What We’ve Learned from 30+ Conversations with Foster Care Champions
(Re)Introducing the INNOVATE! Podcast
At Treehouse, we’re on a mission to support children experiencing foster care by building intentional, intergenerational communities. But that mission doesn’t stop at our own front doors. We’re also working to shift how the country thinks about foster care, and we believe that those with lived experience should take the lead.
Our INNOVATE! Podcast is where we let those foster care champions speak for themselves. Host Angela Tucker — a transracial adoptee, foster care alumna, and nationally recognized speaker on adoption and identity — interviews leaders with lived experience in foster care who now shape the system as researchers, policymakers, founders, and advocates.
As the podcast continues its fourth season, we’re looking back at the ground we’ve covered and previewing where it’s headed next.
“One thing has surprised me as the host of INNOVATE!: I expected to hear a wide range of ideas about how to improve foster care. Instead, I keep hearing remarkable consistency. Whether I’m talking with a researcher, nonprofit founder, policymaker, or someone who spent years in foster care, the same themes emerge again and again. These conversations haven’t just deepened my understanding of child welfare—they’ve challenged some of my own assumptions. They’ve made me ask a bigger question: What if we’ve been thinking about foster care all wrong?”
-Angela Tucker
5 Lessons We Couldn’t Ignore
Three plus seasons and dozens of conversations in, a few throughlines keep surfacing. Together, these themes begin to reimagine the foster care system in the U.S.
- We Keep Treating Lived Experience Like a Story Instead of Expertise
For too long, “expertise” in child welfare has meant a degree, a title, a seat earned through the usual institutional channels. INNOVATE! guests push hard on that definition. They argue that living through the system produces a kind of knowledge and familiarity that no textbook or credential can replicate — and that experience belongs in the room where decisions are made.
The Champions on our podcast maintain that their stories are evidence for broad decision-making. In S2E9: “Lived Experiences in Foster Care IS Data,” Demetrius Napolitano and Maddy Day make the case that the experiences of people who lived through foster care should carry the same weight as traditional research.
Pushing the conversation forward, in S2E4: “I Was The First One With Lived Experience to Sit On The Board,” Julie Segovia and Janay Eustace describe their personal journeys moving from being served by child welfare institutions to leading them.
- A Bed Isn’t the Same Thing as Belonging
Today’s foster care system is often forced to prioritize one question: where does this child sleep tonight? INNOVATE! guests point out that this is the wrong question, or at least an incomplete one. A roof over a child’s head doesn’t necessarily offer belonging. Children need people who choose them, permanently, without a case number attached.
That reframe gets a full structural blueprint in S3E7: “Soul Family — Young People Choose Their Circle of Caring Adults,” where Patty Chin describes her SOUL Family model, an alternative to case-managed housing built entirely around chosen, permanent relationships. In S04E01: “Belonging: It’s Transformational Value,” former NFL player Gaelin Elmore makes the same case from a different angle, arguing that belonging — not placement stability — is the real measure of whether a young person is going to be okay.
- We Built a System That Responds to Trauma Instead of Preventing It
In S3E6: “How Mandatory Reporters Could Become Mandated Supporters,” Jasmine Snell proposes something that sounds almost radical on its face: what if the adults required to report families to child welfare were also equipped and expected to support them? It’s a small structural change with a big implication.
That implication runs through several other conversations on the podcast — the idea that much of child welfare is built around surveillance, monitoring the home, documenting risk, and verifying compliance. Instead, what families and young people actually need is help healing. Keri Hope Richmond makes that case directly in S3E8: “Healed People Heal People,” describing how she helps people with lived experience move through pain while finding purpose and hope on the other side of it.
- Independence Isn’t Synonymous with Healing
The standard measure of success inevitably becomes a list of milestones: diplomas, jobs, independence by a certain age. INNOVATE! guests consistently push back on that scorecard, arguing that a young person can hit every such milestone and still feel like the system failed them — because nobody asked whether they felt loved along the way.
Jennifer Rodriguez and Shalita O’Neale name that gap directly in S2E3: “Let’s Reframe Who We Call a ‘Success Story,” arguing that success should be measured by whether young people feel valued rather than by degrees earned or careers landed. Phoenix Santiago and Charles Lerner take that idea to its logical endpoint in S2E2: “You Cannot Get Kicked Out of Our Program,” making the case for sustained, unconditional support instead of young people “graduating” out of services at a set age.
- Stories Don’t Just Change Hearts. They Change Policy.
Policy briefs and data reports rarely change how the public feels about foster care. Personal stories do. This theme is close to the show’s own DNA: INNOVATE! guests treat narrative not as an add-on to advocacy, but as one of the few tools capable of actually shifting public perception, and by extension, policy itself.
The show turns that lens on itself in the meta-episode S2E7: “Behind The Scenes of INNOVATE!,” where Angela Tucker and audio editor Nicholas Ramsey talk about storytelling as a deliberate strategy for changing the system. Later, in S2E10: “What If We Marketed Foster Care Like a Product?,” David Ambroz and Brondalyn Coleman push the idea further, asking what foster care advocacy could learn from movements that successfully rebranded public perception around a cause.
Season 4, So Far: New Voices, Same Mission
This season is already delivering some of the show’s most resonant conversations yet.
S04E04: Building Belonging Beyond Campus
What does it take to help students with foster care experience not just enroll in college, but stay and thrive once they’re there? Greta Munns, Fostering Success Program Liaison at the University of Wisconsin–Stout, talks about building a culture of belonging on campus.
She also discusses her appointment to Wisconsin’s Future of the Family Commission, and why real systems change starts with listening to the people most affected by the system.
S04E03: From Anger to Advocacy: Alexandria’s Journey Through 55 Foster Homes
Alexandria Ware, founder of Culture Creations Incorporated, moved through more than 50 foster placements before channeling that experience into advocacy and systems-change work. She speaks candidly about the role cultural connection and healing played in her own journey, and why people with lived experience need to be in the room when decisions about foster youth are made.
She also credits the mentors, judges, and supportive adults who helped her move from survival toward purpose.
S04E01: Belonging: It’s Transformational Value
Gaelin Elmore, a former NFL player turned child welfare advocate, explores belonging as a fundamental human need rather than a nice-to-have. He talks about the adults who “claimed” him growing up and helped counteract the trauma of his own foster care experience.
Gaelin also connects belonging to neuroscience and long-term outcomes for youth.
Stay Tuned for More
There’s a lot more coming this season: more Champions, more hard-won insight, more storytelling, more reasons to rethink what foster care should look and feel like.
You can listen to INNOVATE! on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout, and wherever else you get your podcasts.
Subscribe, share an episode with someone who needs to hear it, and stay connected with Treehouse as this season continues to unfold.