Ideagen Radio
Ideagen Radio
Transforming Foster Care: Jennifer Jacobs on Harnessing Technology and Personal Connections
What if the tools used in counterterrorism could revolutionize foster care? Meet Jennifer Jacobs, the remarkable founder of Connect Our Kids, who has channeled her background in nuclear engineering and military service into transforming the future of foster children. Driven by a powerful article in Time magazine, Jennifer transitioned her career to address the gaps in the foster care system, using technology to connect children with their support networks.
Listen to the incredible stories of Leon and Haley, whose lives changed thanks to Connect Our Kids' innovative approach. Learn how Leon found his biological family, and how Haley reconnected with a cherished basketball coach who became her adoptive parent. These stories underscore the vital role personal connections play in the well-being of children in foster care. Through Jennifer's leadership, inspired by her military background, the organization fosters a purpose-driven mission that transforms lives.
Beyond individual success stories, discover how Connect Our Kids is reshaping public perception of the foster care system by highlighting the undeniable benefits of kinship placements. Jennifer shares insights into the challenges faced by the organization, from funding hurdles to overcoming resistance to change. As we explore the broader impact and recognition of their work, we celebrate Jennifer's inspiring leadership and the profound economic and emotional benefits of prioritizing children's relational health.
#ConnectOurKids #Ideagen #GLS2025
Jennifer's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/connect-our-kids/
Learn more about Connect Our Kids here: https://connectourkids.org/
View the entire 2024 Global Leadership Summit here: https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit
Welcome to the IdeaGen Global Leadership Summit today. I'm thrilled to have Jennifer Jacobs, the founder, co-founder and president of Connect Our Kids and ARP 2024 Purpose Prize winner. Jennifer, thank you for joining us. Thank you my pleasure. Just for people who don't know, maybe what you're involved in right now could you describe for our audience. You know what Connect Our Kids is, you know why you founded it and what are you guys working on right now?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, so I? My background is actually nuclear engineering, I'm an army veteran, and so sometimes people do wonder how I got into what I do now, which is being CEO and co-founder of Connect Our Kids, which works to address the issue in foster care that children's relationships are not treasured as they should be in the families that they might get separated from. So we build tools and training to help keep kids in foster care connected to their people. And who are their people, you might ask? Their people can be their family, their friends, their neighbors, teachers, coaches, the people who support them. Some people call this the village, and so we build those tools and training to help make sure that happens.
Speaker 1:Wow, I mean a remarkable career journey it seems that you've had. I want to just dive into what inspired you to take that that jump from your you know your beginnings to now working with Connect Our Kids, and you know how does that affect your approach to what you guys are working on.
Speaker 2:Sure, so I, 14 years ago, I was working in nuclear counterterrorism space and read an article in Time magazine, and that article in Time magazine was talking about foster care. But unlike some articles about foster care, which are really negative, this was talking about something that was working in foster care. But first it was describing the half million children who experience foster care every year, and it really struck me as I thought about that. I, as it happened, was pregnant with our third child at the time. He's now an eighth grader. And as I was reading about this, I, as it happened, was pregnant with our third child at the time. He's now an eighth grader. And as I was reading about this, I thought what would this be like if it was my child, if it was your child?
Speaker 2:And you imagine a child going into foster care, being taken from everything they know and dropped into some other home not just some other home for you military folks who maybe have moved a lot, but a different family with different habits and traditions and rules in that family that you have to learn to survive, and then sometimes moving from home to home to home.
Speaker 2:You can imagine how devastating that would be and for those of you familiar with trauma. You'll then not be surprised by the statistic that children in foster care are diagnosed with PTSD at twice the rate of returning war veterans. That can be incredibly devastating. In this article, though, it was also talking about kids who age out of foster care. It means they become adults and they leave foster care, never having found that forever family that they were promised. When that happens, those youth by age 26, two-thirds have experienced homelessness, incarceration or they're dead. They experience undereducation, unemployment, at high rates. In this article, though, it talked about how that can be avoided, and that was the part that was talking about what was working and what can be done is social workers, who are specialists and know how to do this work, actually reach out to family, and I noticed a similarity in what foster care professionals need to do to find families for the kids in their care, and what I already knew intelligence analysts do to find and track terrorists.
