Foster Family Alliance

The people, mission and context

The mission of Foster Family Alliance (FFA) is to educate, advocate, support and promote partnerships that lead to positive outcomes for children, youth and resource families of North Carolina. The organization supports children and youth in foster care and dedicated families and professionals that care for them. FFA provides support across social services, adoptive families, and public/private agencies.

The problem

For adopting families, the organization’s communication and structure can be complex and confusing. Project sponsors at FAA wanted to investigate how it could change the way adoptive families get access to vital information and resources to best equip themselves to support the adoptive child’s well-being.

The solution

The design team conducted interviews and surveys with parents to understand the problem, with a focus on how parents were recruited and on-boarded into the process. After performing additional secondary research with a prototype phone application, the team devised an solution that allow adopting parents to access a website that allowed local outreach to other adopting parents for questions and mentoring guidance.

The long-term experience extended the website into a mobile application experience to include a consolidated area of resources (both local and remote), additional support for local help, and more real-time responsiveness with live access to other adoptive families who were also part of the same supporting ecosystem.