Sixto Cancel founded Think of Us as a technology nonprofit advancing systems change for foster care. Think of Us shifts the child welfare system from its focus on compliance and risk mitigation to holistic development and wellbeing for current and former foster youth. New Profit has invested in Think of Us since 2019, first as a Catalyze investment and now as part of our Build portfolio.
The foster care system is simply not doing a good job of raising children. The reason why is also simple: the system doesn’t listen to them.
Think of Us does. Since our founding in 2016, we’ve listened to thousands of young people tell us their stories, and it’s so clear that kids live best when they live with their kin. Research bears out what kids told us. When children are placed in kinship care, they fare far better in every way. Yet only 35 percent of young people in the foster care system are placed with kin. Not because their kin aren’t out there. When we sent our own researchers out, they found that the majority of fostered children actually had extended family members that they could have lived with.
Think of Us is doing everything we can to make kinship care the norm—from local and regional partnerships that place kids with kin, to lifting up kids’ voices in informing national litigation, legislation, and policy. We’ve got to remake the system. Right now, it’s harming children, wasting billions of dollars, and causing wide ripple effects with an even higher societal cost. Foster kids face endemically low graduation rates, high unemployment, and increased vulnerability to living unhoused, sex trafficking, incarceration, and more.
I was a foster kid, too, and the system failed me—Think of Us is rooted in my own lived experience, and I want to leave you with three of my own life lessons. One: Children should be raised in family. It’s such a simple idea, but for kids like me it isn’t simple to live it, and too often it never happens. Two: We must center those who have been impacted as we design and implement systems that will serve them, because the key to transformation is lived experience. Three: Foster kids and their support systems need allies and advocates who will pursue a shared vision of a new reality: one where millions of children come off their school bus, go into their homes, look at the kin they live with, and say, “I am loved.”