Envisioning a world where every person has the conditions they need to Heal, Develop, and Thrive.
The Child Welfare system is failing, causing greater trauma for the youth and families it is meant to serve. More than 70% of siblings are separated, 20,000+ youth age out each year, and 36%+ of aged out youth experience homelessness. Riddled with systemic racism, private interest money, and the criminalization of poverty, there is a devastating human cost to the gap between the goals of child welfare and its outcomes.
Sixto Cancel grew up in and aged out of the child welfare system. He has been advocating for change at the intersection of child welfare and advanced technology since the age of 16.Â
His personal lived experience has powered a passion to transform the child welfare system so that every person has the conditions they need to Heal, Develop, and Thrive. As one of the creators of the #HACKFOSTERCARE movement, Sixto has amplified national conversations around data in child welfare, assembled stakeholders from diverse disciplines and delivered concrete results for the field. He is founder and CEO of Think of Us which operates as a Research and Development Lab for child welfare, transforming the system so that people with Lived Experience are at the center of designing, imagining, and building.Â
Think of Us strategically engages projects across tech, participatory research, and state and federal partnerships, driving system-wide solutions that bridge the gap between policy, practice, and people. Sixto believes that centering the lived experiences of people whose lives are touched by the system – foster youth, foster parents, caregivers, caseworkers, judges, and funders – allows us to co-design solutions and shift the dynamics that hold problems in place.Â
Sixto Cancel and the team at Think of Us are committed to total transformation of child welfare in the United States with strategic projects, research and development designed to be catalytic, disrupting existing norms in the child welfare system so that lived experience is at the center.
Sixto’s recognitions include:
- 2021 Children’s Bureau Champion
- White House Champion of Change
- Forbes Top 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur
- Forbes Under30 Lister Board
- NewProfit Social Entrepreneur Accelerator Initiative Alum
- Clinton Global Initiative University Alumni
- Young Fellow at the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative
- Juvenile Law Center Leadership Prize
- BET Millennial Maker
- Top 24 Changemakers in Government Under 24 (Campaign for a Presidential Youth Council and SparkAction)
- Fostering the Future Award, Children’s Rights
- Ashoka Fellow
- FastForward Alum
Sitxto also authored an opinion article for the New York Times, “I Will Never Forget That I Could Have Lived With People Who Loved Me”, calling out the failures of the child welfare system specifically the lack of support for kinship care, a shortage of foster parents, and the foster care system unduly and unnecessarily resulting in restrictive, institutionalized group homes.
“As a result, we are making a bold call: Children should not be placed in foster care because of poverty. If children do enter care, it should be because of true abuse or neglect. These children should be placed with kin first and with foster families as a last resort. We want to see an end to the use of unnecessary group home placements in foster care.”