Grant Enables Journalism Nonprofit to Launch Child Welfare and Tech Beat

LOS ANGELES - Nov. 21, 2016 - PRLog -- Fostering Media Connections has received a $40,000 grant from the Walter S. Johnson Foundation to expand its coverage of efforts to integrate technology into the world of child abuse prevention and foster care.

The Walter S. Johnson Foundation assists transition-age foster youth and other vulnerable youth to become successful adults by promoting positive change to the systems and policies that serve them.

Fostering Media Connections produces journalism focused on emerging solutions in the child welfare field. Its original news content is published online in The Chronicle of Social Changeand distributed to other news outlets.

"Technology is an area that child welfare needs to focus on," said Yali Lincroft, program officer at the Walter S. Johnson Foundation. "And because Fostering Media Connections has a unique understanding of child welfare, it can move into the subset of technology and provide a deeper understanding of how it impacts everything we do."

In recent years, content in The Chronicle of Social Change and other Fostering Media Connections endeavors have given increased attention to new uses of technology in the child welfare field, including in-depth coverage of proposals to use big data or predictive analytics to gauge risks of child abuse or neglect. In other stories, Fostering Media Connections has informed people about pilot programs to use ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft to make it easier for parents to visit their children in foster care.

The Walter S. Johnson Foundation is a leading force in the Hack Foster Care coalition – a network of companies, agencies and charitable foundations working together to engage the technology sector to improve outcomes for children and families in the child welfare system. The coalition aims to improve access to technology by providing laptops and Internet access to foster youth, reform the foster youth technology infrastructure, and prepare foster youth for college and careers.

The Hack Foster Care Coalition formed during the first-ever White House Foster Youth Hackathon in May 2016 and is planning a follow-up HackFosterCare event  in Silicon Valley from Feb. 27 to 28, 2017. Similar HackFosterCare events are scheduled in New York City and Los Angeles.

Fostering Media Connections is a 501 c (3) non-profit that harnesses the power of journalism to advance child welfare reform by covering emerging solutions to the system's challenges. The Chronicle of Social Change is a national online news site that produces daily news about child welfare, juvenile justice and children's mental health issues.

To learn more, visit http://fosteringmediaconnections.org and http://chronicleofsocialchange.org.