Foster America Fiscal Leadership Circle Fellowship Cohort 3
January 29, 2027 – December 2027
How Do We Unlock, Align, and Sustain Funding for Families?
About Foster America
Since 2016, Foster America has worked alongside bold government leaders, community advocates, and those with lived expertise to reimagine and reshape the child welfare system. We work to strengthen the conditions and resource pathways that help every family thrive.
Resources that support children and families sit across multiple systems and funding streams, each with its own designated purposes and requirements, making coordinated investment in prevention initiatives dependent on systems aligning their resources and priorities.The Fiscal Leadership Circle (FLC) is a yearlong fellowship designed to help leaders make existing funding across child- and family-serving systems work more responsively for families. FLC combines fiscal knowledge, leadership development, expert guidance, peer learning, and applied project work so participants can identify opportunities, navigate complex funding environments, and develop strategies that move resources toward prevention and family well-being.
We have already seen what is possible. FLC’s first cohort brought together 14 fiscal leaders from 10 jurisdictions, leaders responsible for making decisions about millions of dollars in child welfare funding and how those resources are used to support children and families. Through applied fellowship projects, participants identified opportunities to strengthen federal claiming, expand prevention services, improve cross-agency financing, and sustain family support. Five projects alone identified the potential to unlock approximately $125 million in additional or better-aligned resources for prevention and family well-being.
In 2027, FLC Cohort 3 will bring together a cohort of fellows from across the country, including a mix of individual fellows and site teams. Participants may come from public agencies and private sector organizations, providers, or other organizations working with children and families.
Fellowship Experience
Over the course of the year, FLC fellows will participate in a learning experience that combines fiscal knowledge, leadership development, applied project work, expert support, and learning with peers from across the country.
Fellows will:
Participate in monthly fellowship learning sessions
Participate in one in-person convening
Strengthen their understanding of the child- and family-serving funding landscape, including federal, state, local, and philanthropic resources.
Build technical knowledge related to funding streams and fiscal strategies such as Family First, TANF, Medicaid, SSBG, Title IV-B, administrative claiming, cost allocation, braided funding, and cross-agency financing.
Gain premium member access to Child Welfare Wonk’s member sessions
Explore the historical assumptions, mental models, policies, and system conditions that influence how resources are allocated.
Examine how to measure what matters for families, connecting fiscal decisions to family experience and outcomes rather than relying only on compliance and utilization measures.
Strengthen skills in relational practice, adaptive leadership, strategic storytelling, collaboration, and sustaining change across organizational and system boundaries.
Learn with and from national fiscal experts, practitioners, FLC alumni, and peers working through similar challenges.
Apply fellowship learning directly to a fiscal project or challenge they want to develop, advance, or sustain.
Receive project development and implementation support to move ideas and strategies toward action and sustained practice.
Share learning, progress, and emerging solutions with the FLC community.
Projects may include, but are not limited to:
Maximize existing public funding across federal, state, and local sources, including Family First and allowable administrative claiming.
Braid, coordinate, and sequence funding streams…