OUR STORY
Our evolution has been driven by an ever-deepening understanding of how the child welfare system impacts youth and families. Tens of thousands of individuals with lived experience and hundreds of partners across the country have worked with us to identify opportunities to catalyze change and create solutions. Today, we engage strategically across the national ecosystem, addressing a wide array of interconnected challenges.
Think of Us enters its next era, evolving from a research and design lab into a national implementation partner working to build the infrastructure for a modern child and family well-being system.
Grounded in a decade of lived experience research, policy partnerships, and direct service, Think of Us 3.0 brings together everything we’ve learned to drive systems change at scale across states, agencies, and communities.
Think of Us began translating years of research and advocacy into direct systems implementation. We launched the California KIN Accelerator Pilot, partnering with CDSS, UC Davis, and Casey Family Programs to co-design and rapid-test kin-first innovations with agencies, lived experts, and community partners across eight counties. Time2Connect, a digital family visitation tool shaped by TOU, went mandatory across LA County’s child welfare system.
Virtual Support Services continued to grow, building toward a nationwide model. Working directly with 22 states and supporting 37 more through multi-state initiatives, TOU continued to engage partners and lawmakers to advance reforms that center family well-being, laying the groundwork for what comes next.
Think of Us co-hosted the first National Convening on Kinship Care in Washington, D.C. with the U.S. Children’s Bureau, bringing together policymakers, practitioners, and agency leaders from across the country. We published Kin, First and Foremost, a landmark kinship care report based on field research across three states, and the Center for Lived Experience surveyed more than 650 kin caregivers in one of the field’s largest participatory research efforts.
Virtual Support Services continued to expand, responding to more than 5,800 requests and connecting families to $28.9 million in resources. We became a core partner in the Doris Duke Foundation’s OPT-In for Families prevention initiative, advocated for the Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families Act, and welcomed new senior leaders to deepen capacity across programs and policy.
Think of Us was selected for TED’s Audacious Project, securing $47.5 million over five years to accelerate the transformation of child welfare nationwide. CEO Sixto Cancel delivered a TED Talk on kinship care, bringing TOU’s vision to a global audience and positioning the organization to scale its work across research, technology, and direct service.
Through research, in-person engagements, and Virtual Support Services, we deepened our connection with nearly 6,000 people with lived experience. Their insights directly informed the Children’s Bureau’s federal work plan and shaped historic new kinship care regulations that expanded support for states across the country.
This year we launched the Center for Lived Experience (CLE), a groundbreaking participatory research, proximate policy, and community building initiative. The CLE strategically addresses knowledge gaps between decision-makers and people within the system by conducting innovative research and creating feedback loops so that federal, state, and local policies and practices are anchored in the stories, insights, and innovative ideas of foster children and their families.
This year we also expanded Virtual Support Services (VSS), our core Direct Impact program. VSS is a warmline that provides digital tools and personal assistance to empower foster youth and families to access vital services in California, Georgia, Washington, D.C., and Greater Boston. This model offers a scalable solution that can be used to transform service provision anywhere. VSS informs our larger work to catalyze systems change by providing ongoing feedback about what’s working and what’s not for families interacting with the foster care system.
We also continued to actively engage with the White House and Congressional stakeholders to influence and shape federal policies and funding flows that impact foster care. That work has included supporting the implementation of the Title IV-E Prevention Program, reauthorization of Division X of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, and proposals to reform how the $11.7B in dedicated federal child welfare funding is used.
Our work expanded rapidly at the intersection of tech, data, and partnerships. We published new research, built new tools, and engaged a national community of people with lived experience fueled by key engagements from California and Washington, D.C., and anchor investments from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and others.
We worked to systematically center lived experience, not just within our projects but in every element of how the child welfare system operates.
Think of Us 2.0 was born as we turned our focus to bridging critical systemic gaps in support for foster youth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Leveraging support from key funders, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, #StartSmall, and the Aviv Foundation, we quickly established direct resources and launched an action group to assist states in adjusting their practices to align with the immediate needs of foster youth.
This timely action and its resulting impact solidified our reputation as a nimble, solution-oriented organization that centers lived experience in unique ways.
Emerging from the New Profit Accelerator Initiative, Think of Us evolved from a technology non-profit to a research and design lab with a clear focus - transforming the child welfare system.
We formalized our research methodology and, in sites across the country, led our first ever discovery sprint to fully understand the experience of aging out from those who lived it.
As a technology nonprofit, our primary efforts included development of the Think of Us App and hosting Hack-a-thons across the US (including in partnership with the White House).
Think of Us formally incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2017 with a vision to create a virtual tool to support young people aging out of foster care with the connections, resources, and tools they need to thrive.
As a college student, Sixto launched Think of Us with a vision to create video content that was honest and direct so people with lived experience in foster care, rather than actors, could tell their own stories. This early work catalyzed a commitment to integrating those most affected by the system into systems reforms.
