How to Fix Fostercare with Sixto Cancel

Featuring Sixto Cancel, Founder and CEO of Think of Us

Jeff [00:00:01] We can't fix the world alone. But collaborating isn't easy. And systems are allergic to change. So how do we do it without losing our damn minds?

English [00:00:11] That is what we're here to find out.

Jeff [00:00:14] I'm Jeff Walker.

English [00:00:15] I'm English Saul. Welcome to System Catalyst, the podcast that cracked the code for making the world a better place.

Jeff [00:00:29] Hey. English.

English [00:00:30] Hey, Jeff. How's it going?

Jeff [00:00:32] Pretty good. I just spent some time with my younger son. And this episode really, for me, relates to our experience with him. Because we adopted our son, Hunter, and he was six months old when we adopted him. He adopted him from a foster family. And this episode, it's all about the foster care system. The person we talked to is six to cancel. He's founder and CEO of Think of Us, and it's all focus on really reforming the foster care system. He's a high energy guy.

English [00:01:03] Oh that's awesome. I'm I'm so excited to hear more. And I mean, you know, Jeff and our family, we've been trying to adopt for a while. And for us things are moving forward in that process. But, I know that there's been so many issues, especially issues that have come forward more and more over the years. I've we've all learned more about the foster system, but really curious to know where Sixto started and what really drew him into trying to fix such a difficult, complex system.

Jeff [00:01:34] Well, I first ran across Sixto when I was chair in New Profit, and he was part of the new Profit accelerator program. And, that really helped him kind of think through the system change. But he kept telling his own story, which is pretty amazing about going into the foster care system. And now frustrated because he knew and found out later that he could have gone with a member of his family as opposed to going into a group home. And and when you go back to the family, there's always better outcomes. So he's been reforming the system. It's pretty amazing how he's taking this on. He's pretty young and already had a significant impact. So let's go. Let's go listen to him. I want to talk about, you know, your experience. And, how did you come about wanting to do this? What was that moment that you said, hey, you know, I'm going to set up an organization that does something. You went from passive to active. What changed?

Sixto [00:02:35] When I was 11 months, I was placed in the foster care system, and I got to live with my biological mother at the age of six, but then was placed back in foster care pretty quickly at seven. And when I was placed back, I was adopted. And that adoption was just very abusive. And so I spent from 13 to 15 trying to get back into the system, having to call the hotline, the BS hotline, having to literally tape a record to my chest and record the abuse just to get back in. And I remember being at the bus stop when I was 15, and right before I was able to get back into foster care and just feeling like there has to be a reason why I was gone through so much of the things I was going through, and when I was finally placed back in foster care, I wasn't angry that I was adopted by folks who were abusive. I understood as a 15 year old that sometimes there are some people who just do bad things. But what I was angry about was that when I had found my voice and I had actually told the system what was happening to me, that they didn't believe me. And there was a really technical thing that they kept asking me. And that question was, do you feel safe? And the way I interpreted that as a 13, 14, 15 year old was I ain't gonna die today. So yeah, I'm not I'm not dying and.

Jeff [00:04:05] Not dead yet. Not dead yet.

Sixto [00:04:07] Right. And if I would have literally said I don't feel safe, they would have removed me. And so this policy, this practice, this regulation was the difference between literally me staying in a home for two years experienced severe abuse and me being back in the system. And so that's the moment where I realized that I needed to do something about this system. I wanted to improve it, and I joined the youth board, which was the beginning of the journey.

Jeff [00:04:38] So you had motivation to change things within you, and you didn't have great role models as parents or foster parents, obviously. How do we develop that in more people? So they want to be leaders, you know, these change leaders.