Speaker 2:Both need to find and visualize groups of people in order to influence the person or group in the center. The difference is just that one centers on a terrorist and one centers on the child. Just that one centers on a terrorist and one centers on a child. I already knew a lot about the national security space, but I was curious about how social workers do this work, and what I found out was that, while the national security space has multimillion dollar software with data search and management tools, the national security or the foster care space is doing the same work, essentially with post-it notes and Microsoft Excel. That didn't seem right to me. So I spent the next six years after that trying to learn why we fight terrorism with all the tools we have, and that's a good thing but we don't fight for the features of the half a million children in our foster care system. Eventually, my co-founder and I realized that if we wanted those kinds of tools to exist, we would have to build them ourselves, and so that's what we did.
Speaker 1:Wow, I mean I just want to take a step back because those are just some staggering statistics you laid out there and I mean it's such an amazing mission that you guys you know are dedicated to, amazing mission that you guys are dedicated to. I mean I don't think I've ever seen or heard of somebody just seeing a problem and tackling it quite like that and on the scale that you all are doing. So without getting into the real technical aspects of it, could you describe, maybe just elaborate a little bit on how the technology works? I know it's obviously very sophisticated stuff, but maybe just describe for our audience a little bit more of how technology works. I know it's, you know, obviously very sophisticated stuff, but maybe just describe for our audience a little bit more of how that works.
Speaker 2:Sure. So you know, in an era when we're debating how far AI should go and how fast, we've left this field focused on foster children with post-it notes, and so our tool can be thought of like as I told Gretchen earlier like a Splunk for foster care. We build out essentially a spider web map of the ecosystem around a child or a family, and our tools are connected to publicly available data on the internet so it can suck down those phone numbers, emails, publicly available information that people have shared about themselves online and quickly be able to populate that map so that a social worker can then actually reach out to people who can be in connection with that child. We've heard a lot today about the importance of relationships, of face-to-face of people, and that is nowhere more true than for children, especially children who've become disconnected from their own families. So the technology works like that and we pair it with training, but I think maybe it might be most helpful if I if I give you an example. So two years ago I met a social worker named Maddie, and Maddie was introduced to our software on her second day as a brand new social worker. Maddie's Gen Z, so it took her about 30 seconds to learn how to use it. And that was good, because Maddie had also just been handed her first case, 14-year-old Leon. Leon had been in foster care for two years, ever since his adoptive mother had left him at a behavioral facility and moved out of state, effectively abandoning him. He then spent two years moving from home to home to home, because you can imagine how a 12-year-old and then 13-year-old and then 14-year-old's behavior is after that kind of abandonment. So this case landed on Maddie's desk and she'd just been introduced to this new cool software so she figured she'd use it. Maddie knew that she had an overriding imperative and that was to find Leon's people Using our software. In the same afternoon she ended up on the phone with Leon's biological aunt who, as it turned out, lived six blocks away from where Maddie was sitting, and the aunt said bring him to me right away. I had no idea he wasn't still happily adopted, I will take him now. Maddie's supervisor was on the same Zoom call and she jumped in and she said you know, I've never seen the county move so fast. They had Leon cleared to move in with his aunt. He got to meet his two cousins, his two full brothers he didn't know he had. He got to meet his birth mother, who was still not well, and his aunt immediately filed to adopt him, to bring him into his own clan that he had not even known existed, had not known, wanted him. He was adopted later that same year.
Speaker 2:Similarly, another case a young teenage girl named Haley who had lots of family but none of them. She had been in foster care for a number of years but none of her family was in a position to actually step up and become her permanent family. And the team did something really smart. They talked to Haley and they said you know who's been a really good influence in your life? Who do you look up to? Who would you go live with if you got to choose? And Haley said you know, I just really look up to Coach Mark. Who's Coach Mark? Coach Mark, he was my fifth grade basketball teacher, basketball coach coach mark. He was my fifth grade basketball teacher.
