We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Richard Villasana a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Richard, appreciate you joining us today. Can you recount a story of an unexpected problem you’ve faced along the way?

I’ve had many careers, but I am most focused on my career in foster care. Three decades ago, I started locating people, first for my international marketing company and then for individuals, families and ultimately for foster care agencies. My area of expertise is locating people living in Latin America. I began doing this in Mexico which is where I conducted the bulk of my marketing although I have dealt with every Spanish speaking country in Latin America except Cuba. I located several important officials who helped my company with sales in Mexico. Once word got out that I had a knack for finding people, a few business associates asked me to find relatives, such as a brother or aunt, with whom they had lost contact. I was very successful at doing this. Somehow the word got out even more, and foster care agencies and nonprofits started to contact me to help locate relatives for foster children under agency care. Again, I was very successful with about an 83% success rate. Some people may say, “That’s great.” It is, but that success rate is truly impressive considering that I and my team do this internationally, not just tapping into a database searching for people only living in the U.S.

People in the social works industry call what I do “family finding.” The concept is very simple. When a child enters foster care, agencies are required by state and federal law to search for the child’s relatives. Family finding is a three-step process: make a list of all adult relatives, get contact information and then notify all of those relatives. When done this way, family finding is one of the most powerful processes to get a child of out foster care and back with family. If the list is long enough and all relatives are contacted, the probability is high that at least one of those contacted relatives will offer to take in the child.

When a child enters foster care, an intake form is created to capture all of the important information about the child, their parents or guardian and their extended family members. Caseworkers are pretty competent when doing this work for a child when all of their relatives live in the U.S. Staff will gather birth certificates and other government documents. They will get full addresses, phone numbers and possibly email and social media information.

Unfortunately, this competency often drops dramatically when a child has relatives still living outside the U.S. especially when those family members live in Latin America. Latinos have two last names. They live in states or the equivalent for their country and in cities. If you wanted to find someone, you would probably ask for their name, address and phone number. Common sense, right? Not for many organizations. The most unexpected problem we have encountered over the years is receiving intake forms where no second last name was provided. No address or the name of a city was listed. The worst cases are those where we only get the name of the country such as the Dominican Republic or Honduras. That’s it. Most surprising is that this lack of information extends to cases I have worked on behalf of the U.S. federal government. For two years, I have worked more than 100 cases through my nonprofit, Forever Homes for Foster Kids, to locate parents who were illegally separated from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border between 2017 and 2021. This lack of information is so bad and so surprising that I wrote the bestselling book, Do No Harm: The U.S. Border Child Tragedy Continues, to share some of the worst instances where vitally important and basic information was missing about a parent.

We solve these cases that lack the most minimal information by working to fill in the missing pieces. Sometimes this means going through the notes and documents to find information that a caseworker saw but didn’t recognize as being important. This often includes finding a relative’s second last name. Other times, it means working with a foreign government agency to gather that information. Sometimes we succeed simply by being in the country and searching for a person. Our success comes from creating a profile for each country and having a process that I have created over the years. The work requires people who understand Spanish, are researchers and have a passion to reunite a child with their family.

Of course, solving any case is great especially when it has taken months or more than a year of consistent, focused effort because it means a child will now be with their family. On the other hand, it’s also truly amazing when we get a case where the information is truly terrible, and we solve it in less than 72 hours. I have solved some cases in less than 48 hours and a few in less than 24. The real impact is that instead of a child spending years in foster care, agencies, including the federal government, can turn to me to solve hundreds, thousands more cases so that those children can be with their families. Being the best in the U.S. at locating Latin American relatives for both foster and immigrant children is simply my using my skills to save kids and build stronger families and communities.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

When it comes to outreach, one of my biggest goals is for more people to know about and support our work. Numerous reports reveal that getting a child out of foster care and back with family benefits everyone. The kids are generally stronger emotionally and mentally. They socialize better with others. The child has a much greater chance of finishing high school and going to college and completing college. They will get and keep a job whereas only about 50% of foster kids have a job at age 24. It’s all about family connections and support, not necessarily that a child’s family will lavish them with money. Getting a child out of the system is cost effective. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on just one child especially if that child stays in the system until they age out. Studies show that as a society, each child who ages out of foster care will cost the system about $300,000 in social services and support during their lifetime. As I highlighted in my book, Do No Harm, the foster children who age out this year will cost society $7.2 billion, and next year another group of kids will have the same or higher cost.

