Getting approved takes months, and families rarely know how far they have left. Homeward Circle gives them a clear path and people to walk it with. Increase your number of homes, keep parents engaged, and save your staff hours of manual tracking.
A family calls, ready to open their home. Then the months stretch on: orientation, training hours, references, home studies, background checks. Eventually the calls stop coming back.
They gave up because the process is long, lonely, and often has no visible finish line.
Most agencies can name the number of families they lose, but almost none know exactly how it happens.
Every drop splits into withdrew here versus still working on it, so a slow family never reads as a lost one.
Your agency’s certification process, drawn in phases you name, reorder, and delete yourself. Every parent opens the app to the same map: where they stand, what’s next, how far they have already come.
Inside every phase sit milestones such as background checks, references, and the home study. Inside every milestone are the steps your staff verify one by one. When the last step verifies, the family earns a badge, like “Oriented”, “Trained”, or “First Placement”.
Both parents in a household open the app to the same map and the same target date.
Your agency builds a circle around each new household: staff, Champion families who have already been through it, and other families still in process.
Every circle sits behind a confidentiality agreement, message content is encrypted at rest, and anything flagged reaches your designated moderators.
Every step, from background checks to training sessions to home-study visits, gets verified by your staff as they work it. Families see each step checked off and each badge earned, and that keeps them going. The requirements stop being a wall of unknowns.
Homeward Circle flags every family that has gone quiet, so you can reach the one sitting a single step short of a badge. The withdrawal report names the exact milestone families get stuck on, so you can change that part of the path and get more families approved.
Recruiters watch inquiries become licensed families instead of dropped leads.
Trainers see which milestone a family stalled on and reach them before the group moves on.
Foster parent supervisors moderate circles, act on flags, and spot the families going quiet.
Families tell their circles real things.
Circle message content is encrypted at rest, and every read of sensitive data is audited. Every staff member signs in with a phishing-resistant passkey instead of a password; parents get an app-level biometric lock on their phone.
Your agency’s data exports as a spreadsheet whenever you ask. Circle conversations are left out of that export on purpose, so they can’t be passed around.
You will not find a “HIPAA compliant” stamp here, because no vendor can promise that on your behalf. What we offer is the architecture above, and a Business Associate Agreement on the Enterprise plan for agencies handling PHI.
Every plan includes the whole product: the phased roadmap, milestones and badges, circles, reports, the family mobile app, and the coordinator console. Plans differ in family limits and support.
| Free For small programs getting started | Most agencies Standard For growing agencies | Enterprise For large & multi-site agencies | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Families | Up to 15 | Up to 50 | Custom |
| Staff accounts | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Support | Email support · within 3 business days | Email support · next business day | Priority same-day support & guided onboarding |
| Billing | Free | $249 per month, self-serve | Annual contract & invoicing |
| HIPAA Business Associate Agreement | — | — | Available for agencies handling PHI |
A family is one household. One or two parent accounts count as a single family. Contact us for Enterprise pricing with PHI handling.