Speaker 2:Basketball coach hayley's in foster care and she has, since fifth grade, moved schools, towns, poems at least six times. So how are they going to find coach mark? Well, they were able to trace back through her files and find a last name and then our tools were able to find coach mark's phone number and can you imagine getting that call. There's a girl in foster care, haley. Oh, I remember Haley. She was so great. I love that team. Well, haley's in foster care. No one's been able to step up for her. We ask her who you matter in her life. She said you, mark, and Haley wants to know if you might consider letting her live with you and your wife. Mark and his wife had had no discussions or interest in fostering or adopting or any of that. They'd never thought about it. But how can you turn down a call like that? So they ended up getting approved to be foster parents and fostered her, and last year they adopted her. So that's the kind of thing that our tool helps with.
Speaker 1:Wow, I mean two extremely powerful stories and I'm sure they're just, you know, few of many that you guys have really impacted, and I mean I just love that in the second story, the input that the child has as well. I mean someone that they can look up to, and someone that they know and that they can can look up to, and someone that they know, um, and that they can guide you to somebody that they think is you know resonates with them.
Speaker 1:So I mean, yeah, two incredibly powerful examples. And you know it leads me to my my next question. With the mission so impactful and positive, uh, I'm sure you know you're able to drum up some support, but what kind of leadership strategies have you implemented to drive support for the mission of Connecting Our Kids?
Speaker 2:So I think one of the most important things in leading any organization is to have a great team, and so part of having a great team is making an environment that that team wants to be part of. Having a great team is making an environment that that team wants to be part of, but especially making sure that the team understands the why. And I think this is especially important in nonprofit work, where there tends to not be a financial driver for the team personally, but there tends to be an enormous potential for an enormous why be an enormous potential for an enormous why. And we really focus on the why at Connect Our Kids, so that even our team members who are deep into the code of our software or deep into the details of animating one of our on-demand trainings understand why they're doing that work. My initial leadership training was in the military and one of my when I was a platoon leader, one of my sergeants told me one time he said you know, ma'am, I'll walk through the swamp up to my neck all day long as long as you tell me why. And that's obviously always stuck with me and our team.
Speaker 2:We have a number of team members who have been affected by child welfare directly and we always work to make sure that we're hearing their voice, that they're part of our story, to the extent that one of our team members, our outreach coordinator and writing director, posted last Christmas her story about spending Christmas in a residential facility and she talked about she was there with her sister, she'd been in foster care for a couple of years and she found herself in a residential facility.
Speaker 2:And she talked about she was there with her sister, she'd been in foster care for a couple of years and she found herself in a residential facility.
Speaker 2:And she talked about waking up on Christmas morning really excited, not about any kind of presents or anything, but because she knew, without a doubt, that that day someone from her family would definitely visit or call because, I mean, if you're going to do it, christmas would be the day, so definitely it's happening. And she talks on um on the video, about how, as the day went on, she thought, well, okay, maybe no one's coming, but definitely they're going to call, because when she and her sister went into foster care they had no contact. No one reached out to them. They knew they had a lot of family, but no one reached out to them. This was years before the internet, she didn't understand why no one from her family was showing up. Did they really not have any interest in her at all? And later, as the day continues to go on and a phone call comes, she says well, maybe there'll be a card that gets delivered.
Speaker 2:Surely definitely someone at least will deliver a card. And at the end of the day no one came and no phone calls came and no cards came. And she said she was forced to face the fact that really and truly no one in her family gave. What kind of language are we using here? No one in her family was interested in having a connection with her or her sister, and that was devastating.
Speaker 2:But she said then she found out later as an adult, when she herself went to go find family it's not that they didn't want to call or visit or send a card. They didn't know where she was, they had no way to contact her, they had no way to reach out to her. They were as separated from her as she was from them. And so that's one of the things that she repeatedly says to us on the team at Connect Our Kids. She says what you guys are doing would have changed my whole experience in foster care. She was lucky enough to end up finally getting a foster mother who's still in her life today and is an amazing person. But to have known that her family cared about her and was part of her village, part of her clan would have made all the difference to her. So that's how we try to focus on the why I connect our kids.
