/episode-56-connect-our-kids-with-jennifer-jacobs-and-jessica-stern

Dr. Gregory Williams interviewing Jennifer and Jessica on his BBS Radio network show, “Breaking the Silence:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz6MFW-B8bQ&t=1140s

“Breaking the Cycle” foster care documentary, opening credit: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS5JVSTf4LA&t=384s

The Elevate Prize funding would allow us to directly fund the design and development of the Guide Me feature of our software, and bring it at no cost to child welfare professional serving foster children. This feature will be embedded directly into our existing Family Connections software tool, and will have the crucial functionality of bringing family finding capabilities to social workers who have not had access to the time and resource intensive family finding trainings that are necessary today in order to learn about how to search for and engage with a foster child’s extended family and supportive kin. This user-friendly step-by-step guide on how to do family finding will be integrated into our easy-to-use software program for searching and downloading information from the Internet in seconds. This combination will bring within reach our goal of a family and a support network for every foster child. Our Family Connections software already removes the first barrier--that it takes too long to do family finding--and the Elevate Prize funding will allow us to address the second barrier--that many social workers don’t know how to do family finding. This funding will make an enormous difference in thousands of foster children’s lives.

One of our most valuable partners is the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. We received input from their Wendy’s Wonderful Kids recruiters throughout our product design and feedback work over the past 4 years. As a result, many of their professionals already use our software and we have recently been asked to train all of their recruiters nationwide on our tools as they seek to find permanent placements and supports for the children they serve. 

We also work with dozens of other child welfare and mentoring organizations, from private non-profits to county and state agencies. We seek feedback from all of our users, and have made a number of key improvements based on what we learn from them. Our Guide Me feature will be designed with heavy input from our large group of collaborative child welfare professional partners. 

We are working towards data partnerships to improve the quality and quantity of the contact data that we can quickly provide to child welfare professionals. These discussions are ongoing.