Geoff Bennett: Twenty-two thousand young people at night age out of foster care each year without family structures in place to support them.

It’s an issue that Sixto Cancel is working to address. He’s the founder and CEO of Think of Us. That’s a nonprofit organization that aims to change child welfare systems across the country. He’s also experienced foster care himself.

Tonight, he shares his Brief But Spectacular take on what’s known as kinship care.

Sixto Cancel, Founder & CEO, Think of Us: I think the hardest secret that a lot of people who’ve experienced foster care carry is that we all wish that we had family, and that we could be raised by people who truly are in our corner and who love us.

But, for so many of us, that’s just not our story.

I was 11 months old when social workers placed me into foster care because of my mother’s drug addiction and poverty issues. I was adopted at 9. And that adoptive family was supposed to be my forever family. But, unfortunately, it was riddled with racism and extreme abuse.

The things that I had to do to prove what I was going through really fired a passion to me to say the system has to function differently. I shouldn’t have had to literally tape a recorder to my chest to actually tell the world what was happening to me and to be believed.

And so, when I turned 15, I joined the youth advisory board at the foster care agency. And that’s when I started to be able to give recommendations, to be able to work with the state legislators to understand how is it that you actually fix a broken system.

I started Think of Us and 2017 because I knew that the foster care system was broken. And so many of us who have experienced it want to transform it. The foster care system has about 400,000 young people in it at any time.

Where foster care really failed me was the fact that I could have lived with people who could have loved me. Three years ago, I realized that I have four uncles and aunts who were foster adoptive parents who had been fostering longer than I had been alive.

And this whole entire time, I have actually could have been raised with family if we would have had prioritized family members. When I think about the experiences that I had, I wish I was saying that they were unique, but they’re not. And I believe we can have different solutions to those things.

Kinship care is like a version of foster care. But instead of it being an unrelated person that you don’t know, it’s an aunt, uncle, cousin, a sibling who’s acting in that space of providing you care. We now know that when children are placed with a relative, that they graduate high school more on time, that they have less moves, that there’s less trauma, and that young people have their family members to be able to navigate life.

And without the human beings who are in our life to be there to guide us, how much opportunity do we really? Recent laws and legislation allows for us to do things differently. Now child welfare is able to actually provide services without having to separate a family. How is it that you get a family the housing support, the mental health support, the things that will keep them together, instead of taking that child and having to place them in foster care?

And that’s a very new function for the child welfare system. And so, if we need to separate family, like, let’s make sure we have exhausted every other option before we do that and, if we do have to separate family, that we place them with a relative.

This has the potential to really make our foster care system a family-first type system.

My name is Sixto Cancel, and this was my Brief But Spectacular take on prioritizing kinship care.

Geoff Bennett: And you can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.