Connect to RaiseAChild: Engaging Angelenos to improve outcomes for foster kids.

We seek to ignite true innovation within Los Angeles County's foster care system, the largest child welfare system in the nation, through a radically different approach to improve public awareness and civic engagement. This will be accomplished with the expansion of our successful multi-media outreach campaigns, strategic collaborations in the development and roll-out of a new Customer Relationship Management technology system, and the application of best business practices and principles.

LA is the best place to CREATE

RaiseAChild’s pioneering multi-media recruitment campaigns have been steadily growing. With last year’s state-of-the-art events generating well over 1,750,000 impressions and directly reaching thousands of people, we anticipate successfully connecting with more than 100,000 Angelenos over the next two years and mobilizing them for the greater good of children in foster care. Through Activate L.A., we plan to expand by 50% the scope of these events and continue to create, produce, and manage unique outreach campaigns that promote family building to a broad spectrum of prospective families. Using radio, television, digital media, social media, and street-light banners, campaigns will be scheduled twice a year throughout Los Angeles. The spring campaign will coincide with National Foster Care Month, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and Gay Pride Month and the fall/winter campaign will take place during National Adoption Month and the holiday season. Each will prominently feature the LA2050 name on all related materials and its logo on 100 % of the street-light banners. Our innovative Parent Advocate Program, which combines the attention of a mentor with the technological support of a cloud-based case management system, will also expand to track and facilitate the progress of all identified prospective parents. Inspired by our participation in the 2017 #HackFosterCareLA event (to engage the technology sector in improving the lives of children and families involved with the foster care system), we will also embark on a unique retention collaboration designed to improved methods of communication and support services to thousands of prospective and current parents. By simultaneously developing and implementing this technology, we will have the capacity to incorporate this additional flow of prospective parents into our database, and also more effectively and efficiently meet their needs to assure their retention.

Our sensational outreach campaigns will feature compelling messaging in English and Spanish about the dire need for loving homes for foster children. Building on our success of inclusivity, these messages will continue to target both the LBGTQ and heterosexual communities, along with further expansion into the Spanish language speaking neighborhoods throughout the city, representing approximately 48% of L.A.’s population. Additional bi-lingual staff will enable RaiseAChild to make additional inroads into the Hispanic community. We also plan to expand discussions with several inclusive and welcoming faith-based organizations to further engage Angelenos and promote our mission. Fostering and adoption are slow processes, but our goal is to motivate and engage 100,000 Angelenos through social media, targeted outreach campaigns and solid business practice technology, to help to solve the foster care crisis in Los Angeles.

Our technical partners and staff will closely monitor and track the number of prospective parents who come to us through campaigns, events, websites, word of mouth, etc. and the number of prospects who have begun the necessary orientation, training and certification steps -- or where they are in the process. Using the newly-created best practice business technology, we will be able to further customize each subsequent interaction. Analyzing information from the existing pool of possible resource parents will allow us to identify the best current prospects and allocate staff resources strategically to maximize returns. As the survey and messaging results are obtained, collected, and aggregated, the information will afford staff greater efficiencies in managing its thousands of prospective parents and enable them to provide more effective one on one attention. By using this information to proactively make system-wide improvements aimed at preventing drop-out, we will be able to increase and improve our retention success rates for potential parents who in turn will ultimately be able to positively impact the safety and well-being of the children in their care.

RaiseAChild has a program that has been tested and proven unlike any in the country, which provides measured and ongoing support and guidance to all its prospective parents as they navigate the foster/adoption process. Since our inception, we have slowly introduced innovation and groundbreaking approaches into the child welfare system and are now beginning to see the positive results of our efforts. In five years, we hope to see the system completely overhauled and the process for fostering and adoption taking half the time for prospective parents to be vetted. We anticipate increasing our retention rates by an additional 40%, and the foster care crisis, now fueled in part by the opioid epidemic and new federal policies on immigration, be significantly diminished. Ultimately, we look forward to finding forever homes for 15,000 children who are the innocent victims as there is a severe shortage of foster homes in L.A. When we look at today’s children, we see tomorrow’s leaders, but for foster children to thrive in Los Angeles, we must engage Angelenos to help support their development, help build them loving families and promote public policies that work for both. In order for communities to come together cohesively to create a prosperous Los Angeles by 2050, we must invest in these children now.