What "Homes Waiting on Kids" Really Requires: Building the Connected Infrastructure Behind ACF's Vision for Child Welfare

Homes waiting on kids, not kids waiting on homes.

It is a simple phrase, but it captures an ambitious vision for the future of child welfare. At the heart of the Administration for Children and Families' (ACF) A Home for Every Child initiative is the idea that children in the child welfare system should never have to wait for safe, stable, family-based placements. Achieving that vision means reducing the need for foster care whenever possible while ensuring that enough foster and kinship homes are available when children cannot safely remain at home.

Much of the conversation surrounding this initiative has, understandably, been focused on increasing the number of licensed foster families. Yet creating more homes is only one piece of a much larger equation. If agencies are to truly realize ACF's vision, they must strengthen the systems, processes, and partnerships that support children and families throughout the entire child welfare continuum.

Earlier Prevention

The strongest child welfare system is one that helps families remain safely together whenever possible. Prevention services, early intervention, and coordinated support can address challenges before they escalate to the point where foster care becomes necessary.

This raises an important question: How do agencies maintain momentum when leadership changes?
The answer lies in creating leadership infrastructure. Just as physical infrastructure supports the movement of people and resources, leadership infrastructure supports the movement of knowledge, decisions, and organizational priorities. It includes documented processes, shared institutional knowledge, transparent decision-making practices, cross-functional collaboration, and reliable access to operational information.

When these elements are in place, organizations become less dependent on individual institutional memory and more capable of sustaining progress through periods of transition.Making prevention more effective requires timely information and coordinated action. Caseworkers need a complete understanding of family circumstances, service history, and available community resources in order to identify risks early and connect families with appropriate supports. The better agencies can coordinate services before a crisis occurs, the greater their ability to reduce unnecessary entries into foster care.

Efficient Licensing

Recruiting foster families is only the beginning. Agencies must also guide prospective caregivers through licensing, inspections, documentation, training, and ongoing compliance requirements. Administrative delays or fragmented processes can slow the availability of qualified homes and create unnecessary frustration for families willing to serve.

Modern licensing processes should balance accountability with efficiency. Streamlined workflows, centralized information, and better visibility into provider status help agencies process applications more effectively while allowing staff to focus on supporting caregivers rather than managing paperwork.

Better Placement Matching

Finding an available foster home is important. Finding the right foster home is even more important. Placement decisions involve far more than identifying an open bed. Workers must consider a child's behavioral and medical needs, sibling relationships, school continuity, geographic proximity, caregiver experience, and available support services. These decisions are often made under significant time pressure, making access to accurate and timely information essential.

Better placement matching improves stability, reduces placement disruptions, and helps create stronger outcomes for children. Achieving that level of decision-making depends on having connected information that supports both professional judgment and informed action.

Stronger Family Connections

The A Home for Every Child initiative also reinforces the importance of kinship care whenever it is safe and appropriate. Maintaining family relationships often provides children with greater stability, stronger emotional connections, and improved long-term outcomes.

Supporting kinship care requires agencies to identify relatives and trusted adults early, coordinate assessments efficiently, and maintain clear communication among caseworkers, providers, courts, and families. Just as importantly, information must move with the child throughout every transition rather than remaining isolated within separate systems or organizations.

When communication is connected, agencies are better positioned to preserve family relationships and make decisions that reflect each child's full story.

Coordinated Permanency Planning

Every placement should represent progress toward a permanent home. Whether that path leads to reunification, guardianship, or adoption, permanency depends on careful coordination across multiple organizations and stakeholders.

Caseworkers, courts, service providers, foster families, and biological families all contribute to permanency planning. Delays in documentation, communication, or case coordination can unintentionally extend the amount of time children spend in foster care.

Operational efficiency is therefore more than an administrative goal. It directly supports children's ability to achieve lasting stability and permanent family connections.

Building the Infrastructure Behind the Vision

Although these priorities may appear distinct, they all depend on one common foundation: connected infrastructure. Technology alone cannot achieve the goals of A Home for Every Child. Relationships, professional judgment, and dedicated casework will always remain at the center of child welfare. But technology plays a critical role in enabling those efforts by connecting information, supporting collaboration, and reducing administrative barriers.

CITI's solution, Unify™, is designed to support agencies across the entire child welfare lifecycle, from intake and prevention through placement, provider management, and permanency planning. By bringing together case information, workflows, and operational visibility within a unified environment, Unify™ helps agencies strengthen coordination, improve decision-making, and maintain continuity from a case’s beginning to its end.

Ultimately, ACF's vision is about far more than increasing the number of foster homes. It is about building a child welfare system that is prepared to support children and families at every step of their journey. When agencies invest in the connected infrastructure that enables prevention, streamlines licensing, strengthens placement decisions, supports kinship care, and advances permanency, they move closer to a future where children spend less time waiting and more time where they belong: in safe, stable, and permanent homes.