Taylor Sartor is looking to make foster care easier.
Sartor was a law student and volunteering as a guardian ad litem volunteer to two children in the foster care system in 2017 and quickly realized there was no one-stop shop for children — or adults — to know foster children's rights.
"When I looked into the law and learned about it, I became frustrated with how all over the place it was," Sartor said. "Were they entitled to an allowance? Did they have a right to see their siblings? It was all over the place; it was like, 'How does anyone get this info?'"
The closest thing was a 66-page binder children were expected to lug around in order to know their rights within the system.
"The kids liked the information, adults liked the information, but kids are kids — they lose papers," Sartor said. "Especially kids in the foster care system, they lose things even more because when they go to different [home] placements, they lose everything."
She then began searching for an easily accessible "know your rights" online guide but soon found nothing that dove into the complicated foster care system in an easy-to-understand way.
"I realized nothing explained the rights they had, and there was nothing in the country where you could look up your rights," she said. "I wanted to strike the balance between the language being too simplified where it wasn't helpful, and too complicated where you get overwhelmed. We took a long time on getting the language right."
Sartor launched the FosterPower app in early May, which serves as a landing guide for everything from court proceedings to access to medical care and mental health services.
It wasn’t an easy leap for Sartor, who never envisioned getting involved in the technology startup space. She currently works as an attorney at L David Shear Children’s Law Center of Bay Area Legal Services.
“When we started, it was, ‘What’s coding?’, ‘This is a widget,’” she said, adding the app was designed completely off feedback from youth in the foster care system. “I had to work very closely with all the vendors to make sure this specific vision of what I was going for, based on what the kids were telling me, was executed.”
The app is free and funded by a two-year grant from Legal Services Corp. It also received funding from the Community Foundation of Tampa Bay. It covers Florida foster care systems for the time being, with the hope to expand across the nation eventually. Sartor also hopes to add human trafficking prevention widgets to the app.
“I’m not looking to make another app, but we want to build what we’ve created with FosterPower,” she said. “There’s more we can do with taking it to the next level; there can be more interactive things we can do.”
