Power to the Public: Tackling Child Welfare and Foster Care
Channel: New America
Date: 08/10/2021

Across America from Arizona to Pennsylvania to Hawaii, child welfare and foster care systems are broken, and children are paying the price of that dysfunction.

Today, there are more than 400,000 children in the U.S. foster care system. More than 43,800 of them live in foster care institutional placements, a disproportionate number of them Black youths. This “safety net” doesn’t always keep children safe. As New America’s Tara McGuinness and Hana Schank point out in Power to the Public, “while coming into care may provide immediate protection from abuse and neglect, the long-term outlook is grim: 70 percent of juvenile justice-involved youth have been in the child welfare system, 33 percent of homeless young adults were previously in foster care, and 60 percent of youth who are sex trafficked were in care.” To make matters worse, the current bureaucracy deters too many well-meaning foster parents, and placing children with extended family is complicated by a lack of good processes and policies. 

Join New America’s Tara McGuinness and Hana Schank for a roundtable discussion with child welfare experts Sixto Cancel, Marina Nitze, and Amber Salzar. The panel will discuss the urgent opportunities to reform the U.S. welfare and foster care systems, the role of public interest technologists, emerging bright spots of what works, and myriad ways that everyone can get involved in protecting some of our most vulnerable community members. 

Speakers:

Marina Nitze, @MarinaNitze

Public Interest Technology fellow at New America. Recently, Nitze was the CTO of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and wrote the book Business Efficiency for Dummies (and the upcoming Hack Your Bureaucracy). She has volunteered as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate for foster children for over a decade.
Sixto Cancel, @Sixtocancel

Founder and CEO, Think of Us, a tech nonprofit with a mission to drive systematic change in child welfare and the foster care system.
Amber Salzer, @waDCYF

CQI Program Manager and LGBTQIA+ Lead for the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), Licensing Division. She has worked for the organization since 2011, focusing on child welfare, foster care licensing, and kinship care.
Moderated by Power to the Public co-authors:

Tara McGuinness, @taradmcguinness
Founder, New America’s New Practice Lab

Hana Schank, @hanaschank
Co-Director, New America’s Public Interest Technology program

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