A Network Of Traditional Leaders Is Helping Kaduna Communities Find Missing Children

Temporary Alternative Placement Agreements (TAPA) allow parents struggling with addiction to enter a drug-treatment program and connect them with parenting resources and support to help them maintain custody of their children. Under a TAPA parents have a say in who their children stay with while they're seeking treatment, rather than losing custody altogether. Participants say TAPAs are far less traumatic and help hold them accountable as they’re required to sign an agreement to uphold at the start of the program.

In Nigeria, the Center for Environment, Human Rights, and Development is improving response time and documentation of oil spills by providing training and smartphones to local volunteers. The locals take photos and capture the coordinates of spills, upload them to a digital monitoring platform, and then send them to a Whatsapp group to ensure immediate action is taken.

Court-appointed special advocates (CASAs) are trained volunteers appointed by a judge to represent a child’s best interests throughout the foster care system and adoption court processes. CASAs spend time with the children to get to know them and their situations, including their medical, psychological and social needs, to advocate on their behalf. The CASA program began in the 1970s; today, there are about 1,000 CASA programs nationwide.

The HeyKiddo app and educational curriculum allow parents and teachers to access information and activities that help develop students’ social and emotional health and empathy, teach them how to make responsible decisions and maintain healthy relationships. Over 500 families currently use the app and the portion for teachers, called The Huddle, is used in a handful of schools in California, with plans to expand.

In response to a lack of action from local government, individuals are turning to digital platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook groups to avoid scammers and price gouging in the rental industry. These groups have thousands of members and allow landlords and tenants to interact directly without middlemen interfering and charging unnecessary fees.

My Two Aunties assists Indigenous families to help keep children out of foster care. The group provides parenting support and education, seeks to build relationships between families and their culture and also works to repair intergenerational trauma that can lead to creating an unsafe environment for children. In 2022, the program served 97 families and held 411 parenting classes and interest in the program is continuously growing.

Fostering Hope is a community closet that provides new and gently used clothing to children in the foster care system. The organization has helped nearly 2,500 kids get a new wardrobe.

By putting a priority on rescuing children from danger in their homes by reducing the danger or placing the children in relatives' care, Iowa courts have greatly reduced the traumatizing use of emergency foster care placements with strangers. The program, which began with seven judges and has since spread statewide, starts with a simple list of questions that judges or social workers ask to identify specific solutions to problems other than the default mechanism of sending children to live in foster care, which can make their emotional problems worse.

The Lummi Tribal council created Sche'lang'en Village to provide a supportive community for Native families that have been torn apart by the foster system, drugs, or domestic violence. The more than 30 families accepted to the low-cost housing project receive a host of services to help them recover and build better futures. A disproportionate number of Native children are taken from their families into foster care, which damages not only families but the Native culture.

A free mobile app called Ameelio opens a free channel of communication between incarcerated people and their families, to avoid the price-gouging telephone services that prisons and jails authorize to charge people exorbitant rates to talk. Ameelio's app makes sending letters with photos easier than doing it by snail mail. Nonprofits can also use the free service to communicate with clients. Ameelio, which is supported by donations and grants, is piloting a video-conferencing service.