Collaborated with Youth Villages: Foster America is partnering with Youth Villages, a nonprofit dedicated to helping children and their families, on the expansion of Youth Villages’ Intercept program. Youth Villages’ work to serve more families through Intercept is part of a broader effort to reduce jurisdictional reliance on out-of-home placement. Throughout this partnership, Foster America has provided
technical assistance to support the critical work of Youth Villages and New Allies (a nonprofit that helps leaders in states and counties navigate long-term, sustainable system transformation) to further system change efforts within child welfare. This work includes: • Development of baseline measures • Assessment of data quality • Implementation of strategy for jurisdictions to regularly produce and report outcomes • Fiscal analysis • Service array analysis • Mapping • Synthesizing information from working sessions, surveys, interviews, and more Who is a lived expert? Foster America is committed to intentionally and meaningfully engaging those most impacted by the system in all our efforts to transform it. These include “lived experts” – those with firsthand personal experience with a family-serving system, particularly young people who have spent time in foster care and parents who have feared and even experienced child protective investigation and separation from their children in times of need. Co-hosted a co-design series with MIT: In 2023, Foster America and the MIT Media Lab’s Affective Computing group organized Fostering Futures: Harnessing Technology for Wellbeing. This groundbreaking effort is an incubator for ideas that leverage technology for the enhancement of mental wellness among vulnerable populations. Together, we facilitated youth and family co-design workshops across the country (with stops in New York, Pennsylvania, California, Oregon, Colorado). Through this work, lived experts came together to explore technology and design, and were empowered to help develop tools to meet their needs. These co-design sessions set the stage for a 2024 symposium at the MIT Media Lab that will bring participants, technologists, funders, and child welfare leaders together to explore how technology might be designed to better support youth and family wellbeing. 11 www.foster-america.org
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