Ohio Implements ‘Connect Our Kids’ Family Mapping Tool To Facilitate Kinship Placements

On December 2, 2021, the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) implemented a new technology platform called “Connect Our Kids” statewide. The platform aggregates publicly-available information about children in foster care for use by social workers in order to facilitate their kinship care placements with existing extended family members.

The Connect Our Kids search tool, People Search, returns publicly available information from over 300 Internet sites through the data provider, pipl.com. The search results replicates the work a social worker (or similar user) normally does manually to identify a child’s extended family network of potential . . .