Sixto [00:04:52] Yeah. I think the audacity to believe and to have hope is the foundation of really thinking about change. I remember being in, best Friend's house, and she was a bit older than me, and she had a daughter. And I walked into her house and I saw her and everything was empty. And I thought to myself, this is not how I want to live and want to grow up. And the reason I felt that way about being in her house was because I knew she had access to programs that I had access to. That was the moment where I, like, leaned into like taking advantage of every work to loan program, every financial literacy program. I mean, you name it. And when I think about people who want to change stuff, it's because they understand the pain of something really deeply there, proximate. And then you have an idea and a vision about what could be different and how to get there. But I think the problem is, is that sometimes we're so busy surviving and trying to get to that next moment in lines, it's hard to pause and say, here's how I want to contribute back. And for me, I found that healing for some other people living in that pain is just too hard.

Jeff [00:06:05] Thankfully, Sixto had the strength to stand up for himself and the millions of others like him. Now, I like to say that before you can change a system, you first need to identify where it's broken. Well, when it comes to the foster care system in the United States, you don't have to look very hard. And as you'll hear, many of its problems are rooted in the very founding of state funded child welfare.

Sixto [00:06:30] The point of the child welfare system wants to say, look, as a child, your future is in jeopardy because of abuse, neglect, you name it. And you know, they're promising a better life. But the reality is, is that you have half of the people who go back home within a year. And then the outcomes for the young people who stayed longer are very dismal. Right. You have young people who are experiencing PTSD at two times the rate as Iraq War veterans. Right. You have young people with below high school graduation, higher homelessness and incarceration. And so to me, it dates back to the initial way that we viewed children. In 1850, you had Charles Lawrence Brace, who's the considered the father of the modern foster care system. You know, he had homeless children in New York City and was literally getting on trains, putting them on farms in the Midwest. And it was a transactional arrangement where you had young people being placed on farms to work the farms, and in exchange, you had housing, and then the social worker would busy once a year. So our system was based on this very transactional way of thinking about it and not thinking about children thriving.

Jeff [00:07:45] So there was a tipping point where it started to change all the way from the old system, which was, sounds to me like child slavery, where there's putting people to work and then checking on them occasionally. Right. And I know that happened in Britain too. And then it went to this group home system. How did that why all sudden group homes is not just volume and it's easier and you get paid to do that as opposed to trying to return people back to their families?

Sixto [00:08:10] I mean, there is a deep racist history around orphanages and Native Americans, right? And so it wasn't until 1996 where explicit federal law said, you have to serve black families. Awesome. And so when we think about group homes, it started off with the orphanages and then the concept of living with a foster family. And now today a lot of group homes are used because a state may not have license and a foster parent. And that becomes the de facto place to meet their inventory needs. When the reality is, is that we can be placed in that family. And we've seen that when systems actually prioritize families, that they can have the majority of their children actually living with family members.

Jeff [00:08:59] Well, to to me, that's that's one of the great solutions is to be able to retrain the families, to be able to handle the kids. Right? Because you can't sometimes you returning them back to a problem, you know. And so how do you kind of think about fixing the family question?

Sixto [00:09:14] So I think that there is this idea like the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. But what most people don't realize is that 63% of the children who are in foster care are there for neglect reasons. We look deeper into the situation, and you have 37% of these families who are making less than the federal poverty, half of the federal poverty rate, which is $12,000 a year. You got families surviving on less than $1,000 a month. And then when you look at overall, 85% of families are making less than $50,000 a year. And so what we have is a huge poverty issue. You got 36% of the young people whose parents have had an addiction issue. You got 10% who are in there because of housing issues. So less than 20% are actually there for physical and emotional abuse. And so the misconception here is that this is a child problem or a. This is sometimes the parent problem. Most times, and not it's the systemic condition in which these parents are living.

Jeff [00:10:18] As Sixto mentioned, the foster care system doesn't address the root cause of all these issues. These children face poverty. Thankfully, a few years ago, Sixto got introduced the concept of system change and quickly learned how to harness its power.

