Jennifer jacobs: reconnecting foster children to families, communities

Thirteen years ago, Jennifer Jacobs, 53, a nuclear engineer in Falls Church, Virginia, read an article about foster care. It stressed the importance of finding a child’s family when ties

have been severed and the value of reconnecting with that family. “As I was reading, I realized that there were enormous similarities between what those foster care professionals need to do

to find those families and what I already knew intelligence analysts do to find and track terrorist networks,” says Jacobs, whose work in nuclear nonproliferation intersects with the

intelligence community.  On any given day, there are 400,000 children in foster care in the U.S. And every year, 20,000 age out of the system never having created new familial bonds and

often cut off from their original extended families and other caring individuals who could provide crucial support. “By the time they age out, a lot of trauma has occurred,” Jacobs says. Her

curiosity piqued, Jacobs wondered if the foster care system was using the same sophisticated technology to locate family members that Homeland Security and similar agencies use to track

terrorists. She was disappointed to find that such tools weren’t being used at all.  “They’re doing the same work with Post-it notes and Microsoft Excel,” says Jacobs. “I thought, ‘Why

wouldn’t we value these almost half-a-million children’s lives and futures as much as we value fighting terrorism?’ ” That question haunted Jacobs, and she spent six years trying to

understand the technical challenges and devise solutions. Along the way, she met Jessica Stern, who experienced foster care herself. Together they realized that if they wanted a solution to

exist, they would have to create it themselves. A TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTION In 2020, they piloted Connect Our Kids, a technology nonprofit that helps social workers, lawyers and volunteers find

family connections and natural support networks for America’s most vulnerable children. Now the organization’s tools help some 2,000 users in more than 40 states and Canada. “Connect Our

Kids is working to keep foster kids connected to their people, their families, their communities, their supporters, because the impact of those relationships can be crucial to their success

or failure in life,” says Jacobs.