My organization, Forever Homes for Foster Kids, has been reuniting children with families for three decades. Donations have allowed us to continue our work and solve cases when no one else has been able to do so. We are the last hope for some kids and organizations. We solve cold cases resulting in a life-changing impact for the child and their family. Instead of a child spending years in foster care, they can be back with family in just a few weeks.

Sometimes an adoption gets stalled for months or more than a year because a parent has to be found and notified. Our work has also resulted in these stalled cases moving forward and many kids being adopted because we found the parent.

Our field of expertise (brand) is exceptional family finding and reuniting children with family. We worked one case involving four siblings. The youngest two had been adopted by the foster family. Because of their age, the judge wanted family finding done for the two older siblings to locate the father who was believed to be living in Mexico. He was also of the Nahuatl tribe, meaning that he was possibly living apart from Mexican communities.

No one had done a deep search for this parent. The adoption had been pending for a year with the next court date set in 30 days. Everyone, including the caseworker, expected this case to be given a continuance at that time for another four months. We went to work and delivered our results in less than 30 days so the caseworker could present our work to the judge. Our report explained that we had found two potential relatives. The judge explained that while it was possible that we had found other family members, government officials had documented that the father had given three different names and two different birth dates. The judge concluded that while we followed the evidence, it was terribly tainted. Since we had done such a thorough search, to everyone’s surprise, the judge ruled to accept our work as meeting the court’s family finding requests. A Termination of Parental Rights would be issued immediately for the father. If the father did not respond after the required waiting period, the adoption could move forward and be completed. The attorney was in shock. The foster parents were in shock. My greatest enjoyment was reading the glowing testimonial from the caseworker. She was almost dumbfounded by this outcome after having the adoption stalled for a year and having us work the case for only 30 days and getting this ruling from the judge.

Fans and followers can support our work in many ways from doing a fundraiser on Facebook, to subscribing to our YouTube channel to donating or volunteering. We locate relatives who can give their granddaughter or nephew a toy, a hug every day, help with their homework and, most importantly, provide family love.

You can learn more at our website at www.foreverhomesforfosterkids.org. Read success stories at https://foreverhomesforfosterkids.org/success-stories.

Also learn more about foster and immigrant children and our work reuniting them with family in the bestselling book, Do No Harm, at: https://www.amazon.com/Do-No-Harm-Tragedy-Continues/dp/0981919952. A portion of the sales goes to reunite foster children with family.

As for myself, I’m the founder of Forever Homes for Foster Kids and a leading international authority on immigration issues and foster families. A proud Navy veteran, I have been featured on CNN International, Associated Press, ABC TV, WISH-TV, Costco Connections and The Washington Post. I’m a columnist with Foster Focus Magazine and an international speaker. I was honored as a California Hero. I have translated for the United Nations. For three decades, my nonprofit has worked with government agencies across the country to find families for immigrant and foster children to create a permanent home. I’m the bestselling author of the book, “Do No Harm” about the children separated at the Mexico-U.S. border from 2017 through 2021 and today’s foster care crisis.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We began building our social media presence starting with Facebook about 2011. We struggled, as many businesses do, to get that first 100 followers and then to get past 1,000. I met my mentor, Gia Heller, who had been very successful at building her presence on Facebook. I started working with her in 2015. One of her most important lessons was about consistency. Think about it. A local business says they are open from 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday. If you show up at 9:15am, and the store is closed, you might try again. If they closed at 4:30pm some days, then you are most likely going to look for another consistent option. The same applies to social media. If you post only once a week, even twice a week, that’s not enough. At training events, Facebook staff will tell you that three days is the absolute minimum to post per week. Those days should be the same week in and week out so your audience can count on seeing something new from you.

A lot of professionals dismiss Facebook as being for people over 40. There’s certainly some truth to this, but here’s what many people overlook. You can pay to get more reach and engagements, what you might call interactions. If you are starting out with social media, having the option to pay while you learn can positively impact your business. You can specify a city and demographic. You can pay to grow while you learn over time what works and what doesn’t.

