About Fostering Media Connections

Fostering Media Connections

Fostering Media Connections is a nonprofit news organization based in Los Angeles, California, that uses journalism to lead public conversation about children, youth and families in the United States. It is best known as the publisher of The Imprint, a daily online news site devoted to child welfare, youth justice, foster care, youth homelessness and the public systems that shape family life. Alongside that daily reporting, the organization publishes a magazine for foster and adoptive families, runs a journalism training program for young people with lived experience in those systems, and supports podcasts and other audio work in the same field. Its premise is simple and demanding: issues that are often covered only when a crisis erupts deserve sustained, specialist reporting, and the young people and families inside those systems deserve to be heard as sources and as storytellers, not only as subjects.

That combination of a daily newsroom, a practical magazine and a youth voice program makes Fostering Media Connections different from a conventional online newspaper. The Imprint reports nationally, with stories originating well beyond Southern California, while the organization itself remains anchored in Los Angeles. Its readers include foster parents and kinship caregivers, social workers, attorneys, judges, policymakers, advocates and journalists at other outlets who are encouraged to republish and build on its work. By treating child welfare and youth justice as a full-time beat rather than an occasional assignment, Fostering Media Connections has built a record that larger, general-interest newsrooms have repeatedly cited and co-published.

Origins and Founding

Fostering Media Connections was founded in 2010. Its founder, Daniel Heimpel, built the organization around the idea that media coverage could advance reform in child welfare and juvenile justice by reporting in depth on emerging responses to the problems in those systems, rather than only documenting failures after the fact. In its early formulation, the organization set out to report and produce in-depth stories, publish them through its own outlet, and train student journalists, policymakers and others in how stories about vulnerable children and families can be told responsibly and effectively.

The flagship publication did not begin under its current name. It began as The Chronicle of Social Change, an online news site covering child welfare and juvenile justice nationally. The Chronicle was founded in 2013, and by the time of its later rebranding it had published thousands of articles — more than 4,500, by the organization's count at the time of the relaunch — on children, youth and families caught up in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. That archive matters because it shows the scale the small nonprofit had already reached before it adopted a name meant to travel further in a crowded national news market.

The Move to Los Angeles

Los Angeles is not incidental to the organization's identity. Fostering Media Connections moved its headquarters and its publication to Los Angeles, taking offices near Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles. The move placed the newsroom inside Los Angeles County, one of the largest child welfare jurisdictions in the country, where decisions about foster care, dependency courts and youth justice affect very large numbers of children and families. Supporters of the move argued at the time that Los Angeles County offered a distinctive opportunity for change and that an active press presence was part of how such change could be driven forward.

The Los Angeles base also shaped the organization's working relationships. Heimpel taught a course at the University of Southern California's Sol Price School of Public Policy on using media for policy change, in which graduate students learned how solutions-oriented journalism can be used to move public debate. That teaching role reflects a broader feature of the organization: it has never presented itself only as a publisher. It also presents itself as a resource for the field, inviting news directors, editors and reporters elsewhere to draw on its knowledge of child welfare, child trauma and juvenile justice when they take on those subjects.

The Imprint and the 2020 Rebranding

On August 3, 2020, Fostering Media Connections launched The Imprint as a rebranded version of The Chronicle of Social Change. The new name came with the same stated commitment: an independent, nonpartisan news publication devoted to rigorous, in-depth journalism about families and the public systems that affect their lives. The relaunch was presented as a step in the publication's growth, not a change of mission, and the older Chronicle name continued to appear in its archive and subject coverage.

Leading the editorial effort at the relaunch was Karen de Sá, an award-winning investigative reporter. De Sá had worked for newspapers in California since 1994, including eighteen years at the San Jose Mercury News and three years at the San Francisco Chronicle. Her reporting had exposed inhumane conditions in juvenile halls, group homes and youth prisons, and had detailed systemic injustice in dependency courts. Hiring a reporter with that background signaled the kind of work The Imprint intended to prioritize: documented, on-the-record investigation of institutions that hold power over children who have very little power of their own.

What The Imprint Covers

The Imprint covers the systems that intervene in family life. Its recurring subjects include foster care and the shortage or availability of foster homes, adoption, kinship care, child protective services, juvenile justice and youth incarceration, youth homelessness, and the transition young people make when they age out of foster care into adulthood. It follows legislation, litigation, agency policy and budget decisions, and it reports on data — for example, compiling and analyzing national figures on the number of homes available for children and youth in foster care, which its reporting found had declined significantly since 2019.

The coverage is deliberately national in scope, while often organized around particular places where a policy experiment or a failure is especially revealing. The Imprint has added place-based reporting beats over time, including a local child welfare reporting beat in Georgia launched in December 2024 with foundation support, and a national beat covering Indigenous children and families launched in September 2022. It has also expanded its New York youth justice coverage with dedicated reporting support. Those beats show a pattern: rather than scattering attention evenly, the newsroom invests in sustained coverage of communities and topics that general outlets tend to visit only briefly.

Investigative Work and Its Impact

The clearest example of the organization's impact is its reporting on California's use of for-profit, out-of-state facilities to house young people in its care. That investigation, reported with colleagues including Sara Tiano and published in both The Imprint and the San Francisco Chronicle, began with an unusual tip and developed into documented reporting about a practice few readers knew existed. When the reporting team put its questions to California's child welfare department, the department responded that it had begun to freeze the policy of allowing counties to use out-of-state facilities.

