Sixto Cancel has clearly beat the odds, having paved a successful path from a turbulent upbringing in foster care to becoming the founder of the well-known research and design nonprofit Think of Us, which combines technology and advocacy to lift the voices of foster youth into the national conversation.
His innovative approach to leveraging a technology platform geared toward capturing the lived experience of current and former foster youth has landed him on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for Social Entrepreneurs and made him an influential voice in the youth services field. After Think of Us released its latest paper on group homes, he rallied alongside Paris Hilton urging legislators to stop abuse in foster care institutions.
Cancel has shared his story of growing up in foster care publicly countless times, but it’s a harrowing story worth a quick re-telling for those who haven’t heard it.
Cancel was taken away from his mother at 11 months old and placed in the child welfare system because she was addicted to heroin. Seven foster placements later, at age 9, Cancel was adopted into an abusive household, where he was beaten, ridiculed and called racist profanities. He came home one day after school to an empty house. His adoptive parent had moved and left him behind.
To get back into foster care, however, Cancel had to plead his case to a judge and prove that his adoptive parent had been abusive. Once back in foster care, he stayed in the system until he aged out at 23 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Only after he aged out did he discover that he had several aunts and uncles who were adoptive or foster parents, but no one in the child welfare system had ever attempted to connect them.
Today, Cancel’s goal is not to burn down the foster system that wronged him — he says he’s not a child welfare abolitionist — but to redesign it into a healing and supportive environment.
The interview
You were young when you heard your calling. Was there a particular moment you knew you wanted to dedicate your life to changing the foster care system?
At 15, when I was coming back into care. I had to have this court hearing where a judge would decide my fate. It was very jarring for me because the judge treated me in such a bad way. That made me ask the question: What in the world? Why was it so hard and took so much effort for me to get back into foster care?
How have your thoughts on changing the system evolved?
In the beginning, it was about improving it. I had joined the NAACP before I was 15, and gotten used to what it means to do advocacy work. Then when I came back into foster care, I joined the youth board, which was all about making improvements to the system. Later, in college, when I was launching Think of Us and collecting stories of foster youth is when I realized that we really need a whole new system design.
Can you explain the nuances of improving the system versus redesigning it?
For me, when you’re just improving a system, you’re accepting that design, accepting the mandate, accepting the DNA is correct. But the DNA of our system needs to be re-tweaked.
The mandate of the system should be to help young people heal, develop and thrive.
That might mean there are services that help you thrive, even years after you have had interaction with the system. Right now we have a system that functions based on the risk and safety of the child, either with an intervention or removal. But the mandate doesn’t measure if the child is better off.
How does Think of Us attempt to redesign the system as you say?
We believe there are three leverage points that will help us re-architect the system: prevention, transition-age youth and kinship care. We think if we have a system that switches from being a stranger-foster family primary system to a kinship system we will have better outcomes by leaps and bounds. We think the system needs to wrap around youth as many supports and services that are needed to connect them to work, school, and a family-like network that will provide healing support. That’s a very different type of system than what it is today.
On your website, it says Think of Us focuses on system change through federal policy. What are the most pressing policies happening in Washington right now?
Right now, there is an opportunity with Chafee [John H. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program is the main funding source for services for older foster youth]. The White House has put forward a proposal, which Congress still has to accept, to increase its funding by $100 million to a total of $243 million.
There are a lot of bi-partisan talks on the Hill right now about increasing Chafee and how we can think differently about supporting older foster youth. Questions like, should we actually force all states to extend foster care? There’s a big question about what we should do with older youth right now. There are even draft bills that have come forward. There is a driving bill to help young people access cars.
If you had a magic wand, and you could do one fix on the child welfare system right now, what would it be?
I would go ahead and ensure that kin were able to take in their relatives without going through an exhaustive and intrusive process of getting licensed.
The details
Residence: Washington, D.C.
Age: 30
Hobbies: Creating data visualization boards and playing Civilization V on Xbox
Book on the nightstand: Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading by Martin Linsky and Ronald A. Heifetz
First Job: At 15, ironed designs onto t-shirts in a Work-to-Learn program for kids in foster care
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Brian Rinker is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and journalist. He covers public health, child welfare, digital health, startups and venture capital. His work has been published by Kaiser Health News, Health Affairs, The Atlantic, Men’s Health and San Francisco Business Times. Brian received master’s degrees in journalism and public health from UC Berkeley.