Sixto [00:10:36] It was 2019. I get accepted into the new profit accelerator. And while I'm there, I'm given a new framework around system change. I learn about the six elements of a system that keep a systemic outcome in place. And it was like a light bulb hit me. It's like, you know, they're important days. They're in your life the day you're born. But the day when you find out who you really are is a whole different day. And to be in that accelerator and to say, oh, that's me. That's the way I think. Oh, this gives me clarity on how I should be moving forward. We ended up restructuring the entire organization based on what we learned during that accelerator, and we became a system change org. And so that's why today, you know, we want value proximity. So we collect thousands and thousands of people's experiences and voices. We convert that into literal data and then use that as the evidence to say, hey, you got 10,000 people across the country in these different places experiencing X, Y, and Z. And so we know this is a systemic problem that we have to be able to address. Once we do this type of learning that helps us rephrase the problem and understand the problem differently, then that's when we're able to scout for people who are already solving these issues. So we take on this scout scale model where like who's already doing this work. And once we find enough people who are doing that intervention, we look across those interventions to find out what are the core ingredients. Every community will approach their problem slightly different. But at the core, there might be 3 or 4 things that they do that we should be bringing to the federal government, to Congress or the white House and saying, here's what we need to codify in your financing, in the regulations, so that then we enable more people to do them. And so that's been the way that we've been able to operate in and be able to have impact.

Jeff [00:12:39] Six is highlighting some important lessons here. If you want to change systems for the better. Number one, get proximate to the people experiencing the issue. Number two, find the key players in the system and learn from them. Number three partner with the government when you can.

Sixto [00:12:59] When I think about systems change right it is. How do we help spark the next group of folks in their county and their state to take some of the learnings we have, the learnings that they have from their own communities, and then they are able to run to shift systems. It is about the collective. And very, very, very rarely is it about one organization who has a seismic shift impact. It has to be that we are inspiring people, we are supporting people and that we're co driving that change with them.

Jeff [00:13:31] That really takes a managed ego to do so, that many people will come in and say, I have the answer, do what I do. I fixed it right. Whereas you're taking another attitude saying I don't have all the answers. I have people that I can talk to and bring those best answers up and start talking about them to the world. To me, that's part of that proximate strategy that you talked about, that center, you know, for lived experiences that you can leverage off of. Maybe talk a little bit about, you know, those lived experiences and how they can produce better outcomes.

Sixto [00:14:06] Absolutely. One of the things that happened during the pandemic is while the rest of the world was expected to shelter in place, foster youth who were turning 18 and 21 were literally being kicked out of the system because their age they had aged out. And so we went to Congress and along with our coalition of friends and said, hey, foster youth need, you know, some supports, some financial supports. And on top of that, we need you to pass a moratorium to stop people from eating out. States need that in order to stop young people from eating out. 1821 are the most common ages that young people age out in this country. And Congress said, well, the airlines are at my door. The hotel industry is at my door. Everybody want money, right? And we just sent some stimulus checks and we explain that, well, when you're 18, you haven't done your taxes, right. So what they said is where's the proof? Where's the evidence that, you know, would help us understand what the need is and what we got? And less than six weeks was 27,000 current and former foster youth who had given us detailed information about their housing, employment, education and their basic needs. And we brought that to Congress. And in coalition with others, we were able to help pass $400 million in aid to folks, but it wasn't enough to pass it. Three months into it, not a dollar had been spent. And so we then had to organize to understand why any state wasn't pushing out dollars. And they were saying things like, well, we need the federal government to give us our program instructions. And so then we literally went for our second round of funding with Jack Dorsey. And when we were able to go ahead and actually stand up, a team that turned around and supported 44 states and getting this money out. We created a platform where it was the application platform, which we co-created with young people. We were able to get a 95.5 completion rate because we co-design that with lived experience. One of the things that we learned, for example, was that when we asked people who was your last social worker, they would drop out of the application. Sometimes it was because they thought their worker was too busy. Sometimes they had forgot the name, the last name of their last worker. So there was all these barriers and the way that we phrased questions. And when we worked with young people in their lived experience, we created an application and platform that they could easily be able to getting help. What we did is we encourage local community nonprofits to go after those contracts to execute the pandemic relief program. But then we shared everything we had every single piece of social media template that we had. They can just slap their logo on it. We gave them the emails that they can go ahead and send out to them. And then that's how we were able to find over 30,000, young people to be able to access their pandemic relief program.

