OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Foster Care Technologies has signed a contract with Deloitte Consulting LLP, under which Foster Care Technologies will be providing ECAP to guide Foster Care, Adoption, and Service matching placements for the the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services' CCWIS Solution ..read more

Scene 1 It’s 11:15pm at your child welfare agency. The stress level among your caseworkers is starting to rise as they begin experiencing a sharp increase in the number of calls they are getting about children who are suddenly in need of new placements. Many of your staff happen to be relatively new on the job and many are fresh out of school and now working their first full-time jobs. As they are bombarded with new placement requests, the tension in the room rises quickly. They are searching through incomplete databases, recent email chains, and even their memories, as they try to identify an ..read more

Please join Paul Epp of Foster Care Technologies and three other government industry experts for a webinar to hear about the challenges facing state child welfare agencies in the age of CCWIS and how technology can help fix them. Title: Challenges Impacting Child Welfare Programs and Effective Solutions Date: Tuesday, March 24, 2020 Time: 08:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time Duration: 1 hour ..read more

This week we saw growing evidence of the fact that placement stability may be the most important goal we can set for children in the foster care system. Eric Adler’s recent article, ,Frequent moves don’t just harm foster kids’ emotions – they hurt their brains, part of the Kansas City Star’s 6-part series, Throwaway Kids, gives us a window into the lives of children who experienced multiple placements and discusses the work of researchers who are studying the effects of multiple placement moves on the brains of children who are forced to live this way. Meanwhile, halfway across the country, c ..read more

Foster Care Technologies, LLC (FCT) has been awarded a contract with Spurwink, a behavioral health and education services organization, to help guide adoptive matching for the Department of Health and Human Services in the state of Maine. Starting on August 1, 2019, Spurwink will use ECAP to help guide the adoptive placements of all children in this statewide adoption program. With many successful adoption outcomes among the more than 25,000 placements guided by ECAP to date, our research-backed matching process has been configured to help guide all adoptive placements within this statewide ne ..read more

According to MeriTalk, a major publication for CIOs and IT policymakers, the future of government IT will be heavily impacted by new cloud-based technologies, a few of which were featured in Microsoft’s month-long showcase this past April. ,ECAP (Every Child A Priority) was the first of three solutions that were profiled in the article, each of which offered a unique solution to various public safety and health issues. These and other issues where governments are involved can become very complex, demanding solutions that require the tracking and processing of many different data points. This ..read more

ECAP, the only scientific, data-driven matching system demonstrated to improve the outcomes of children in foster care, was highlighted in a report released by The Capacity Building Center for the States, part of the U.S. government’s Children’s Bureau. ECAP helps identify the best available foster family for each child by matching the child with the families most likely to provide a stable placement. The Capacity Building Center for the States’ series, ,Inventory of Innovations, informs organizations about innovations that are helping address common child welfare problems. ECAP’s groundbreaki ..read more

The Redlich Horwitz Foundation recently published a Best Practices Inventory -- a roadmap showing how agencies can attract and support amazing foster families. Their eight recommendations cover the full scope of agencies' work with kinship and foster families, from identifying and recruiting families through training and ongoing support. Their Best Practice #3, "Develop a Customer Service Mentality with Prospective Foster Parents", identifies the importance of respecting and supporting foster parents through each interaction. An important piece of this is matching children with foster familie ..read more

Foster parents have a duty to be an advocate for the children in their care. Often, these children come from troubled homes and have been victims of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. While signs of physical abuse are fairly obvious, indications that a child has suffered sexual abuse can be less clear. There are several indicators of sexual abuse, that, taken as a grouping or pattern, should prompt foster parents to inform a pediatrician and law enforcement. Four Possible Signs Of Abuse The signs below would be considered post-abuse, as opposed to signs that abuse has very recently (withi ..read more

A policy report to Congress identifies ECAP as a valuable tool to improve the lives of children and youth in foster care across the country. Each year, several young adults who have spent time in foster care are chosen to participate in the well-respected Foster Youth Internship Program® at the Congressional Coalition on Adoption. Upon completion of the congressional internship, each student creates a federal policy proposal outlining a method to improve child welfare. These proposals are thoroughly researched and are deeply personal, born out of the foster care experiences of the interns. Thi ..read more