2025 IMPACT REPORT
We started with a question siblings in foster care have been asking for decades: why doesn't anyone fight for us to stay together?
The National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections was founded in 2025 to answer that question — with policy, with community, and with the voices of people who lived it.
The National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections is a first-of-its-kind national organization dedicated to closing the gap between sibling protection laws and real-world practice. We convene cross-sector stakeholders, produce legal research and advocacy tools, train professionals, and center lived experience at every level of our work.
Our founder, Lily Colby, Esq., spent her teenage years in foster care — placed separately from her three brothers across multiple homes. That experience didn't just shape her. It became her life's work. After Yale, Berkeley Law, and years of state and federal advocacy, she built the organization she wished had existed when she was a child.
Behind her is a team of advocates, attorneys, and lived experience leaders who believe the same thing. Together, in our first year alone, we trained 500+ professionals, launched a 50-state legal research initiative, created the nation's first Sibling Connections Healing Circles, and raised $340,000 to fund it all — because this work cannot wait.
Why is there a need for a National Non-Profit?
About 200,000 foster youth are separated from one or more siblings while they are in foster care. Although federal and state laws exist to protect foster sibling connections, there isn't full implementation on the ground. Here at the National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections we're committed to sharing best practices across the country and working towards changes in policy and practice.
What are foster youth sibling rights?
What are we doing about it?
Over the last year we have recruited over 300 volunteers, dozens with lived experience and dozens of lawyers who have provided pro bono assistance.
We are researching the problem, raising awareness, bringing together stakeholders from all areas of the system to provide feedback, doing legal research on the rights of siblings, and training caregivers, lawyers, judges, social workers and systems partners.
We've trained over 500 professionals this year and plan to train over 1000 in 2026.
We've been available for technical assistance to support local programs and states interested in improving sibling connections. We also have helped connect individuals with other resources within their state to help get support.
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What's the problem with how things have been done? Why are sibling connections important?
Sibling connections in foster care are incredibly important. When a child experiences a separation from their biological parents, they often rely more on their siblings and family connections for normalcy and a sense of stability and emotional support. The sibling connection in particular is the longest relationship that many people have in their lifetimes. Research has found that sibling relationships have impacts on everything from self esteem, and childhood grades, to future health outcomes and employability.
When surveyed lived experience advisory councils across the country consistently placed sibling connections as one of their top concerns about the child welfare system, more common than any other issue.
Remember, sibling separation isn't a one time occurrence, and even short separations can be traumatic and lead to missed opportunities for connection.
"Research shows that the failure to maintain sibling relationships in foster care harms children's ability to form their identities, deprives them of a vital source of support as they grow and develop, and causes lifelong grief and yearning. Further, direct accounts from youth with lived experience in foster care describe how critical sibling relationships are and the trauma of sibling separation. Roughly two-thirds of children in foster care in the United States have at least one sibling, many of them are separated — often forever — and courts rarely consider the damage such separation causes."
ABA Toolkit, Page 1
Unfortunately, child welfare practices, licensing standards, timelines, and bureaucratic hurdles often have made the separation of siblings a common, harmful experience across the country.
Although federal law provides for many protections for foster youth to be placed with their siblings and access frequent visitation, foster youth have been routinely placed away from their siblings and often get infrequent visitation.
EXPLORE
Want to go deeper? Everything below is a door into a different part of who we are.
Meet the Founder
Lily Colby, Esq. — her story, her credentials, and why she built this.
Meet the Team
The advocates, legal experts, and lived experience leaders behind the network.
About the Network
Our mission, model, and what makes us distinct.
2025 Impact Report
A full look at our reach, outcomes, and the communities we serve.
