How Box supports child welfare organizations

At Box, we are committed to empowering nonprofits to fulfill their missions with the power of technology. To maximize our impact, we focus on three areas where our partners are powering significant positive change, and we are working hard with them to ‘10x’ that impact. One of those areas is child welfare, where we’ve seen the use of Box enable critical work and outcomes.

As National Foster Care Month comes to a close, we’ve been reflecting on the amazing work of our partners that tirelessly advocate for foster youth and child welfare. Over the last couple years, we’ve had the honor of engaging with and learning from inspiring organizations, including National Association of Counsel for Children, Foster Nation, and CASA of New York State.Below are some examples of how we’ve been fortunate enough to play a small part of enablement in their digital transformation journeys.

Technology for Good

We offer donated & discounted Box technology to eligible nonprofits and work to ensure our partners understand how Box can help them accelerate processes, collaborate seamlessly, and protect their most valuable information, including critical PII.

Angels Foster Family Network is utilizing Box to streamline onerous processes. With Box, Angels Foster enables their social workers to spend over 30% more time engaging with foster youth and their families, rather than filling out paperwork during meetings.

To access emergency aid authorized by the federal government last year, Think of Us utilized Box to share former foster youth data with the state’s child welfare departments in 44 states across the United States. This resulted in delivery of hundreds of millions in critical federal dollars. The use of Box ensured protection of this confidential data and streamlined the process to deliver the approved funding to former foster youth.

Grant Making

We launched our inaugural Box Impact Fund last year, an initiative administered through our Donor Advised Fund with the Tides Foundation, that included funding two $25k grants focused on digital transformation in child welfare. Here is some background on the child welfare grantees, and how they intend to utilize the funds:

• African Community Center for Social Sustainability (ACCESS): Located in Uganda, ACCESS is committed to working with vulnerable people in resource-limited settings through provision of medical care, education and economic empowerment to create a long-lasting change that is owned by the entire community
  • "This grant will enable ACCESS to set up an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data system that will be used to monitor the implementation of child welfare interventions in the community, integrate them and use the data to continuously address ongoing challenges. The grant will support the organization to improve health, education and livelihoods of orphans and vulnerable children in rural areas." -- Dr. Robert Kalyesubula, President ACCESS Uganda
• Children's Home Society of Minnesota: With a mission to help children thrive, and to build, strengthen and sustain individual, family and community life, Children's Home Society of Minnesota is committed to serving those in need through ethical, transparent and inclusive services throughout the lifelong foster care/adoption journey
  • “This grant from Box Impact Fund will allow us to digitize thousands of adoption records. This will not only help our organization financially, but most importantly will allow adoptees, birth families and adoptive families quicker access to vital information.” – Heidi Wiste, President of Children’s Home Society of Minnesota

With so many inspiring organizations applying for our Box Impact Fund (hundreds of organizations!), we were thrilled to be able to fund micro-grants for 8 additional child welfare organizations, totaling $75K. These grants will assist with smaller but essential projects as they work on their critical missions with foster youth and children. The grantees include:

• California Youth Connection
• CASA of New York State
• Foster Nation
• Heart of Missouri CASA
• National Association of Counsel for Children
• She Ready Foundation
• SOS Children's Villages in Zimbabwe
• The Possibility Project

Volunteering and Pro-bono

Our Boxers love volunteering, supporting and working with nonprofit organizations, in fact over 75% of our Boxers are engaged in some form of social impact. Here are a couple ways we’ve been able to work with child welfare organizations:

• Global Impact Day: Our annual Global Impact Day is a time when Boxers join together to focus on our communities. This past year, our Boxers teamed up on a range of activities from offering career advice to students, creating care packages for foster youth, and delivering technology-led solutions for Cambodian Children’s Fund’s nonprofit design challenge.
• Box Pro-bono consulting: Box Consulting for Good, which started in 2019, provides pro-bono consulting services to select nonprofit organizations looking to maximize their usage and adoption of Box to power their missions. CASA of San Mateo County was keen to reduce time spent on administrative efforts with the ultimate goal of reducing the time to match CASAs with youth. By having Box as a centralized place for their content, CASA will be able to eliminate numerous paper-based processes, reduce inefficiencies as well as the administrative overhead involved.

Creating positive change in the world has always been a top priority at Box. Our mission is to power how the world works together, and that extends to everything we do at Box.org. We want to help your team focus on what matters most: your mission. Thank you for the critical work you do day in and out. If you are an organization working in child welfare, we would welcome a conversation to see if we can support your journey in any way.