Jennifer Jacobs: Reconnecting Foster Children to Families, Communities

The technology creates a “spider” graph of the child’s connection ecosystem, mostly from publicly available data — “a combination of a loose family tree and community connections, loved ones and supporters,” says Jacobs. It enables those who place and track children removed from a home to find options other than assigning the child to an unknown family in an unfamiliar setting. Even if such a placement isn’t possible, the child can still benefit from a network of support. “It’s crucial that those individuals are engaged, that they are brought in and … enabled to be supportive,” says Jacobs.

Companies that administer Medicaid programs are among the organization’s partners. “They understood quickly that taking care of the relational health of foster children or children at risk of going into foster care … is really good for business,” Jacobs says. “To do the work up-front saves an enormous amount of money from a business perspective, and from the human perspective, they can literally save lives. So it’s a win-win.”

The benefits of contact

The organization has already touched the lives of 18,000 children in 11,000 families, Jacobs says. She said one young man, “Jonathan,” spent years in the foster care system getting moved from family to family and disconnected from everyone he knew.

“When our tools were used by his social worker, she was able to find his grandmother who was living 15 minutes from his latest foster home,” says Jacobs. “She had no idea that he was in foster care. He’d been adopted early on, and she assumed that he was better off and doing fine with his adoptive family. She didn’t know he’d been taken from that family because of abuse and that he’d been in foster care with no one for years. And she broke down crying, just distraught that her grandchild had needed her, and no one told her. No one gave her a chance to help.” Jonathan’s grandmother then petitioned the court to take guardianship of him and was able to introduce him to the rest of his family — “to all the people who didn’t know that he was alone,” she says.

 Jacobs now has her sights set on ways to intervene much earlier after a crisis puts a child into foster care. “What if we could back the whole train up and keep children from ever getting disconnected in the first place, even to the extent that perhaps we don’t need to remove the child from the family?” she says. “If we connect the family to their supporters, and other family and community early on, then a whole bunch of trauma could be avoided.”