Ideal Family Placements with The Contingent
The second focus of our Well-Being Support Ecosystem is to recruit and retain ideal family placements for children in foster care. But what is an ideal family placement, and how do we identify them? This is where our partner, The Contingent, comes in. Their data-driven model helps states identify potentially successful foster families with pinpoint accuracy. Ben Sand, The Contingent’s CEO, walks us through how they do it and why finding these ideal family placements matters.
To start us off, what is The Contingent?
Yeah, so our mission is to empower leaders and mobilize the community for the common good. We do that by creating understanding and system-wide data that informs the needs of kids and families in any given jurisdiction. Then, we use that data and a commitment to technology to empower collective impact in a community, where our superpower is the ability to mobilize community members to scale.
But our primary focus area is recruiting foster families and volunteers. We’ve developed a solution called our Air Game approach to complement the good work done on the ground like community mobilization and foster family recruitment. It can get a little nerdy, but that’s a high-level summary of what we do.
How did The Contingent’s operating model come about?
When governments are involved in the lives of kids and families, data is often over-collected but underutilized. The question became how do we understand the use of data to improve the lives of people? It grounds my conviction in this work.
I read an article in The Atlantic that really framed this for me. The article was entitled “When the Nerds Go Marching In”. It made me wonder, “What would it look like if we hacked data tools for foster care?” In the future, data will be more valuable than gold, but the key is how to use data in a way that compels the community to take action. Our organization began to obsess about that. We went into our lab environment, the Action Lab, and brought together a group of thought leaders. We partnered with Microsoft and formed an internal group of four disciplines including marketing, CX engineering, and our data and evaluation team.
We found that every state in the country struggles with foster family recruitment and finding ideal placements. These are really good-hearted people with the right desire, but they’re struggling because they’ve been using strategies that don’t speak to ideal families. States often don’t have the capacity to recruit homes in a geographically or culturally specific way. The systems are not regulated to help the right home step forward in the right communities.
Folks are looking for new approaches to solving this challenge. And we’re on the cutting edge of that for sure.
What’s the biggest challenge in recruiting and retaining foster families?
We actually completed a study of thousands of community members and found that only 5% of the population will ever even consider becoming a foster parent. So we’re looking for a needle in like a field of haystacks, and our Ground Game strategies of setting up a booth at the county fair, doing a church presentation, or putting up signs aren’t data-informed approaches.
We needed to figure out, “What is the math? How do you talk to the 5%? What functional algorithm needs to be written to talk to the right people at the right time?”
When you look at the foster care issue, the problem is not that people won’t say yes. The problem is finding a way to talk to them most effectively.
State and federal governments do report statistics, but many are years behind. How up-to-date is the data The Contingent collects?
We obtain data-sharing agreements with state governments and perform a gap analysis. Then, we use the data to understand the kids currently in care: their defining characteristics, where they live by zip code, their age, their ethnicity, and the complexity of their needs. We update it quarterly and publish all our results as we measure, whether or not we’re closing those gaps. By doing this, we communicate the complexity of the challenge at a speed far more accelerated than most government reports.
So what is an ideal family placement?
Once we get the gap analysis done, we try to understand the status of every child’s placement for those who are removed. How many kids are placed out of the county? How many kids have access to a culturally specific home? How many kids have an in-home placement that meets their complex needs? How many kids have a placement that keeps their siblings together?
An ideal placement checks all those boxes. We want very particular homes for very particular children with very particular needs.
In the foster care space, we often say we just need more foster homes. And that’s true. The number of foster homes has declined for the last five years in a row. But it’s not just that we need more. What we need is an ideal placement for each child. You can have an open home, but if a child is placed 250 miles away, that’s not ideal. We want to make sure that when kids are placed into foster care, they’re not ripped from their school and their social network. That’s why local placements and keeping siblings together are so important.
So the data identifies “profiles” of successful previous foster families and then uses that to identify new ones. Is that correct?
Yes. Once we understand the gap analysis, we study all the foster parents in a jurisdiction. After we identify ideal families, we create a data lake, like a reservoir that stores large volumes of data, with typologies for these families. That gives us the ability to be very precise. We talk to families in particular zip codes that look like families who would be successful in fostering. Our messages tell them about a real need right in their neighborhood, dramatically accelerating the number of ideal families that step forward. Families reach out to inquire about getting involved.
They get access to our digital concierge service where they get a warm phone call from one of our associates. We walk with those individuals as they discern where they want to be with their foster care experience, whether with the state or a private licensing agency. We then directly pass them to one of the organizations to begin the licensing process. The certification process can take a long time, so we try to deliver information to caseworkers so they can prioritize the right families at the right speed to meet the needs of kids in their community.
Some may be hesitant to have their data collected. What convinced you to use data collection?
We live in an age where there’s a lot of conversation about the future of data and technology and its impact on society. While there are negative consequences for how data changes our lives, this is a great example of how data and technology change the world for good. We invite people to become technology optimists.
If you had a foster parent or someone interested in becoming a foster parent sitting in front of you, what would you want them to know?
I’ve been a foster parent, and I’ve often said that foster parenting is like a choose-your-own-adventure game. You have no idea what’s behind door number A, B, or C. You’re signing up to welcome trauma into your home. Foster parenting is always hard, but we know it’s also always redemptive.
When you sign up to say yes, do it with a group of people who will support you along the way. There’s always a moment in the journey where you wonder, “Can I keep doing this?” To be most effective, families should think proactively about how to do this in community.
Foster parenting is not for everyone, but it needs to be for more. For those considering it, we want to walk alongside you and support you in your journey.
The Contingent In Action
The Contingent has been recruiting foster families since 2013, but their efforts gained more attention after 2019. They now oversee foster family recruitment for Arkansas, Indiana, and Oregon. Their partnership with us, Every Child, and the governor’s faith-based initiative in Tennessee launches on Monday, August 26th. We’re excited to continue working together to end the child welfare crisis in America!