Even the best social media experts, like Mari Smith, will tell anyone that it takes at least 90 days to see results. However, by paying for advertising, you can move forward more quickly. We had been posting regularly every week. One tip is that we would take very popular posts and repost them every three to four months. When I say repost, I’m not saying to simply pin a dated post to the top of your Facebook posts. I’m saying to grab the video or image and recreate the exact same post so it’s new. Also no one should ever post on Facebook without having an image or photo. That’s just wasted energy.

Using this strategy of reposting popular posts paid off in a huge way in November 2016. We had a meme of a little girl sitting in a corner with the wording telling about Phoenix Child Protective Services receiving several children. This was at least the third time we had posted this meme. Bam! It went viral immediately. Keep in mind that we changed nothing. The meme wasn’t changed. The text about the image was the same. We had about 1,600 followers at this point, and for some reason this post caught people’s attention. We were adding more than 500 followers a week. By the time this post slowed down, we had reached more than 308,000 people. We had more than 10,000 likes and thousands of comments and shares. We did pay to get more reach — a total of $150. If you are a businessperson or someone wanting to reach a lot of people in a certain demographic, paying $150 is a no-brainer. Break it down, and we paid roughly a cent per 3,000 people.

By May 2017, we had more than 6,100 followers. We now have more than 62,000 followers on Facebook. Consistent and persistent posting and learning what appeals to our followers has helped us to have one of the largest followings on Facebook for a nonprofit serving foster children.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The number of cases that our nonprofit, Forever Homes for Foster Kids, has handled annually has gone up and down. At one point, Texas Child Protective Services was sending us a case at least once a week. Texas CASA was also sending us several cases, and we were receiving cases from many other states. We had not, however, ever received dozens of cases for multiple countries until March 2021 when we started a contract to locate parents who had been separated from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border. An executive order had been signed by then-President Trump for the federal government to locate and reunite all of the families that had been separated during the execution of a program called zero tolerance. We knew we were going to be receiving dozens of cases.

Many business consultants asked me what actions we were going to take to scale up our services to meet this anticipated demand. I remember telling them that it was challenging to put a plan into place. We had worked dozens of cases during a month’s time so we knew we could expand to take on the case load. However, we were not told in advance to which countries the parents had been deported or how many per country. Essentially, we were going to receive dozens of cases sight unseen. This may sound like an ugly situation, and in some ways it was. The information we received was insufficient to start a family finding effort to locate a parent. Some of the information was incorrect. Names and cities were misspelled. Some information was simply wrong. This would be like thinking you are buying a 4-door sedan, and when you show up, you find out that the person is trying to sell you an SUV. They both will get you from Point A to Point B, but they are different and that could change what you decide to do.

What allowed us to take on all of these cases for multiple countries and with mediocre to pitiful information is that we had processes in place. I have professionally worked with every Spanish speaking country in Latin America except for Cuba. The nonprofit had processes in place for doing family finding from Mexico to Argentina. We have recorded our institutional knowledge from every case to constantly improve our process in general and specifically in each country. We may not have done family finding in a particular country for years, but with our process, we were able to hit the ground running in days.

After we received the cases and started working, we revisited this idea of scaling up with a few of our consultants. They admitted that sometimes you simply have to dive in and get to work. Over the last two years, we have made incredible changes to our process so much so that we recently closed one case in less than 48 hours. The underlying reason we were successful with those dozens of federal cases is that we had procedures in place beforehand. We talked with consultants to be as prepared as possible for this influx of cases. We then documented everything we received from team members and updated our processes so that we are now the leading nonprofit in North America that specializes in locating relatives in Latin America for both foster and immigrant children. Being the best simply means that more children can be with family sooner and that fewer kids will age out of foster care and be on the streets alone and at risk.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.foreverhomesforfosterkids.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/foreverhomesforfosterkidsca
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/familyfindingmx
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardvillasana
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/familyfindingmx
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@foreverhomesforfosterkids2388
• Other: https://foreverhomesforfosterkids.org/do-no-harm-the-book