Speaker 1:That's amazing and that's really interesting what you're talking about, I'm sure you know we can all understand the experiences of the child, right, but the flip side too is the experiences of the family, you know, and how, how they hurt for that connection as well, and the you know the joy they must feel when that's made to be connected with the child. You know, I think that's the whole other side that maybe you know you guys are obviously helping to to to, you know, bring to light. So that's amazing. Of course, with a problem this large, the challenges are inevitable, right. What have been some of the biggest challenges that you all have faced, whether that's implementing your technology, building your system, any of those challenges, and how did you overcome them so far?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, well, building high-quality technology and providing high-quality training can take a lot of resources, and so funding, like any non-profit funding, is a challenge. One of our real immovable points of what we're doing is that the training and the tools being provided to this field need to be high quality. So, because we insist on that quality, that means that we have to really find high quality funding partners, and so that's something we're always working on. But we have found that a lot of people do care about this space. People tend to not know about it. So there's a lot of education that we have to do with the general public as well as potential funding partners.
Speaker 2:But the second challenge that we have, and probably overall the bigger challenge, is fear of change, and this can come in a lot of forms, but essentially, just like all of us, when we're doing something, we're going to do something differently. That triggers a lot of fear. It doesn't matter what it is. If we're going to start a new exercise program or start a new job, or even if it's a good thing we're going to start a new adventure in our life. There's fear there, and that applies to this as well. We address that by partnering closely with our users. We don't drop off software and say enjoy, see you later. We partner closely so that we can help social workers to build those new habits.
Speaker 2:We also work with judges and lawyers, parents of all types in our training to learn about valuing the child's relationships and why that is so important. We've also gotten to learn a lot about how bureaucracies need to work and how we can accommodate their needs. Child welfare in this country works at the state and county level and through private agencies in a lot of different kind of jigsaw ways, so we essentially have a bureaucracy in about 3,000 parts. When you're talking about the child welfare system, it is a multi-multi-part system, so we've had to learn a lot about the details of that, as well as Medicaid. So Medicaid is also one of our most crucial user groups because it turns out so most foster kids are served by Medicaid and it turns out that taking care of children's relational health is incredibly smart business. It is not only good for the child, for their health, for their future, but it also has real healthcare savings in both the short and the long term.
Speaker 1:Wow, I mean it's the domino effect. I mean, like you said in your statistics earlier, like the negative impacts that can happen when a child, you know, goes through the foster care system up till they're 18, or they never have that village, as you call it. I mean, if you just think about the potential there, you know the potential that's maybe not being harnessed because they're not surrounded in the right there. You know the potential that's maybe not being harnessed because they're not surrounded in the right situation. You know there's truly an opportunity there. I think as well, and you know it's evident, you guys, through your stories, you've achieved amazing success, immeasurable success. What is your future? Or the future vision that you have for Connect Our Kids on a national level, and you know how do you see yourself. Or the future vision that you have for Connect Our Kids on a national level, and you know how do you see yourself shaping that future vision.
Speaker 2:So what we're trying to do at Connect Our Kids is bring the discussion about relationships to the forefront of child welfare. First thing that we're doing is making it feasible to find grandma. If it is not that hard to find family, then there's no excuse for not doing it. So that's kind of a first, very tactical level stuff. Then, second, we're scaling our reach. So we are already used at some level in 40 different states. That could be a few small users, that could be a state contract. We are rolling out an extension of that. We are talking to as many states and counties and agencies that are interested in doing better by their kids as we can.
Speaker 2:But Just like if you're trying to start on that new exercise program and you put that steps tracker on your Apple Watch and so you're trying to get that extra walking in the app itself, tracking your steps doesn't do a thing. It's the walk. You have to do the walking. You have to do the work. The app tracker is just something to help you see what you're doing, encourage you to do the walking. You have to do the work. The app tracker is just something to help you see what you're doing, encourage you to do it. But if you don't, if you're like my kids and you realize you can just shake that thing up and down and look at that I got a lot of.
Speaker 2:I got a lot of steps right, it defeats the whole purpose. So even if we had every social worker working in foster care using our tools, that would not be my definition of success. I hope that that would be a helpful step towards success. But my definition of success is that everyone interacting with children or families remotely touched by child welfare is focused first and foremost on the relationships and the preciousness of a child's relationships with their family and a family's relationship with that child. As you've said, we had one of our earliest cases.
