What is Family Finding®?
Family Finding® is a relational practice model created by Kevin Campbell and developed through Pale Blue. It is not a technology, not a software platform, and not a generic search process. It is a structured, values-based practice for restoring connection and belonging for children and youth who have become disconnected from family.
What Family Finding® Is Not
A database or technology tool
A generic relative-search service
A program that can be licensed without training and fidelity support
Interchangeable with informal or untrained family engagement
The Six Steps
Family Finding® moves through six steps — a cycle more than a checklist. As new names surface, you loop back to the beginning.
Discover — Surface the connections that already exist: mine the file, map the family, and ask the child and the people around them. Most "missing" relatives are hiding here.
Engage — Reach the people you find as people, not case resources — honest about why you're calling and what you hope for.
Plan — Build the plan with the network, not for it.
Decide — Decide alongside the family, with the child's voice in the room.
Evaluate — Check honestly whether connection is actually growing.
Follow-Up — Stay. Belonging is a relationship, not a referral. Then the cycle begins again.
The 40-Connection Truth
The model sets a working standard: for every child, discover at least forty family members and important people — through the file, interviews, and search tools. That number is a deliberate refusal of the thin story. Because practitioners find this again and again: "there is no one" is almost never true. A file that says a child has no one usually means that looking felt harder than accepting the isolation — so the system settled for a single line. (Finding is not placing. The evidence is strongest on what Family Finding® reliably does: surfacing far more people than systems expect. Whether a connection becomes a placement is a separate, later question.)
What Runs Through Every Step
Beneath the six steps are the principles that make them Family Finding® rather than ordinary case practice — an ethic of urgency; an expanded definition of permanency (belonging, not just a legal placement); effective, exhaustive relative search; family-driven process; the development of multiple, realistic plans; and well-defined, tactical procedures. These are not steps to complete but commitments that shape how every step is done.
Federal Recognition
Family Finding® has been written into United States federal legislation three times:
2008 — Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act (signed by President Bush)
2011 — Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act (signed by President Obama)
2014 — Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act
This makes Family Finding® one of the most legislatively recognized relational practice models in U.S. child welfare history.
International Reach
Family Finding® is practiced across the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Western Europe, and beyond.
Family Finding® and Family Seeing®
Family Finding® is practiced alongside Family Seeing® — a complementary model that deepens the relational work. Learn more at familyseeing.org.
Ready to implement Family Finding®?