Sunlight wins Flourish Fund Innovation Challenge — here's why this matters

We have news to share, and we want to take a moment to explain what happened and why it matters.

Sunlight Verified was named among nine award recipients of Flourish Fund and Eagle Venture Fund's inaugural National Foster Care Innovation Challenge — selected from 110 applicants, with support from Google.org and the Aviv Foundation. We're honored. And we want to share what this award is, what Sunlight Verified is and how it fits into everything we're building.

What is Sunlight Verified?

Sunlight Verified is a new solution that addresses one of the most persistent — and least visible — problems in the foster care system: fragmented, unreliable screening data.

Right now, the people responsible for placing children in safe homes — foster care agencies, child welfare programs, volunteer organizations — work with background-screening and abuse-registry information that lives in disconnected, often outdated systems. A volunteer approved in one county or state may have a disqualifying record in another. A placement decision made in good faith may be based on less than a full picture.

Sunlight Verified will aggregate fragmented child-welfare data, background-screening records and abuse-registry information into a single, unified verification- and risk-intelligence platform so decision-makers responsible for a child's safety can move faster and with greater confidence.

Why this, why now?

People who know Sunlight's work might ask: How does a screening and verification platform connect to the mission of renewing families?

It connects directly.

Sunlight exists to connect families and professionals in the child welfare system with innovative technology that improves communication, protection, trust and transparency — to reduce time in foster care and reunify families safely, sooner.

We've built tools that help parents stay connected with their attorneys. We're helping CASA programs coordinate advocacy for youth in care. We're working to make sure families can access the healthcare that will reunify their families for good.

A child welfare system that works for families must be one that families can trust. Trust demands safety. The same system that needs to reunify more families safely, sooner must also make sure every placement decision is made with a complete, accurate picture of risk.

Those aren't competing goals. They're the same goal.

Sunlight Verified is Sunlight's answer to that part of the problem — an improved verification infrastructure that brings together data across county and state lines to improve the safety of placements while also making the screening process less of a barrier for qualified volunteers, foster families and community members who want to step up.

What this award means

Being selected from 110 applicants by a portfolio designed to span the full foster care continuum — from family preservation to youth aging out of care — tells us that the problem Sunlight Verified is solving is real, recognized and compelling.

Flourish Fund and Eagle Venture Fund's visions are exactly the kind of thinking that animate everything Sunlight builds. Flourish Fund contends that what changes a child's life isn't a single organization or a single intervention, but a community of people working together across the system. Eagle Venture Fund invests in pathways to flourishing and fixing the entrepreneurial system, decimation of sex-trafficking industry and health innovation — to see people flourish in body, mind and spirit.

We're proud to be part of this cohort and to learn from the other organizations doing remarkable work alongside us.

What comes next

This award is fuel. More details on Sunlight Verified — including availability, partnerships and how to get involved — will come soon.

In the meantime you can read about all nine award recipients and the vision behind the National Foster Care Innovation Challenge here.