Hack Your Bureaucracy

The group learned that Illinois passed an executive order issuing a moratorium on aging out, allowing older youth to stay in care until the pandemic ended. The coalition also found other states that had taken similar, but slightly different, policy actions to achieve the same goal, like issuing internal policy amendments and passing new laws. Sixto and his team published a playbook that compiled the various, tested pathways to stopping youth from aging out, and they shared the specific policy language that Illinois and other states had successfully used. Other states literally copied and pasted these materials, enacting their own moratoriums within days. By making it as easy as possible for the agencies to do the right thing, Sixto kept tens of thousands of vulnerable youth from being kicked out of foster care during a pandemic.