Tech Company Innovates Foster Care

By J. K. Schmid, AFRO Staff

A Falls Church non-profit has won first place at the inaugural Innovate for Good Challenge. The winner, Connect Our Kids, is developing data-driven intelligent software to enhance the abilities of social workers to place foster children in homes in a faster and scalable manner. Connect Our Kids’s website and the press release announcing their victory claim there are over 400,000 children in the US foster care system.

“The Innovate for Good Challenge is intended to promote and heighten awareness of organizations that are catalyzing social change through new technology such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and/or extended reality,” the press release reads. Innovate for Good is a contest sponsored by Independent Sector and Accenture.

Connect Our Kids has not launched a product at the time of this writing, but expects to launch from Virginia when the time comes.

“The financial award and technological support from Accenture is a game-changer for our young non-profit organization,” said co-founder and COO Jessica Stern, in the same release. “We are a giant step closer to piloting our family connections tool across 5 states because of this incredible opportunity.”

This article originally appeared in The Afro.