Springboard Prize Awardees
The four awardees of the inaugural Springboard Prize for Child Welfare are:
The Children’s Justice Attorney Education Program (CJAE) plans to launch a fellowship program to provide extensive training, expert case consultation, and reflective practice to attorneys practicing in rural areas in Nebraska, with the goal of improving the availability and quality of legal representation for children and families in rural communities. Housed at the University of Nebraska’s Center on Children, Families, and the Law and College of Law, Michelle Paxton, Director of the Children’s Justice Clinic, will build and lead the program, which is inspired by her clinic’s efforts to provide law students with support to help them represent children as Guardians ad Litem.
Family Reunification, Equity, & Empowerment (FREE) intends to expand the support groups, resources, and personalized coaching it provides to formerly-incarcerated parents, grandparents, and other family members navigating the child welfare system. It also plans to grow its work with system-impacted families to advocate for changes to state laws that unfairly prevent parents and family members with conviction histories from being reunited with their children. FREE’s goal is to reduce the number of caring, capable birth parents or other family members with criminal records who are denied custody because of their past convictions. FREE, an initiative of Starting Over, was founded by Vonya Quarles, who built the organization based on her professional and personal experiences in the criminal justice and child welfare systems.
The Nebraska Indian Child Welfare Coalition (NICWC) plans to develop a culturally-specific program to help tribal youth aging out of care access the available services and financial support to aid their transition into adulthood. (e.g., Chafee, Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services’ Bridge to Independence program) Led by Misty Frazier, a member of the Santee Sioux Nation, NICWC hopes to reduce barriers to independent living grants, with the long-term goal of strengthening the relationship between Nebraska Tribes and state agencies. Through existing relationships with tribal leaders in child welfare across the country, NICWC hopes to share its program and lessons learned beyond Nebraska.
Uptrust plans to create a new version of its mobile app to streamline court appointments and other administrative needs for families involved in the child welfare system. The app will provide a calendar of obligations, text messages to remind families of upcoming appointments, an opportunity to connect directly with their lawyers, and access to vital social services. Its goal is to reduce administrative burdens on parents in the child welfare system, so they can focus on what’s most important for themselves and their families. The organization scaled a similar technology solution in the criminal justice system, which has been used by over 250,000 public defender clients across 100+ counties, and has demonstrated a 50% reduction in missed hearings. The team is adding this child welfare feature in part based on their own varied experiences with the foster care system, both as parents and attorneys.
The awardees of the 2025 Springboard Prize for Child Welfare are:
Tasselturn’s Homeplace College Network helps foster youth attending high school find pathways to college through educational coaching and college advising, opportunities to meet with college recruiters, and identifying the right college for each individual. The Network partners with colleges and universities to reserve spots specifically for foster youth, and guides young people through the application and financial aid processes unlocking millions of federal dollars dedicated to foster youth.
The Arizona Department of Child Safety, together with Mathematica, is working to build AI tools to help caseworkers in Arizona more quickly and efficiently learn complex family histories and make smarter decisions about what is best for youth in the child welfare system. By easing burdens for caseworkers, the department hopes to move children towards permanency more quickly and overall, improve outcomes for youth in the system. Its goal is to model and scale such tools for use by caseworkers in agencies across the country.
Foster Success works nationally to support young adults transitioning out of foster care with a range of programs aimed at financial empowerment, educational success, and workforce readiness. Through Credit Build, one of its financial empowerment programs, foster youth have opportunities for no-risk savings-secured loans and trauma-informed financial coaching to support them in establishing credit, laying the groundwork for long-term financial security.
