Creating National Standards to Approve Kin Caregivers
Co-designing foster home licensing standards that keep children with family.
New national licensing standards now let child welfare agencies approve kin caregivers — grandparents, family friends, relatives — faster and more equitably. States that adopted the streamlined forms cut paperwork dramatically: Maryland went from 30 forms to 3, Tennessee from 17 to 6. Every U.S. state and at least 5 tribes have expressed interest in adopting or have already adopted the standards. The work won a 2025 Service Design Award.
The challenge
Children placed with relatives after removal from their parents tend to have better outcomes than those placed with strangers — but licensing processes built for unrelated foster parents created unnecessary delays and barriers for kin. In 2023, a federal rule change opened the door to build dedicated, faster standards specifically for licensing kin.
My role & the project
This work grew out of an earlier 7-week study I ran on background checks for kin caregivers with 45 child welfare agencies (see below), which expanded into the full national standards effort. Across the project I helped write the research plan, conduct desk research, recruit participants, design and run a survey of kin caregivers, moderate interviews, analyze and synthesize findings, develop process maps, and prepare client-facing presentations.
The fuller project gathered input from 430+ participants across 50+ state, tribal, and territorial agencies, organized around three research areas: background checks, physical home safety, and caregiver assessment. Each phase paired discovery research with iterative testing, with continual outreach to marginalized and under-resourced caregivers — including Black, Indigenous, and low-income kin.
Background checks in depth
Speaking with 6 subject matter experts, 45 child welfare agencies, and 9 kin caregivers, and surveying 97 more, we mapped both the current and an ideal background-check process. The current process takes an average of 145 days across multiple disconnected touchpoints. The ideal process — which starts every check on day one of placement and makes stipend payments available immediately — could complete in as little as 33 days.
Unclear disqualifying-crime lists, confusion over which household adults need checks, prolonged appeals processes, administrative hurdles clearing non-criminal records, and limited fingerprinting-site availability all added weeks to placement decisions — on top of the emotional cost to children moved multiple times while waiting.
Deliverables
What I'd tell another researcher
Talking with people who'd designed background checks in sectors outside child welfare gave us context on limitations and promising practices we wouldn't have found by staying inside the field. And our early survey ran into bot and fake-response contamination — without a captcha or unique tracking links, a meaningful share of responses had to be cleaned out. We built captchas and per-channel tracking links into every survey after that.
"This project demonstrates what's possible when design is used as an instrument of justice, not just efficiency." Eliisa Sarkkinen, Service Design Award judge