Technology-Enhanced Adoption Recruitment and Matching Innovation Hubs (TE-ARM) - Children across the West wait months or years for an adoptive family while the systems meant to find them a home still rely on static, hard-to-search photo listings, paperwork-heavy licensing processes, and staff who must match children to families largely from memory. In California alone, more than 43,000 children were in foster care in 2023, and across the West's 13 states, tribal nations, and Pacific territories, over 15,000 children had adoption as a permanency goal. Children who wait longest for a match include older youth, sibling groups who must be placed together, and children with significant medical or behavioral needs. The University of California, Los Angeles, through its Agile Visual Analytics Lab (AVAL) at the Luskin School of Public Affairs, proposes to lead the Western Region's Technology-Enhanced Adoption Recruitment and Matching (TE-ARM) Innovation Hub. Partnering with the California Department of Social Services and the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services as its first two pilot agencies, with a planned pathway to add a tribal partner, the Hub will design, test, and share technology tools that help caseworkers, licensing staff, and matching committees do their jobs faster and with better information, without replacing their professional judgment. The Hub's work unfolds in three stages over five years. The first builds tools that show where a jurisdiction's pool of approved families falls short of its waiting children's needs, and that track families through the licensing process so agencies can see, and fix, where good candidates are lost. The second builds a decision-support tool that helps match children with the right family, helps caseworkers identify relatives and family friends who could adopt, and reduces the paperwork burden of documenting a match. The third publishes an open technical standard, and builds a working example, so two states, or a state and a tribal nation, can securely share information about waiting children and available families. Every tool keeps final decisions with caseworkers and families, and every jurisdiction keeps ownership and control of its own data; the Hub will not build any national database of children or families. By year five, the Hub aims to increase the number of prospective families identified for each waiting child by 50 percent, improve the rate at which matches lead to placement by 15 percent, and cut the typical time from becoming legally free for adoption to being matched by 20 percent, each measured against each pilot site's own starting point before the project begins. All tools, training materials, and lessons learned will be shared, in accessible and reusable formats, with child welfare agencies across the region and the nation at no cost. This is a five-year, $19,312,711 cooperative agreement application under the Administration for Children and Families' Technology-Enhanced Adoption Recruitment and Matching Innovation Hubs program (Funding Opportunity Number HHS-2026-ACF-ACYF-CO-0040), covering Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, and the Pacific Territories.
