Americas Kids Belong Inc

We are using a "Collective Impact" approach where we empower leaders across sectors to innovate and leverage their platforms and skills to make a coordinated impact on improving outcomes with foster care. This could involve increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of a state's recruitment efforts, improving awareness in churches to better wrap around foster and a adoptive families, helping businesses to use their influence to provide incentives and become more foster friendly (similar to providing senior citizen discounts), and empowering creative influencers to use their platforms to help create awareness for the need for foster families and support for those who step up.

AKB is the catalyzing force that organizes and aligns the major players in a state to come together across sectors to learn, innovate, and collaborate in solving the complex problems inherent in foster care and adoption. We then help launch state initiatives typically led by the governor's office in conjunction with churches, connected non profits, the creative community, and key business entities to spearhead recruitment and awareness efforts on a widespread scale. We also employ our signature, I Belong Project™ that enables children in foster care who are eligible for adoption to be the stars of their own stories. These kids are given a platform to share about themselves in high quality family recruitment videos. Finally we use our Dream Makers program to assist and support the vulnerable youth transitioning out of the foster care system.

Our capabilities for succeeding in our mission lie both in our strategic approach to solving the foster care crisis and in our personnel and key connections. Our staff and board members are highly connected and diverse in backgrounds and experiences that range from top level business leadership, to high government positions, to influential faith roles, to roles in child welfare. We also are connected to major creatives who are using their gifts to help frame this issue and inspire others to become involved. Our unique model was born out of marrying the grass roots method of adoptive and foster family recruitment in Colorado, the "grasstops" method of a governor’s office led adoption recruitment campaign in Virginia, and a business approach to the nonprofit sphere led by Joe Ritchie and his Fox River Team in Chicago.

In 2015, AKB worked behind the scenes to coordinate a multi-sector, multi-year campaign with the state of Oklahoma that organized the government, faith, creative, business and non-profit spheres around the issue of child welfare. In 2016, for the first time in the history of the Pinnacle Plan, OKDHS met and surpassed the foster family recruitment goal as 1,078 families were recruited. As part of this reform effort, parent certification time was cut in half and a group home was closed because of an influx of new foster parents.

In 2016, AKB played a similar catalyzing role in a multi-sector approach to help bolster and improve Tennessee’s Foster Care System (TNFosters Initiative) and the state saw an increase of 42% in new foster families in the first year.

In 2016, our I Belong Project™ produced 164 recruitment videos across five states. In 2017, 216 recruitment videos were produced. In 2018, we had 16 shoots with 207 kids to produce 183 videos in four states. From some sample groups of youth in foster care, we’ve seen a rate of about 50% of kids placed in pre-adoptive homes within a few months of having a video compared to no inquiries at all in some cases in the previous years.

We envision taking these types of results into additional states. Currently AKB has expanded its national reach with 501(c)(3) affiliates in Tennessee and Virginia and state chapters in Colorado, South Dakota, Iowa, and Kansas. We're continuing to add additional states each year and currently have four states on the horizon to expand our operations into. We're also on pace this year to create 400 videos through our I Belong Project™ for youth across our country eligible to be adopted.