Americas Kids Belong Inc

We seek to dramatically improve the experiences and outcomes for kids in care by ensuring they can be placed with caring foster and/or adoptive families.

We Focus On 2 Profound Problems:
1 - Family Recruitment
With close to 400,000 kids in foster care there are half as many licensed foster homes to care for them. The frustrations of navigating an overloaded child-welfare system can derail even motivated families.

2 - Family Retention
Half of new foster families quit in the first year, often blaming a lack of social support. The result is a “leaky bucket” where the pace of recruitment cannot keep up with the rate of attrition, and it is the vulnerable kids who fall into the gap.

These conditions lead to kids waiting longer and moving between temporary placements more often, compounding their trauma and reinforcing the notion that they don’t belong.

We Offer 3 Innovative Solutions
At America’s Kids Belong our focus is on accelerating mission achievement against the two key problems we solve for, so our solutions evolve with the child-welfare landscape. In 2024 our key focus areas include:

Each year our I Belong Project™ films 500+ adoption-eligible kids in foster care. The video storytelling initiative gives a face and voice to young people seeking adoptive families.

Foster Friendly Communities™ rally municipal, business, faith and nonprofit leaders to prioritize foster care and ensure a family for every child and a supportive community around every family to support and retain them.

Foster / Adoption Journeys – We offer content, our FosterCon webinar series, a forthcoming podcast called The Foster Friendly Podcast, and other resources, through AKB and our partners to help people on their journey to explore fostering or adoption.

We strengthen communities by strengthening kids in foster care and the families that care for them. All children need (and deserve) to experience belonging in a safe, secure family where they can thrive. When kids age out of foster care at 18 without a family to support them the consequences are dire for the youth and for the adult they will become. The lifelong adverse effects are wide-ranging and staggering to the individuals and their communities. Foster care is a “root cause” of many of society’s deepest social wounds, including homelessness, incarceration, addiction, poverty, unemployment and perpetuating a generational cycle of foster care.

The challenges of today’s foster care system ripple into the vitality of our communities as a whole. Every child who ages out of foster care without a family will incur an average of $300,000 in social services over his or her lifetime. And that’s just the tangible cost.

We work to help adoption-eligible kids in foster care find adoptive families through our I Belong Project, and we work to strengthen families through our Foster Friendly Communities initiative.

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.

America's Kids Belong is a leading, trusted voice in raising awareness of the needs of kids in foster care. Last year alone our national social media platform reached 20+ million, in addition to the social media reach of our chapters and affiliates.

We film about 500 kids each year for our I Belong Project which generated 3,300 adoption inquiries and 1,100 fostering inquiries in 2023. 354 kids were matched with adoptive families.

Our Foster Friendly App has 15,000+ user downloads and features 2,132 businesses and 127 faith partners. The app garners an 86% net promoter score among users. The app is the technology linchpin to our current Foster Friendly Communities initiative.