Connections can become new beginnings

Discover extended family connections for children and teens in the juvenile justice system. Our free tools make searches faster and easier – to identify support networks, establish an environment for rehabilitation, and orchestrate belonging.

Belonging can be the end and the beginning

Connect Our Kids is the most successful technology platform for family search and engagement in the country. Using our free technology, juvenile justice professionals can assist with facilitating life-changing natural support networks that can end the cycles of trauma, crime, and poverty.

Connect Our Kids provides juvenile justice professionals with the technology needed to identify, connect, and develop family support systems desperately needed by young people in the justice system and their families.

We know that a support system consisting of relatives, kin, and adult friends is essential for better outcomes and permanency. So, we made out tools fast and easy to use – even in emergency situations – reaching across district and state lines.

Juvenile justice professionals can use our tool for free (really!)

Because of generous supporters, we’re able to give, not sell, our technology platform to involved professionals at no cost to the Court.

People Search

Created for child welfare professionals and volunteers to find contact information for extended family members and other connections by searching over 300 sources of data.

Family Connections

Family Connections is a visual relationship mapping tool used to build out networks of extended family members and other natural supports for vulnerable children and their families.

All Connected

A trauma-informed video academy for creating connection and belonging, designed in collaboration with trauma therapists and advocates with lived experience within the foster care and prison systems.

REC Center

Resources for Engagement and Connecting (REC): an inspirational idea hub for engagement, outreach, diligent/family searching, relationship building, and more!

Find scripts and templates for calls, emails, and letters to help you make life-changing connections.

Mobile Apps

Our tools are available as mobile apps so you can begin searches immediately and on the go.

FAQs and more

Explore learning resources for social workers.

Quick Start Guide: Put the power of technology to work for you

1
Watch our 3-minute Quick Start video
2
Bookmark our tools on your browser and download the mobile app
3
Use Family Connections to build a map of each child’s family and support network, and People Search to find contact information for everyone on it
4
Tour our Engagement Center for search tips, scripts, and outreach templates

Protect every child’s privacy and data

Data security and identity information are important features of our technology tools. We don’t collect data or track searches.

Engagement & Ideas Center

Engagement scripts and templates for calls, emails, and letters to help you make life-changing connections.

Inspirational idea hub for engagement, outreach, diligent/family searching, relationship building and more!

All Connected

A trauma-informed video academy for creating connection and belonging, designed in collaboration with trauma therapists and advocates with lived experience within the foster care and prison systems.

FAQs and more

Explore learning resources for social workers.

Our Impact

We are so grateful to have crossed paths with the Connect Our Kids leadership at a Family Finding conference in November 2019. Immediately, the team asked, "How can we help you find connections for foster youth?" NOAS partnered as a pilot agency for the software and now has fourteen staff using the system regularly to find permanency. Recently, a new staff member located an estranged sister of a birth mom. The sister lived a few miles from our office and was already a licensed foster parent. Auntie welcomed her nephew and has been matched for adoption. Without the tools provided in the Connect Our Kids software, we may not have found permanency for this teen.
Cheryl Tarantino
Northeast Ohio Adoption Services, NOAS|Ohio
From our first conversation with the Connect Our Kids team, we knew that this tool would be a valuable asset to assuring permanent family connections for the children we serve across the nation. Hundreds of our grantees and partners now have access to not only the technology that significantly increases their ability to link to extended family but also to robust training and expertise, all with one single goal in mind – dramatically improve the lives of children in foster care waiting for permanency.
Rita Soronen, President & CEO
Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption|National, based in Ohio

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