North Carolina’s foster care system faces critical challenges, leaving children waiting years for permanent homes due to bureaucratic delays. Tech entrepreneur Ryan O’Donnell witnessed these failures firsthand and developed Your Case Plan, an innovative app aiming to streamline communication and accelerate placements, addressing key issues within the North Carolina foster care system. Could this secure platform be the key to fixing the broken system and providing faster, more effective support for children in foster care?
Ryan O’Donnell and his wife became foster parents in 2019 after hearing about the crisis during a presentation at their church.
O’Donnell said the child placed with them had a father who wanted to adopt him, but what should have been a short stay in foster care stretched on for years.
“You know, what we saw in our foster son’s case was that at so many steps, when you could have done what was best for him and his family, the system went in the opposite direction,” O’Donnell said.
Instead of being reunited within weeks, the boy spent seven years in foster care due to a revolving door of case workers and constant court delays.
“Those are a lot of Christmases [and] those are a lot of birthdays you don’t get back,” O’Donnell said.
In “Broken: Foster Care in North Carolina,” the WRAL documentary team highlighted similar stories of delays, missed opportunities and a lack of coordination in the state’s child welfare system. One of the major issues is North Carolina still doesn’t have a statewide, centralized IT system for child welfare cases.
State Rep. Sydney Batch, D-Wake, is a family law attorney and is featured in the documentary. She said the state’s current plan to roll out a system over the next three years is unacceptable.
“I could probably go and ask ChatGPT to go and build a program or to answer how we could fix the foster care system faster than it’s being built in the state of North Carolina,” Batch said.
O’Donnell, a tech entrepreneur by trade, created Your Case Plan, a secure app designed to connect everyone involved in a child’s case, not just those who work for the Department of Social Services.
“Think of us like MyChart for foster care,” O’Donnell explained. “It gives everyone a secure place to communicate, stay on the same page, and really work toward the child’s permanency plan.”
Your Case Plan allows multiple people to use the app, including lawyers, social workers and foster families.
“What we are able to do is to go one step further, and that’s to actually improve outcomes for the kids and families in our child welfare system,” O’Donnell said.
The app is already in use in several North Carolina counties, including Durham and Mecklenburg. Oklahoma is also using the app statewide.
WRAL News asked O’Donnell how his app would function along with North Carolina’s new online system when it launches.
“We don’t have a statewide centralized IT system yet, like some other states,” O’Donnell said. “And, we’re not going to replace that tool when it finally comes live.”
O’Donnell hopes North Carolina lawmakers and state officials will support his app’s expansion to all 100 counties.
“If you reduce the time children spend in care by just a few months, you could save the state tens of millions of dollars in unnecessary foster care costs,” he said.
