White House

In May, a couple hundred technologists, child welfare experts and foster youth gathered on the grounds of the White House for the first foster care hackathon to reach such national prominence.

On Saturday night, two fast rising former foster youth put their stamp on child welfare leadership by pulling off a near flawless online town hall in support of Hillary Clinton. In a Richmond, Virginia office space hastily re-configured into a T.V.

On Saturday, only days before election results come in, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign will focus on foster care. During an online town hall organized by a foster-youth led initiative called Foster Youth for Hillary, potential Second Lady Anne Holton will field questions from foster youth across the country.

Last week, several prominent California child welfare experts expressed grave concerns about the Family First Prevention Services Act, ­pending federal legislation that would dramatically change how foster care is paid for.

Last week, during a reception at a sleek house off of Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row, I found myself in the kitchen talking with Winnie Wechsler. Wechsler, who runs the Pritzker Foster Care Initiative, which funds a slew of child welfare related non-profits including the one I run, was amped up.

With the first day of the White House’s Foster Care Hackathon in the bag, two non-profits seem poised to make huge strides in expanding their reach. In the case of tech-heavy iFoster, the hackathon became a venue for repeated pledges to dramatically expand its program for providing foster youth with laptop computers.

Tomorrow kicks off the first ever White House Foster Care & Technology Hackathon, and participants’ home court, the web, is buzzing with excitement as leaders in technology and child welfare leaders from around the country head to Washington to #HackFosterCare.

Sixto Cancel spent the entirety of his childhood in foster care. The bureaucracy and inflexibility of a system designed to protect him instead wreaked havoc on his life and those of his 10 siblings.

The Obama administration announced last week that Dave Wilkinson would be the new director of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation (SICP), a wing of the White House Domestic Policy Council.