The kids were 17, 13, 12, 9, 7, and 3. They checked in late the night before, after their mother was taken into custody. Kay, the social worker, had just been assigned to the case and spent the morning reviewing the files, making calls, leaving messages, and sending emails. It became apparent that it's unlikely to find anyone in the family to care for them, nor any family friends. Kay's next hope was to find a long term place, ideally a foster family that can take all 6 of them, but this would be unlikely given the shortage of families and facilities. So she went to the emergency foster home to meet the kids for the first time. So, she had to ask them a question:

If you have to be split, which siblings do you want to be with? I shadowed Kay and interviewed the kids one by one. It turned out all the younger kids wanted to stay with the oldest sister except the 13 years old. Holding up his head and fighting back his tears, the boy said he's old enough, he could stay with the 9 years old and look after him.

To say it out loud, child welfare systems across the nation are broken. 424,000 children are in foster care on any given day nationwide. In 2019, over 672,000 children spent time in U.S. foster care. [Source]

While there are more children entering foster care every year, there are fewer families and facilities are available for them. The most significant challenges state child welfare agencies have been facing are [Source]:

• Providing an adequate level of services for children and families,
• Recruiting and retaining caseworkers, and
• Finding appropriate homes for children

As a result, many foster children can't get placed in more appropriate homes in time or at all. Many of them have to go through different homes or placements, their lifes growing up in the child welfare systems can be anything but stability. One of the foster children we interviewed, a 15 year old from California Youth Connection (CYC), has been placed 53 times.

We skipped the discovery & framing phase which would have allowed us to look at the problem space from end to end. The entire project was divided into 7 modules based on the programs and domains, each module had its own team consisting of design, product, and engineering from multiple vendors, subject matter experts, product owners, and service managers from the state or counties. There were about 20 - 30 people in each module/service team. The plan was to onboard one team at a time, about 2-3 teams per year. The onboarded teams were expected to deliver "working codes" quickly, therefore the research was very modulized and solution driven early on.

However, a year later the project started to feel the pain of solving problems within domain silos. For example, the state released a Resource Family Approval directive, but counties had their own ways to approve foster families for decades. They had developed systems and programs accordingly, which created obstacles such as sharing data across counties, or collaborating across services. During interviews, large counties with thousands of employees and small ones with a handful of employees were always asking something different, something tailored for their special needs. We had no choice but to demolish the silos and look at the services as a whole, rather than the sum of their parts.

Strategists, designers, researchers, and frontend engineers from different service modules joined to form a designOps. We pooled resources and shared our knowledge to develop a holistic and cohesive vision for the services end to end, with the help from the Subject Matter Experts and the frontline county workers.

One of the outcomes of the Discovery & Framing phase was a snapshot of the Emergency Placement, which is what Kay assigned to do with the sibling set of six case.