Michigan Nonprofit Releases New Transparency Tool for Youth Care Facilities

ANN ARBOR, MICH. – The Michigan Center for Youth Justice (MCYJ) is releasing a new public transparency tool to help the public stay informed about Michigan’s licensed Child Caring Institutions (CCIs), which provide out-of-home care and residential services for children and youth across multiple public systems.   

Michigan's child welfare system licenses many agencies providing foster care, adoption, and juvenile justice residential services. When incidents occur, they're documented in Special Investigation Reports (SIRs) — but reading through thousands of individual files is practically impossible for most people.

The Michigan Licensed Child Welfare Report Dashboard is an interactive online tool designed to help users explore, review, and analyze reports and investigations on child caring institutions (CCIs) in Michigan. The dashboard helps search the documents, with AI-assisted analysis to help users identify  patterns in the reports. The dashboard was created with the assistance of STATCOM, a community outreach program with the University of Michigan.

“This tool is just one step in empowering families and advocates to stay informed on the well-being of youth in Michigan’s state-licensed child caring institutions,” said Jason Smith, Executive Director of MCYJ. “With hundreds of agencies and thousands of children, it is easy for incidents to be handled to the letter of the law but still fly under the radar. Rather than bringing focus to each individual incident, we hope that this tool will help us find patterns in the care of our children, so we can address the underlying and systemic flaws that allow these incidents to happen at all.”

The goal of this dashboard is to support advocates, researchers, journalists, policymakers, and families by providing more transparency within Michigan’s residential care system. This tool is intended to be the starting point for discussions about how licensed facilities are serving young people, paired with lived experience, on-the-ground insights, and context.

The dashboard aims to simplify the search process for individuals interested in licensing and welfare incidents in Michigan’s CCIs. All of the information in the dashboard was obtained from the LARA public licensing search. No private information about individuals was included in the dashboard. Source documents can be verified through official government public channels. 

We strongly encourage individuals to review our user guide before accessing the tool. You can access the guide and the tool here. 

Contact: Natasha Blakely, nblakely@miyouthjustice.org

Michigan Center for Youth Justice (MCYJ) is an advocacy nonprofit based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that has been working on reforms in the justice system since 1956. MCYJ is dedicated to creating a fair and effective justice system for our state’s youth. It does that by advocating for equitable policy reform and supporting community partners to effect change. For more information, go to https://www.miyouthjustice.org/  

STATCOM (Statistics in the Community) at the University of Michigan is a community outreach program provided by graduate students in the Departments of Biostatistics, Statistics, and the Program for Survey Methodology at the University of Michigan. The program offers the expertise of statistics graduate students, free of charge, to non-profit governmental and community organizations in data organization, analysis, and interpretation. We are actively seeking community partners that need assistance in statistical analysis, data visualization, or survey/sample design and analysis.