The consequences continued after publication. California brought home the 133 young people who had been placed in out-of-state facilities within four months of the story's publication. The company involved, Sequel, was forced to close multiple facilities that had depended on California's placements. State legislators then acted: in July, the legislature banned the use of out-of-state facilities altogether and allocated 140 million dollars to improve California's own capacity to care for young people with complex mental health needs, who had historically been sent out of state for treatment. Few nonprofit newsrooms of this size can point to a single investigation with that sequence of administrative, corporate and legislative results, and the episode is central to how Fostering Media Connections explains the value of its model.

Fostering Families Today and Adoption Today

The organization's second major publishing arm is its magazine work for the families who care for children in the system. Fostering Families Today is a bimonthly print and online magazine serving resource families and kinship caregivers, intended to give them current information about trauma-informed care and the practical realities of fostering. It is sent to the homes of foster and adoptive parents around the country and provides guidance for their parenting journey.

Fostering Media Connections later acquired both Fostering Families Today and Adoption Today, magazines founded by Richard Fischer in 1998. Fischer died on Thanksgiving Day after a long battle with cancer, having made clear that he wanted the publications to continue supporting families nationwide; Fostering Media Connections worked with him to map out a future for them before taking them on. The organization retained Kim Phagan-Hansel, who had edited and designed both magazines for fifteen years, preserving continuity for readers. Fostering Families Today had previously won the United States Department of Health and Human Services Adoption Excellence Award in 2014 and the National Association of Social Workers media award in 2012, recognition that underlines the service role the magazine plays alongside the newsroom's watchdog work.

Youth Voices Rising and Training Young Storytellers

The third pillar of the organization is its youth journalism training, known in its current form as Youth Voices Rising. The program trains young people who have lived experience in foster care, the juvenile justice system or homelessness in the basics of reporting and in how to write opinion pieces, so that people who know those systems from the inside can help hold them to account. Earlier descriptions of the program, under the Youth Voice name, describe the same work: giving youth involved with the foster care and juvenile justice systems training in journalism and a route into print and audio.

The program's premise is that lived experience is a reporting asset, not a disqualification. Participants have produced first-person work through periods that included the pandemic and the national reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd, bringing perspectives from across the country into the organization's output. Youth Voices Rising also runs events and webinars, including sessions on subjects such as helping foster youth reach self-sufficiency as young adults and on reunification and kinship care. For the organization, this is not an outreach extra; it is one of the three primary programs through which it carries out its mission, alongside The Imprint and the magazine.

Podcasts and SafeCamp Audio

Audio has become a substantial part of the organization's publishing. Fostering Media Connections launched SafeCamp Audio as a platform for podcasts about foster care, youth justice, kinship and related subjects, describing it when it launched in June 2023 as a new platform for podcasts in the field, and separately as a nonprofit audio hub. SafeCamp programming includes The Imprint Weekly Podcast, which features interviews with policymakers, researchers, advocates and agency leaders, as well as headline discussions of developments in child welfare and youth justice, and programs made by people with lived experience in the systems under discussion.

The audio work serves a different function from the daily news site. A news article can document what an agency did; a long interview can let a foster parent, a former foster youth or a system leader explain, in their own voice, how a policy feels in practice. By elevating podcasts from across the field rather than only producing its own, SafeCamp also positions Fostering Media Connections as a convener for a whole community of practice, in the same way its newsroom serves as a resource for other journalists.

Recognition, Reach and Leadership Change

Fostering Media Connections says its stories have been cited by national outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, Fox News and NPR, and that it has co-produced or co-published impactful stories with partners including CNN, The Washington Monthly and the San Francisco Chronicle. It has also been recognized by organizations including the National Association of Social Workers for its work at the intersection of social work, activism and journalism. In May 2026, The Imprint joined the Global Indigenous Journalism Network at the Associated Press, contributing coverage of Indigenous children and families to the network's members — a development consistent with the dedicated Indigenous children and families beat it had launched several years earlier.

The organization has also passed through a leadership transition. Founder Daniel Heimpel eventually stepped back from leading the organization he created, writing that Fostering Media Connections was growing and that its next phase required different leadership. He pointed to John Kelly, who had spent fifteen years covering the same issues first at Youth Today and then as a senior editor at The Chronicle of Social Change and The Imprint, and to Christie, the organization's long-serving vice president responsible for operations, as the pair to lead that phase. Kelly is identified in organizational material as a co-executive director of Fostering Media Connections. Heimpel himself moved on to a new role at Good River Partners, while remaining publicly associated with the organization he founded.

How the Organization Is Supported

Fostering Media Connections is a nonprofit, and its publishing model does not depend on the advertising and subscription economics of a commercial newspaper. Its own descriptions list support from philanthropic funders, advertisers and sponsors, and subscribers to its business and policy coverage, along with individual donors. Like many nonprofit newsrooms, it takes part in NewsMatch, the year-end campaign in which donations are matched, and it actively solicits donations through The Imprint's site. One directory listing put its revenue at just under one million dollars in the year reported, which places it in the category of small, specialist nonprofits rather than large national news organizations — a useful context for the national reach described above.

That funding structure is part of the editorial proposition. Because The Imprint encourages other outlets to share and republish its content, its influence is not measured only by its own audience. A story can be produced in Los Angeles, published on a specialist site, co-published with a metropolitan newspaper, cited by national media and read by the officials who run the systems it covers. For a directory of online news outlets, Fostering Media Connections is best understood that way: not as a Los Angeles local paper, but as a Los Angeles-based national newsroom built around a single, underserved subject — how America treats its most vulnerable children, youth and families — and around the conviction that the people living inside those systems should help tell the story.