In collaboration with New America and Schmidt Futures, Foster America will implement a team of three fellows across three different states who will lead efforts to improve resource family (i.e. foster and kinship family) licensing and support. These fellows apply relevant skills from other sectors to this reform work, including skills in human-centered design and business process redesign.

The fellows will build on successful approaches for ensuring foster children are placed in family settings, as opposed to group homes and institutions, and with kin whenever possible. They will also develop new strategies and tools for furthering these goals. Fellows will center equity in their work by analyzing the extent to which children and families of color are disproportionately harmed by current resource family policies and practices and by working to remedy these harms and increase the number of foster children of color who are able to remain in their extended families and communities. The fellows will come together regularly to learn from each other’s efforts, scale the successful strategies any individual fellow or agency partner develops across the three jurisdictions, and co-design solutions to shared challenges.