2022 END OF YEAR REPORT

Early indicators of a movement for systems change

We stand at a pivotal moment, facing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally reshape the child welfare system. 

There has been a growing consensus in recent years that child welfare fails to meet the needs of those it serves and leads to negative outcomes across the lifespan. This has shifted the ecosystem from a narrow concept of child safety to a broader emphasis on family wellbeing. Reform efforts are increasingly focused on supports that enable families to stay together, preventing entry into foster care altogether. 

Now, the collective experience of the pandemic has forced the child welfare ecosystem to rapidly adapt to novel challenges. Expanded funding opportunities have been put to innovative uses. More than ever before, decision makers, state administrators, and frontline practitioners are open to new ways of doing things. However, while there is broad agreement on our greatest challenges, we struggle to find solutions that address root issues and work at scale. Think of Us is uniquely positioned and aligned with partners across the ecosystem to help create these solutions and drive this national movement for change. 

We know that the most successful movements for systemic change - ending child labor and Jim Crow, gaining women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights - all have one crucial thing in common: they were envisioned, built, and executed by the people closest to the problem. Centering lived experience means we’re committed to a process, not a predetermined solution. Our novel structure and approach are the results of this commitment, consistently applied.

Our work creates unprecedented proximity between the decision-makers and people with lived experience, building pathways to a child welfare system built on solutions that are practical, holistic, and truly reflect the needs and priorities of those impacted.

Initiatives that are founder-led become sustainable at the point where ownership of the vision is shared among senior leaders. This year, this has become true for Think of Us as we have welcomed world-class leaders from diverse sectors to drive our mission forward. Our commitment to deeply engaging lived experts has allowed us to codify a perspective, process, and set of tools that together create a novel pathway to effecting large-scale systemic change. We’re grateful to the community of lived experts who have shared their leadership and wisdom to build this movement. We strive to honor their candor, creativity, and urgency in everything we do. 

We stand on the shoulders of giants who began the work of centering lived experience and stand together with our many partners and funders who are continuing it today.

Thank you.

Sixto is really proud that there are a lot of people who came before him, other organizations that allowed him and his team to really open up some of these doors that haven't been opened before and he doesn't take that lightly.

Sandra Gasca-Gonzalez
Vice President, Center for Systems Innovation, Annie E. Casey Foundation 
In 2022, Think of Us has deepened our partnerships and commitment to collaboration, and in doing so have seen early indicators toward a movement for systems change in child welfare. We are building infrastructure to bring alignment among ecosystem partners and ensure that the collective insights and leadership of people with lived experience are central to every decision as we transform child welfare together.
STATS Section
Away from Home examined the experiences and perspectives of young people who recently lived in institutional placements in foster care, revealing shocking patterns of abuse, isolation, neglect, overmedication, and traumatization in environments that were unloving, punitive, and prison-like. Twenty-two states have committed to ending the need for congregate and group care placements for foster youth following the publication of the study, shifting the national conversation around the institutionalization of youth and demonstrating the power of lived experience data to shift mental models and drive systemic change.
  • Cited in an investigation of the four largest companies that institutionalize youth
  • Cited in legal action against state of Nevada for subjecting children with disabilities to unnecessary institutionalization
  • Deep Dive with people with lived experience to reduce institutionalization of foster youth for behavior needs
    -Annie E. Casey Foundation, Allegheny County, PA
  • Upcoming research exploring kin as alternative to group home placements
    -Casey Family Programs, State of Indiana
  • Convened National Foster Care Month Roundtable
    -White House, Office of the VP, Administration for Children and Families.
  • Congressional briefing elevating the voices of lived experts
    -Senate Foster Youth Caucus, Congressional Foster Youth Caucus, Congressional Adoption Caucus
  • Expert testimony on the experiences of foster youth in congregate care facilities
    -U.S. Congress
  • Exploring bipartisan legislation to address abuse in congregate care facilities
    -Leadership of Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth
  • Influenced The New York Times including foster youth in an interactive media opinion piece on the insitutionalization of youth.
The Center for Lived Experience is a participatory research and policy initiative launched in 2022 to create proximity at scale between decision-makers and people with lived experience in child welfare. It conducts best-in-class research to address ecosystem knowledge gaps, builds feedback loops to elevate this data, and establishes proof points for lived experts to formally engage in bipartisan policymaking and collaboration. The Center is laying the groundwork for permanent structures through which people with lived experience can co-create a child welfare system that truly meets the needs of youth and families.
  • Collaboration in Journey to Success to improve outcomes for youth who experience foster care
    - Annie E. Casey Foundation
    - Raikes Foundation
    - Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
    - Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
  • 50+ meetings with Congressional staff 
    - U.S. Congress
  • Collaborative leadership moving the Foster Youth and Driving Act forward
  • Joined closed-door roundtable to support the Biden Administration’s priorities for transition-age youth 
    -Domestic Policy Council, White House Office of Public Engagement, Secretary Becerra of HHS
  • Codifying participatory and trauma-responsive research practices
  • Released Aged Out 2.0 with updates and policy considerations for the current moment.
  • Technical assistance to partners in recruiting and supporting research participants 
    - People with lived experience in foster care
  • Conducted a study on the experiences of teenagers during Child Protective Services (CPS) investigations
    - Funder collaborative2.14
  • Research work on the intersections of racial equity, disability rights, and justice systems
    - Coalitions of research organizations
  • Supporting the Child Welfare Ombudsman to leverage lived experience voices to recommend state policy reforms.
    - State of Colorado
  • A team of lived experts presenting learnings to drive statewide reform
    - State of Washington
  • 2.7 Signed an Amicus brief on the Indian Child Welfare Act referenced in oral arguments
    - U.S. Supreme Court
  • Launch event brought together 300+ people
    - Congressional staff and government, philanthropic, and agency partners.
  • Hosted a town hall on the administration’s strategic priorities for child welfare White House, Office of the Surgeon General, Children’s Bureau
Our Lived Experience Network connects 38,000+ individuals, including former foster youth, biological parents, and kin caregivers. These lived experts inform everything we do, from providing the data and insights through research, to co-designing tools such as Virtual Support Services, to using their voices to shift the conversation with federal and state leaders.

