“Our vision is that child welfare is enabled, as a system, to support families and children rather than to separate them.” -Jennifer Jacobs, USMA ‘93

Jennifer Jacobs is the CEO and Co-founder of Connect Our Kids, a technology nonprofit dedicated to helping social workers, lawyers, family recruiters, and CASA/GAL volunteers find supportive family connections and natural support networks for America’s most vulnerable. The organization’s advanced tech tools speed up and scale up techniques for finding extended family members and other caring adults for children in foster care. Jennifer has applied her technical expertise gained from working in nuclear counterterrorism as an Army Officer to Connect Our Kids. The organization has affected 18,000 children and found over half a million connections for those children, touching the lives of over 10,000 American families. In this episode, we discuss:

• Where Jennifer came up with the idea to create Connect Our Kids

• How the technology works to help social workers do their job more efficiently

• Impactful success stories of children being connected with family members and adults in their circle

• Jennifer’s long-term vision for Connect Our Kids and her short-term goals for 2024

• The challenges Jennifer is facing and the support she needs to help Connect Our Kids grow

Jennifer explains that social workers who work in child welfare can use the tools provided by Connect Our Kids to build out a “map” for a child. This helps to organize all known information about the child’s family and other adults in their circle and search for more details on the Internet through the Connect Our Kids People Search technology. By having a tool that searches for and organizes all of the key details, social workers have more time, bandwidth, and emotional energy to do the human work of social work. Due to Jennifer’s smart application of modern technology, Connect Our Kids is impacting the lives of thousands of children and families. Thank you, Jennifer, for creating tools that help foster children be connected to their people. Connect with Jennifer:

• LinkedIn

• connectourkids.org

• jennifer@connectourkids.org 

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Special thanks to Jennifer for joining me this week. Until next time! -Scott Mackes, USNA ’01