Speaker 2:We had a social worker in Washington state who had a young man named Calvin who was 17. He was going to age out from foster care soon and the social worker was really worried about Calvin because Calvin had never met, spoken to on the phone or received a birthday card from anyone he was related to. And Calvin knew that this was not normal, and so Calvin had created a story to explain to himself why this was, and the story was that he had been such an awful toddler that his family had thrown him away, thrown away the key and walked away. He must have been that bad, because otherwise, I mean, how hard is it to send a birthday card and they chose not to. Calvin's social worker used our tools and within a day had found Calvin's paternal grandmother and a paternal aunt. The grandmother still had pictures of that toddler, calvin, on her wall, because Calvin hadn't been thrown away.
Speaker 2:Calvin had been lost. They had no way to find him. They had nowhere to send the birthday cards, no phone number to call, and Calvin got to learn that not only was he not trash, that he was in fact so treasured when he was born that he had been given the most important name the family had to give. It was the grandmother's own father's name. He had been a local law enforcement hero in the family and they had given him that name, and he did not even know that about himself. In that case he did not move beds. He stayed in the loving foster family that he had been living with most of his childhood. But he now went out into his adulthood knowing that he was precious and wanted and claimed, and that can make all the difference in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow, I mean, just the sheer number of firsthand accounts that you have is incredible on the success you've had. And it leads me to my next question, and it may seem obvious at a point but how are you measuring success? I know you've mentioned a lot of ways success can be connecting someone with their family or getting them into a better situation, but how are you measuring the success and the effectiveness of your programs and what outcomes or outcome do you think you're most proud of?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, and this is, of course, very complex. When you're talking about people it's complex and if you try to make it simple, you risk missing the point. But if you're going to spend money on something and you're going to choose some risk to accept at the expense of other risks, it's helpful to know what you're choosing and what the efficiency is. So there's a number of metrics that are incredibly powerful in this space around the value of family children placed with family. If they have to be taken from their birth family, children who are placed with kin do better. They're more likely to graduate from high school, they're less likely to run away, they're more likely to express satisfaction with their placement, they're 10 times less likely to be re-reported for abuse. So those are really important metrics that establish that generally, it's important to have a child be connected to their family, to their safe family. At Connect Our Kids, our tools have been shown to increase kinship. Placement rates can even double them when used by committed use groups, and I'm extremely proud of that number. Our pilot testers told us that they could find six times as many connections for a child in half the time. But I also, as a scientist and a lover of data myself, I have to always caution to remember that not everything that can be measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured. How do you value your own family? What units would you use to value the joy that your child brings you or the pain that that child sometimes brings you? What kind of a number do you put on that? What value do you put on the honor and the pain of being present at a loved one's last moments? How do we quantify that? I don't know. I'll tell you another story that maybe will illustrate how hard it is to capture this and why we have to be careful when we start putting numbers on things.
Speaker 2:One of our early users was doing in the pilot for a girl named Jordan. Jordan's a teenager, but she was taken from her birth family age three. We don't know why, but most likely for neglect due to drug use. It's a very common reason that kids end up in foster care. Jordan responded so poorly to being taken as a three-year-old from her family that she became very difficult to place. Now a three-year-old, physically healthy child is usually fairly easy to place, but Jordan moved through many homes, even as a toddler, but eventually she was adopted and often we would celebrate that as a new, a wonderful new beginning for Jordan, but in this case, unfortunately. Eventually, her adopted father sexually abused her and so, as a young teenager, jordan found herself back in foster care once again. She was so distressed and despondent by this that Jordan began multiple attempts to take her own life Serious attempts, including jumping in front of Medicaid for that case, told me that they added up that in the 18 months Jordan had been in their care, she had cost them a million and a half dollars.
Speaker 2:The team that was caring for Jordan was trying everything. They really cared. They had tried all the medicines they could, they had tried therapies, that she was in a high-level residential facility getting hands-on care around the clock, and finally they realized there was actually one thing they had not tried, and that was to ask Jordan what she thought might help. So they asked her and she immediately replied I would like to meet my birth family. I would like to know if there might be people who would be willing to be part of my life without having to be paid to do so.
Speaker 2:So luckily, they had recently gotten access, the team had recently gotten access to our tools, and it took them all of 20 minutes to find her mother, her father, her grandmother and an aunt. They had been looking for her for years. They were overjoyed to have her back in their life. Jordan immediately stopped trying to kill herself. She was able to eventually start taking advantage of the healing opportunities that her team had been trying to put in front of her, and, with her family's support, she then finally was able to start building a new life for herself. So we have a lot of numbers in that story a new life for herself. So we have a lot of numbers in that story, but I'm not sure they capture the full measure of what happened there, and we need to not lose sight of that.
