About

Why GCWAI exists

23,160 children went missing from Washington State foster care in a single year. Most were found. Almost none of the placements that let them disappear were formally documented as failures.

GCWAI builds the audit infrastructure that the accountability side of child welfare has never had: tools for the attorneys, advocates, CASA volunteers, and journalists who hold agencies answerable — not for the agencies themselves.

What we built

We started with three tools built to document a single case:

• Audit Accountable Desktop — a case tracking and violation logging system built in Python, designed to produce a court-defensible record of every placement decision, missing-incident report, and agency response.
• Federal Escalation Engine — automated complaint generation for HHS-OIG, FBI, and NCMEC, pre-formatted for each agency's requirements.
• PRR Tracking System — automated enforcement of Public Records Request timelines under RCW 42.56, with escalation prompts when agencies miss statutory deadlines.

Those three tools became GCWAI.

Who we serve

Child welfare attorneys, CASA program directors, legal aid advocates, tribal child welfare programs, and investigative journalists. Anyone who needs a documented, court-ready record of what agencies did — and did not do — when a child in their care went missing.

Operating base

Washington State, focused on DCYF accountability. The framework applies to any jurisdiction with mandatory federal AFCARS reporting obligations.