Jeff [00:17:10] This story shows how much goes on into making these big changes happen. Six to use real data in the lived experience of foster kids to adjust policy, working closely with local organizations. He didn't stop there. He's also been working hard on kinship care because of the way the current system is set up. Children in foster care are often put with complete strangers, when in fact they have family members or kinship ready to take care of them. So his organization is trying to get this system to prioritize and facilitate kinship care, where children are less likely to be abused. Once again, this comes from personal experience.

Sixto [00:17:52] I was 27 when my sister called me and asked me to come to a family reunion. And it was pretty shocking because I had thought I didn't have that much family right? I knew I had siblings, so I'm in Harlem. We go to the park we're walking through, and we finally arrive at my family reunion. And it was weird to be around people who were so accepting, so kind, who looked like me for the first time in my life. And while I was there, I found out that I had four uncles, an aunt who were foster adoptive parents for longer than I had been alive. And that moment was shattered for me, was the fact that I had believed that I had no family. I used to watch from alone. And so, like the Christmas point where the family comes back home, I accepted that that ship had sailed for me, and it was about getting ready for life after high school. And in this moment, the grief that came over me was really unbearable. To think that this whole time I actually had family members who could have taken me in. And all of this dates back to July 1998, when there was a line where and in my case, clan that said there is no viable transfer ship of guardianship. And then that became the truth for every worker who has ever touched my case.

Jeff [00:19:17] It's a great story. It's the small things that can make all the difference. I was talking to a woman an hour and a half ago, is a friend of mine, and she just found that she cannot have children. So she actually is investigating and looking at foster care. Coincidence. And she's trying to figure out, you know, is that for her? And you're talking about trying to return kids back to their own kin? Do you want more people to be foster parents? I mean, what message do you want to send to people who don't have kin in the system?

Sixto [00:19:50] So I truly believe that there are certain people who are called to foster and adopt, and that we will always need people in that category. And I also believe that young people, for the most part, can be placed with their relative. And so we need both. There are some people who are mortified of the idea that they would be attached to a child, and then that child would not no longer be in their life, or they would no longer live with them. Right. And so those folks are called, in my opinion, to do the adoption piece.

Jeff [00:20:21] Gotcha. I, have four kids, and, my fourth child we adopted when he was, five months old from South Korea. And he's our gift to us. I mean, the most compassionate being I know. And he's 25 now. He had a lot of advantages because he had a family to support him, but he still has to handle the issues of adoption and looking different than, than we do and and connecting through them as well. And so those support services, you know, even for a five month old are important. Can't imagine, you know, when an 8 or 9 year old in the system what they need. I can kind of relate a little bit. And, I am so impressed by the amount of support that you have gone out there and gotten, the audacious prize, one of the larger, you know, gifts, around 40, almost $50 million. And, Jack Dorsey and a variety of others. How are you getting your message out so that it truly connects to donors and makes them want to be partners with you?

Sixto [00:21:25] I think the thing that we've been so fortunate is that we've been connected to people who are willing to take backs child welfare, and it's not a system that a lot of people understand and have built portfolios around. And it's so complex because unlike other systems like housing and food stamps, there's not just one thing you're delivering. A system is trying to raise a child, right. And systems can not love a child. It is a proxy of decisions. I just feel like I hit almost like the jackpot of being able to have our results. Our partners results in front of them. The folks who have said we're willing to take a big bet on this. And so we want to be in more community with folks who are going to lean in on this. But what I realize is that what we need is more people outside of the traditional child welfare funding community to step in. And when we do systems change. You need people on the ground who are super passionate about operating their interventions and be in community with folks. You need people who are doing the policy who are thinking deeply about, well, how are we financing the folks? On the ground doing that work, from philanthropy to government contracts, to be able to make sure that folks have the resources to execute. And then we need people who are in Washington, D.C., at the national level trying to figure out how is it that they get rid of barriers or enable opportunity across the entire country based on those learnings.

