An Audacious Effort to Transform the Foster Care System Gets a Big Funding Boost

Sixto Cancel. Photo courtesy of Think of Us.

Anyone who has had contact with the U.S. foster care system — particularly the children who’ve spent time in that system — will tell you that it’s broken. Sixto Cancel is one of those children, and now he is working to transform foster care from the ground up. 

Cancel is the founder and CEO of Think of Us, a systems change organization that calls itself “a research and design lab for the social sector.” The nonprofit incorporates the experiences of current and former foster youth to provide research, data and initiatives to inform child welfare leaders and help shape state and national child welfare policy. Think of Us was recently awarded $47.5 million through TED’s The Audacious Project to accelerate the transformation of the foster care system. It is one of the largest investments ever given “to a systems change leader of color with lived experience in the child welfare field,” according to the announcement. 

The Audacious Project operates under the TED umbrella; it is a collaborative effort to convene funders in support of ambitious initiatives that aim to tackle major social problems. Each year, The Audacious Project supports a new cohort of eight to 10 grantees, following a 12-month search and due diligence process that narrows down applicants to a cohort of finalists whose ideas are presented privately to groups of donors, and then publicly through TED.

In its relatively short existence, Audacious has snagged attention and funding from several billionaire donors and their foundations, with its slick online platform, national spotlight, and the “big ideas” messaging that made TED talks so popular. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ELMA Philanthropies, Emerson Collective, MacKenzie Scott, Skoll Foundation and Valhalla Foundation are all Audacious Project donors. Mega-donors clearly continue to be drawn to big competitive giving programs like Audacious, and a similar platform that is growing in popularity, Lever for Change, which is affiliated with the MacArthur Foundation.

Think of Us was one of 10 grantees selected in the most recent round, a cohort of groups working on a wide range of causes from protecting old growth forests to providing access to contraceptives. As you might expect, solutions involving tech or some other form of innovation have a strong presence, including a data project to map industrial fishing vessels and an effort to use CRISPR technology to change our microbial environments. But there’s a lot of more traditional social justice work, too, including policy advocacy, educational support and improving access to government benefits.

The $47.5 million investment in Think of Us includes funds from Audacious’ pool of donors, as well as the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which has been a longtime funder for Think of Us, and from Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation and Aviv Foundation. Casey’s funding derives from its mission to strengthen families and communities; it has had a long-term commitment to fixing the child welfare system. Supporting foster youth, particularly young people transitioning out of foster care, is also a Hilton Foundation priority. 

“Every year, The Audacious Project looks for leaders and innovators whose big ideas have the potential to make significant overhauls to outdated or underserved systems and issues,” said Anna Verghese, executive director of The Audacious Project, in a written statement. “The child welfare system in the United States is a prime example of this. Think of Us has demonstrated an effective approach by combining lived experience and human-centered design to improve the lives of youth and families across the country. We’re excited to witness their progress over the next few years.”

Parenting while poor

Sixto Cancel, who heads Think of Us, was taken away from his mother when he was 11 months old and spent most of his youth in foster care. At age nine, he was adopted, but his adoptive mother was abusive; he was eventually removed from her home as a teen and after bouncing from one friend’s couch to another, he ended up back in foster care. “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,” he wrote in a 2021 New York Times essay.

When he was in high school, Cancel met several adults who became mentors. They provided support and encouragement, pushed him to apply for college and helped him navigate the application process, and even took him to Target to do his college shopping.

“I feel like I was raised by these people,” he said in a recent interview. “I had these incredible relationships that made a huge difference in the sense of helping me see possibilities I wouldn’t have recognized otherwise. At every point where there should have been some kind of parental coaching, I was fortunate to have long-term mentors and sometimes short-term mentors.”

Cancel considers himself lucky because so many children flounder when they age out of the foster care system. According to Think of Us, 60% of young people who are arrested have foster care involvement, 47% of foster youth don’t graduate from high school on time, 97% don’t graduate from college, 51% of unhoused young people were in foster care, and 86% of children who survive trafficking spent time in the foster care system. 

There is also abundant evidence that the current system is most punishing to poor families and people of color. Think of Us cites research showing that close to 85% of families investigated by Child Protective Services earn below 200% of the federal poverty line. And according to a 2022 report by Human Rights Watch, titled “If I Wasn’t Poor, I Wouldn’t Be Unfit,” communities of color, particularly Black and Indigenous families and families living in poverty, are more likely to have children removed from the home than are white families. Most children are removed from their families because of neglect, not abuse, but “neglect” is often the direct result of poverty, as the report authors point out: “Many people we interviewed described how circumstances related to poverty, including housing instability and inadequate resources, were used as evidence of parental unfitness — either to support neglect allegations or justify family separation or termination of parental rights.” Removal is essential when children experience abuse or severe neglect, but in cases when a family is facing housing or food insecurity, providing assistance is often a better approach than taking children away. 

As Cancel puts it, “We know that most families in the foster care system are there for reasons that have nothing to do with abuse. They are there because of neglect — and a lot of times ‘neglect’ is actually a code word for parenting while poor.” He envisions a reformed child welfare system that sees its role as supporting families and inspiring hope instead of dread. “That knock on the door — hopefully, one day it’s not scaring the life out of you,” he said. “What if instead it could be a knock on the door that’s actually coming with some additional help?”

The engine of lived experience

Cancel describes three fundamental changes that would improve the foster care system: first, more support for families to allow more children to remain in their homes. In cases when that isn’t safe or possible, he’d like to see more efforts made to place children with relatives or close family friends. As an adult, Cancel himself learned that he had family members — including four aunts and uncles — he could have lived with, but the system made no effort to do a kinship placement. Finally, he’d like to see more support for foster children when they age out of the system. 

Cancel and Think of Us have advised the last three presidential administrations, including the Biden administration, and have helped build bipartisan support for fundamental reform. The organization has developed a network of over 38,000 people around the country who have lived experience with the foster care system, and their input has helped steer policy reform. For the organization’s report, “Away From Home,” for example, researchers interviewed 78 foster youth with recent experience in institutional placements in 30 states, including group homes. The report’s findings helped inform bipartisan legislation called the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, which was recently introduced in the U.S. House and Senate (with backing from celebrity Paris Hilton). 

Cancel believes that children in the system have too long been left out of the conversation and that their voices can make all the difference. “It’s what we call the ‘Lived Experience Engine,’” he said. “Now we have this engine, this database of young people who have said, ‘I’m willing to raise my hand for you to learn about some of the most painful moments in order for us to fix this broken piece of the system.’”

There’s a longtime motto among organizers that emerged from the disability rights movement: “Nothing about us without us.” It cuts against the tendency of funders to back elite NGOs with academic understanding but little direct experience in the problems they address. At least anecdotally, we’ve seen moves among large, mainstream funders toward such real-world expertise.

It remains to be seen if Cancel, with the support of the Audacious Project and other funders, can fix the foster care system. In 2018, when the Audacious Project was unveiled, my colleague Tate Williams questioned its goal of funding “big bet” projects that may have a wow factor but don’t necessarily bring about transformative social change. “The true test of [The Audacious Project] and big-bet vehicles like them is whether they can mobilize huge funds to support not just the dazzlers, but the unsexy, un-TED-Talk-worthy work of making the world a better place,” he wrote.

Think of Us is an encouraging case study. The goal of transforming the social welfare system is a big bet that would clearly make the world a better place. As Cancel told a TED audience in April, “Together… we can literally ensure that millions of children are living in a home where they can say, ‘I am loved.’”

Hard to get more audacious than that.