Speaker 1:Oh, I mean, I'm speechless, the story that you said and I'm just, the effectiveness of Connect Our Kids and what you're doing 20 minutes, minutes, 20 minutes to change someone's world. You know, um, it's just, and the passion that you have for this is immeasurable. I think it's, you know it's, he's already reflected in this interview. Everyone here can see that, um, you know. Moving on to our next question, I mentioned earlier that you're an arpP Purpose Prize winner. We love the Purpose Prize and what they're doing. Could you just maybe describe what that recognition means to you and maybe how it's helping to amplify the work that you're doing?
Speaker 2:the amazing work you're doing, yeah, yeah. So the AARP Purpose Prize is just an amazing award. It's a highly selected prize, so we were incredibly honored to be selected. The credibility and the validation that the prize has brought to our team is invaluable and, of course, the visibility that it raises about this issue. Most people just haven't had a chance to know much about what's actually happening in our own child welfare system, and so the AARP Purpose Prize selection has been a huge opportunity to raise that visibility. Aarp is an incredible organization which I, frankly, had not realized the size and impact of AARP personally until I got involved with this prize, and it's been so much fun to work with AARP. The prize also comes with a year of supports and training for our whole team, and so we're just getting started on that, and that's really exciting for everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, congratulations.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:I wanna close this interview with one last question for you. You know, what do you think are the biggest misconceptions maybe that people have about the foster care system, and how are you guys challenging those misconceptions?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think, because the the really egregious horror stories are the ones that tend to make the news. Those are the stories that we all come across if we're just going about our lives, and so the result is that the public often has a misconception that children in foster care are there either because of something bad they did or because their parents are monsters. But the reality is that children who are on foster care are there through absolutely no fault of their own, and the vast, vast majority of them have been taken from parents who love them as much as you love your own children and who cared for them as best they could and who may have stumbled in some way that drew government attention they could and who may have stumbled in some way that drew government attention and perhaps government overreach, but they are not the egregious monsters that a tiny slice of people turn out sometimes are. The other misconception that a lot of people have about foster care is that kids in foster care are orphans, actual orphans with no living parents and no one to take care of them at all, and I hope that we've dispelled that myth here today, in that everyone has people the small percentage of kids in foster care whose mother and father are in fact deceased, still have people, but the vast majority of kids in foster care have at least one living parent, if not very often two living parents. Generally there are around 100,000 kids in foster care who are considered legally free for adoption, but it does not mean that they're orphans. It means that their parents' rights have been terminated, often against the parents' own will and often with parents desperately trying not to have that happen.
Speaker 2:So sometimes that is the right path. Many times it is not necessarily the right path, but public doesn't usually get a chance to even have this level of information. We as the public have more or less outsourced this issue to the child welfare apparatus and as a result, unfortunately, we've sort of stopped paying attention to our neighbors if there's a child welfare issue. We've stopped stepping up and helping each other. We've learned a lot today about the value of relationships and the face-to-face and the oxytocin and how we need to actually talk to each other, and that is nowhere true more than in the space of raising children.
Speaker 2:We all have heard in many different ways it takes a village. We are all of us today alive are the descendants of those early humans who best protected their clan. And so, if you think about it, our brains have evolved to know that the clan has to be protected and you have to be part of a clan, or the deep, reptilian part of your brain will always be at a level of anxiety, because getting thrown out of a clan means that you will probably die. That's what the deep part of your brain understands, and so when children are taken from their clan, deep down in their brain they are in a survival panic. And when children are taken from their clan, that clan is in a panic because it is not safe to be outside of your clan. The public never gets a chance to learn these things.
Speaker 2:So I hope that this has helped a little bit. I hope that you'll take the opportunity to learn more about the complex details of child welfare, and I'm always happy to talk to anyone if you're interested.
Speaker 1:Jennifer, thank you again. I'm inspired by your mission. Your leadership is amazing and I just, you know, want to applaud again the mission that you guys are focused on and connect our kids. Thank you very much for coming, Thank you so much. Daniel.