We have two biological children at home, and we're foster parents to three more. Over the last three years, more than a dozen children have lived in our home.
I'm not going to tell you their stories. They belong to them. What I can tell you is what three years of fostering taught me about the system that's supposed to be taking care of them: it is failing. Not because the people in it don't care. It's failing because everyone inside it is working without what they need.
Everyone is working blind
The rules that decide a child's life are real and they're written down, in policy manuals, statutes and handbooks most families will never see. Basic questions like what support a foster family gets, what a relative is owed, or how long a deadline actually is have answers. They're just buried.
So I started building. I build software for a living, as a technology leader at an investment firm, and the first thing I built for this world was Foster411: plain-English, sourced answers for Georgia foster families, with every fact cited and dated. It's free, and it's the kind of thing that should already exist.
The system is failing. We're done accepting it.
Why "defense"
In child welfare, "family defense" usually means lawyers who represent parents. That work matters, and we respect it. We use the word more broadly. We defend children and families from a system that fails them, with the tools people need, the evidence that shows what's broken, and changes to the law.
That's not neutral, and we're not pretending it is. We will work with anyone who is trying to do right by these kids, including agencies and caseworkers. But when the system fails a child, we're on the child's side.
Build. Research. Change.
Building tools isn't enough. A better website can help a family navigate a broken rule, but it can't fix the rule. So we do three things at once, and each one feeds the others:
- Build. Tools and resources for everyone in the system: youth, birth parents, foster and kinship families, caseworkers, CASAs. We also rebuild websites and tools for free for nonprofits that serve foster youth.
- Research. Public data, databases and original research, done alongside the organizations that see the problems firsthand. The tools show us where the system breaks, and the data proves it.
- Change. Reading the law line by line, publishing what it promises and whether anyone is checking, and then drafting better law.
When a law changes, people need new tools to use their new rights. So the cycle starts again. We're not going to graduate out of building things once we start working on legislation. We'll be doing all three for as long as this work needs doing.
What's next
Foster411 is live in Georgia, with Florida and South Carolina in research. A training site for people who work in foster care is coming. We're publishing our first analysis of the law now, starting with the 30-day clock that starts when a child is removed. And we're working with nonprofits that serve foster youth to make their tools as good as their people.
We're new. We're filing for 501(c)(3) status. We're small. But we're going to do this work for these kids no matter what it takes.
If you do this work too, I'd like to hear from you.
Lucas Grohn, founder