MEET THE FOUNDER
Lily Colby, Esq.
Founder, CEO, National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections
Lily's Story
A founder who has lived what she advocates for
Lily Colby knows what it means to grow up in foster care — and what it costs when siblings are separated.
As a teenager, Lily was part of a sibling set of four. She and her three brothers spent most of their time in care placed across two, three, and four separate homes. That experience — of being connected to her brothers by blood but separated by a system — became the foundation for everything she would build.
In college, Lily chose to give back directly. She volunteered through AmeriCorps and became a kinship caregiver for her younger brother. That decision said everything about who she is: someone who doesn't just advocate from a distance, but shows up.
HER CREDENTIALS
From fellowship to federal advocacy
Lily graduated from Yale College with a degree in Economics and earned her law degree from Berkeley Law. After law school, she received an Equal Justice Works Fellowship — placed at the Youth Law Center and the National Center for Youth Law — where she worked on caregiver engagement and closing the educational gap for foster youth.
Since her fellowship, Lily has worked at the state and federal level on advocacy spanning foster care, homelessness, and disability rights. Her career has been defined by a consistent belief: that lived experience is not a footnote to legal and policy expertise — it is the expertise.
WHY SHE FOUNDED THIS
Building what didn't exist
In 2025, Lily founded the National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections to fill a gap she had lived firsthand. There was no national infrastructure dedicated specifically to sibling connection in foster care — no shared resources, no coordinated advocacy, no peer community for the adults who had survived that separation and carried it into their lives.
She built one.
The National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections exists because Lily understood that policy without community doesn't hold, and community without policy doesn't last. This organization is the place where both live together.