Sixto Cancel, born to a drug-addicted, impoverished mother, was placed in foster care when he was 11 months old. In a 2021 New York Times guest essay with the heart-wrenching title, “I Will Never Forget That I Could Have Lived With People Who Loved Me,” he wrote, “I was told I was loved, that I was a part of a family, yet I would always find myself moved to a new placement, with all my stuff in a trash bag.”
At the age of 29, long after he’d aged out of the foster care system, Cancel discovered that an aunt living less than an hour’s drive away would have taken him in and loved him. In his essay, he concluded, “My foster care placements failed not because I didn’t belong in a family, but because the system failed to identify kinship placements for me and lacked enough culturally competent community services to keep me in a home that had a chance at success.”
Cancel’s assertion is supported by an in-depth review of more than 100 research studies, which revealed that children and youth placed within kinship networks had more stable placements, better mental and emotional outcomes, and more intact family relationships.
Currently, only about a third of all U.S. foster children are placed in kinship care, which includes relatives such as aunts, uncles, grandparents, siblings, and non-relative extended family members referred to as “fictive kin.”
It’s not for lack of trying. In the past, family finding was a labor-intensive process that required months of research, outreach, interviews, and documentation. For decades, child welfare agencies did this manually. The process was burdensome for agencies with limited resources, and some families were so fractured that locating relatives or fictive kin was like finding a needle in a haystack.
Director of Family Based Services Julie Dvorsky remembers one case in particular. “We were trying to find a kinship placement for a teenager, but we weren’t getting anywhere. We paid an online search service and received 200 pages of phone numbers and addresses in no particular order. Two interns sifted through the results for more than a week, identified potential leads, placed over 50 calls, and finally located a relative who could take him.”
In late 2022, Hephzibah hired a dedicated family-finding specialist to expedite the process. But the real break came in 2023 when Binti— an award-winning company with a mission to transform child welfare through technology—introduced its groundbreaking family finding and engagement software.
Hephzibah was the first child welfare agency in Illinois to adopt this technology, thanks to a generous grant from the John F. Smiekel Foundation. After five months of training and preparation, Dvorsky and her team conducted their first kinship searches in September 2024.
“This software is a game changer,” Dvorsky reports. “It streamlines every phase of the family-finding and engagement process, which will enable us to easily identify potential kin, map complex family relationships so we can create a family tree for each child, and track our outreach and engagement efforts to ensure that we explore all kinship options for better family placement outcomes.”