Welcome to Who Cares: A National Count of Foster Homes and Families

Thank you for visiting "Who Cares," a project of The Imprint. This is the nation’s first public resource on foster care capacity.

We started this project because too often, conversations about the use of foster care occur without acknowledgment of the fact that there is not an infinite supply of it. And while regularly released federal data exists around who is in foster care, and the amount of abuse and neglect that is reported and investigated, there was no consistent source of information about how many licensed foster homes each state has, their reliance on kinship caregivers to keep families together, and their reliance on congregate care options such as group homes and institutions.

Each year, The Imprint collects data directly from each state about their foster care capacity. We combine that with specially obtained federal reports to shed light on two critical questions: How many kids are in foster care today? And where are they living? Please see our methodology for more details on the process for this project.

The Imprint will continue to update this site with the results drawn from our annual query to the states, and as new and more recent federal data becomes available.