About this recommendation
Social media is widely used across cultural, geographic, and economic groups. This makes social media a powerful and unique tool for finding family members of youth in foster care.
Other people-finding tools — like credit searches — have limited databases. For example, you have to have a credit history to appear in most of them, entirely missing kin with thin or non-existent credit files.
How to do this
Search popular social media sites like Facebook for known family members, such as a youth’s parents or older siblings. From there, look through public messages, photos, and friend lists to identify additional connections and message them. (This message should not reveal identifying details.)
Child welfare systems should require social media searches as a core part of kin finding activities.
Make sure to have a robust social media policy in place.
Anticipated costs and benefits
- Social media training
- Employee time
- Find more kin who can take placement and/or serve as lifelong support for vulnerable youth
- Find kin your agency would not otherwise find
- Avoid placing children in general foster care who actually have kinship placement options
Outcome data
New Mexico increased initial kinship placements from 3% to over 40% in one year by shifting to practices that included using social media to identify kin.
Who's doing this
What they're doing
- A Second Chance, Inc. (ASCI) uses Facebook and other forms of social media to identify at least 40 kin for each child.
- Washington DC’s social media policy.
- Rhode Island’s family finding team uses “DCYF” in place of worker last names on social media to protect worker privacy.
- Michigan includes social media sites listed on its Diligent Search checklist.
- New Mexico encourages workers to create second, separate social media accounts under their name that they use exclusively for work.
- Virginia’s central family-finding social media accounts are called “Virginia Family Finding 1” (and 2, and 3) to protect worker privacy.
- Some counties in Ohio and California, but it's not done state-wide at this time.