The Network allows us to leverage robust, growing, dynamic datasets to inform policy and practice across the ecosystem. We are now inviting partners to inform how we maximize the value of this resource while continuing to innovate data-protection and privacy standards.
  • Building content database, data warehouse, dashboards to maximize the value of this data for functional data usage
  • Learning about the impacts of the Check For Us campaign and subsequent data
    - 44 states, Washington D.C., ecosystem partners
  • Strategic sharing of lived experience data 
    - States, nonprofits, and systems change organizations
  • 3.3 Expansion of Direct Impact through Virtual Support Services
    CA, GA, Greater Boston Area
    - 1,772 individuals access critical resources
    - 95.8% having initial needs resolved
    - 3,361 engagements with Virtual Support Services staff
    - Average response time is 8 business hours
  • MicroCash grants to better understand the needs youth and families
    - CA, Greater Boston Area
  • Collaboration on SOUL, a lived-expert driven fourth permanency option for foster care
    - Jim Casey Youth Fellows, Annie E. Casey Foundation

“At TOU, we’re not just building proximity for the sake of proximity or taking a piecemeal approach. The data we gather is towards a common goal. Proximity is for a purpose - to inform systems change.”

Sonali Patel
Vice President, Strategic Projects

“Think of Us has played an invaluable role in helping this administration to create better outcomes for children and for families."

Cedric Richmond
Senior advisor to President Biden and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

“When we see tens and thousands of stories, and it's the same story, whether it be urban, rural, red state, blue state - what we're seeing is nationwide trends of how young people are suffering as a result of the way that the system is designed and structured. We fundamentally need a redesign of the actual system.”

Sixto Cancel
This moment is an inflection point for the child welfare system to embrace that true systems change is both actionable and achievable. 

By building diverse, interconnected pathways to systems change, creating proximity between people with lived experience and decision-makers, innovating scalable solutions to practical problems, and coordinating collaboration across the national ecosystem, we can empower those who are most affected to drive unprecedented transformation.

Financial/operational growth

Our growth in impact over the past five years has been mirrored by a steady growth in earned income and fundraising. We're confident that this strong fiscal trajectory ensures our ability to build ecosystem-wide capacity. In other words, the best is yet to come.

This year we built out research, data, and policy teams that are unlocking the possibility that lived experts – those with direct experience with foster care – will influence all levels of how the system operates. -Liz Mills, Vice President, Operations

2023 Strategic pillars and the future

Centering lived experience is more than a moral imperative or meaningful exercise - it is the critical pathway to understanding and addressing the root of systemic problems in child welfare. Our approach invites policymakers and practitioners to join with lived experts in an entrepreneurial enterprise not possible from within traditional bureaucracies - to design, test, and iterate novel, scalable solutions, and to identify and empower those best positioned to implement those solutions.

As we discover together what works, we aim to codify scaleable strategies into policy, shift mental models, and re-direct resource flows so that solutions are far-reaching and sustainable for generations to come.

We are deeply grateful for your partnership in the collective movement towards systems change in child welfare.