Jeff [00:22:58] But then to hold all that together? I think you all service that catalyst to make sure they're all communicating and pointing out opportunities, right? I mean, do you have teams, people trying to do that?

Sixto [00:23:10] So we have a direct service team that is this year will have almost serve 3000 people through what we call a warm line. Folks call in, folks email in, and we help them find resources and we provide them with like think of a like white glove personal assistant to help them find the resource to help them get the resource. And we're doing one hand offs to the nonprofits, one on the ground. That team is all about getting data so that then we can understand what are some of the true needs by serving people. We have a research team and then is looking at what are the pain points across the country. What is this data that we have internally and other people's data? Then there's the team that's looking to scout and scale, find the solutions that already exist, bring them to the states, bring them to Congress. We have a team that's looking to design a program differently so that we can prove things can be done differently. How can it be more instructive and more impactful? And once we learn those things, you give it away. You let other people in the community lead that charge. So we're never looking to be the biggest provider of any one service. And then we have our policy team that's looking at regulation, that's looking at policy, that's looking at law. And those are part of the DNA of the system. And what we don't talk enough about is across all of those different teams is the communications team that's consistently thinking about what are people's mental models, how are people thinking about these things. And so at each step of this process, do we help people envision a new way of doing it so that we create a new normal in which the system is operating in?

Jeff [00:24:52] Could you see a day where every child in a in the child care for system across the country, we actually know their name and know what they need?

Sixto [00:25:02] I believe that not only can we actually know every child's name in need, but that we actually know what the family names and needs are like. We can build a family wellbeing system that is focused on making sure that that family is strengthened, that that family is healthy, and that the pathway to opportunities are not filled with a bunch of traps or gaps.

Jeff [00:25:24] Any other messages you like to make sure people that are listening to this get.

Sixto [00:25:29] The one message I want to say is like, when I think about the march on Selma and the Civil rights movement, right? What I appreciate about many of the folks who are part of this movement was that they were clear on their contribution. There were folks who trained to be in the front line of that march. And that meant being out there, going through exercise where they were spit on first, so that the day that they had to be on that front line and they had a nonviolent response, and there were people who was like, I believe in this, but I ain't get on no front line, and I'm not marching, but I'll make sure I do the logistics and make sure people are bused. Their people are there. There were other people who were waiting at the courthouse, ready to be able to use their legal power to be able to represent folks. And so when we think about a movement to make our country better, the reality is, is that we need people contributing from so many sides. And so what I would really recommend to folks is really understand the contribution that you want to have. Secondly, align that contribution with how others are in the space doing it, and then really think about what is actually your skill set that you are most uniquely to provide. And that's where you lean in. That's what your contribution to system change is that sometimes there's a danger in us wanting to become the centerpiece of that change, and sometimes it's more valuable and how we might show up behind the scenes.

Jeff [00:26:57] I love that. It's perfect. Thank you for all you do. That's it for today's show. Please don't forget to subscribe to System Catalyst so you don't miss out on the new episodes. Also, do us a huge favor by reading our podcast ID, leaving us a review. Thank you so much for joining us, and we'll catch you all in the next episode. Before we go, I'd like to thank our producers at human Group media. We'd also like to thank our incredible network of partners who are supporting our mission the School Foundation, the Aspen Institute, Echoing Green, Dr. K Foundation, Maverick Collective, Virgin Unite. She released their own Africa outreach project, Boldly Go Philanthropy. Same goes for Global Nexus and New Profit. If you're interested in becoming a system catalyst, you'd like to learn more about our partners, please visit System catalyst.com.