About
KARA SIGNAL is published by Kids at Risk Action. The premise is narrow and unforgiving: state child welfare systems are already measured by federal law, the measurements are public, and almost no one reads them. We read them, publish them with their gaps labeled, and keep two decades of KARA's own reporting available with its news citations intact and its editorial policy on naming children on the page.
KARA has been powered by volunteers since 1994 — see our history and current volunteer opportunities.
People
Mike TikkanenPresident and Executive Director
Author of Invisible Children (2005). CASA volunteer guardian ad litem in Hennepin County from 1996 to 2012. Founding board member of CASAMN since 2010.
Allen HuangTechnical Director
Over a decade in technology startups, most recently Head of Engineering at Desora. At KARA, a resource for technical development, data governance, and development communications.
For the timeline of who came before and what they built, see the KARA history.
Board of Directors
Greg Christian
Board member and donor for over ten years. Also fundraises for CASA volunteers in Minnesota.
Jim Early
Trailblazer Coaching. Executive coach. Advisor to KARA since its founding.
Al Innamorato
Over 40 years in corporate and investment leadership, with executive roles at Cendant Corporation, Ernst and Young, Microsoft, Dendrite, Scholastic, and the Fulcrum Management Group. Former member of the Oracle Hyperion SIG Board of Directors. Bachelor's and master's degrees from Villanova University. Research background at the Human Issues Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lawrence King
Purdue graduate, born and raised in Detroit. Campaign work with Nike, Jordan Brand, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and the National Urban League. Focus at KARA: mental health, financial literacy, and child wellbeing communications. Mentors underserved youth in his community.
Damon KocinaSecretary and Treasurer
Long-time KARA resource. Background in marketing.
Advisory Board
Advisors, without governance authority.
Jarred VanHorn
Founder and President of Seeds of Success, a Minnesota 501(c)(3). Student Ambassador at Dakota County Technical College. Past Governing Council Alternate at LeadMN, the Minnesota State College Student Association.
Past Board Members
Tiffini Flynn Forslund · Carol Koepp · Joe McCarthy · Lynn McCarthy · Thomas Carter MD · David Strand
On naming children
KARA reprints reporting from newspapers of record without redaction because that reporting is public, citable, and already part of the historical record. Where we choose what to include, we do not name children who were not already named in the public record, and we do not add photos of children to any archive entry.
Our judgment is that hiding what has already been written does not protect children. Refusing to add to what has been written sometimes does.
If you are the parent, guardian, or (as an adult) the person named in an archive entry and you want the piece removed or your name replaced, write to info@invisiblechildren.org and we will act within seven days. We do not require legal proceedings and we do not require an explanation.
Invisible Children & What We Can Do About It
An uncomfortably close look at the American cycle of abuse and its cost, by Mike Tikkanen, KARA's founder. Mike is a longtime CASA volunteer guardian ad litem: court-appointed by a judge through Minnesota's Guardian ad Litem program to represent the best interests of abused and neglected children in child protection proceedings. The cases in this book are the cases of that work.
Mike Tikkanen, CASA volunteer guardian ad litem, explores breaking the cycle of preteen mothers, adolescent felons, and the damage done to society. Replete with tragic stories from his years working to help at-risk children, Mike outlines practical policies and programs to improve the lives of abused and neglected children. His straightforward commentary brings attention to ways that any of us can make a positive impact and break the cycle.
Read it
- Download the free ebook (PDF): Invisible Children (PDF).
- Request Invisible Children at your public library.
- Purchase the paperback, audiobook, or Kindle edition via invisiblechildren.org/our-book.
From Mike Tikkanen, author of Invisible Children
From the book's opening, 2005. Current federal figures are on the data page.
About six million children are reported to child protection agencies in America each year. About 400,000 of those children are placed in protective custody because of severe neglect or abuse. About 500,000 children are placed into foster care and adoptive placements. Abused and neglected children are all around us.
These children are invisible in our community, yet each one of us is directly responsible for their plight. They live under our laws; they go to our schools; they are convicted by our courts; many of them spend lifetimes in our prisons. They have no say in the laws and policies that rule their lives — just like they had no say in the neglect and abuse that was their childhood.
Ninety percent of the juveniles in the Juvenile Justice System have come out of the Child Protection System (Minnesota's Chief Justice, Kathleen Blatz). Over 90 percent of the adults in the Criminal Justice System come out of the Juvenile Justice System. Justice Blatz (and others) call it a prison "feeder" system.
The United States is the only nation in the world to build prisons based on failed third-grade reading scores or the number of children in Child Protection.
All adults are the protectors of all children.
From the book review, Kathleen S. Long, PhD (April 2005)
Mike Tikkanen's book, Invisible Children, is an urgent call to action that describes in plain, heart-wrenching terms how our institutions act as enablers of child abuse. It is not teachers, school administrators, social workers, police, or therapists causing the problems in our schools, communities, and prisons. These hard-working, well-intentioned professionals are not to blame. As he correctly points out, they are doing the best they can within the framework of laws, regulations, and policies.
The issue he brings to light is much broader and much deeper. This is not an issue of blame — of "right versus wrong" — this is an issue of "right versus right" — the very definition of tragedy.
The purpose of any system is what it does. What the Child Protection System does is produce victims and future inmates for the criminal justice system. Generation after generation, these abused children fill our prisons, overwhelm our schools, and make our cities unsafe for the people who must live in them.
This is a hard-hitting, often uncomfortable book about an enormous, complicated and painful problem. Mike Tikkanen has taken a courageous stand to open our eyes and expose the truth. It is now up to all of us to confront the truth and begin this essential dialogue.
International
Child protection failure is not an American specialty. KARA's international work, including a 2025 research collaboration with Cavendish University Uganda on carrying child protection information to where people already look, is documented on the international page.
What we are not
Not a charity brochure, not a partner of the agencies we cover, and not a fundraising funnel: there is no donation ask on the data pages and no tracking anywhere. When the record supports a hard sentence, we write the hard sentence. When a state's numbers improve, the same tables will say that too, and we will not soften either direction.
Impact ledger
Dated, verifiable, append-only. Announcements do not qualify.
- 2005-03Kids at Risk Action begins publishing reporting on children in U.S. child welfare systems. The archive now spans 1,875 articles.
- 2026-07-20Federal outcomes dataset assembled from AFCARS state tables FY2013 to FY2022 and Child Maltreatment 2023, checksummed and vendored as a verified vintage. The NCANDS half moved to Child Maltreatment 2024 later; see the corrections log.
- 2026-07-22KARA SIGNAL v2 build begins: the not-reported rule is made a database constraint, and the initial methodology is published with a correction to our own build specification.
Accessibility
We aim for WCAG 2.1 AA. What that means here, concretely: body text and labels meet 4.5:1 contrast against the paper background; every data chart carries a text alternative (the underlying number, in a table, with the same citation as the visual); the not-reported state is announced in words, not color alone; every page reflows cleanly at 375 pixels; every interactive control shows a visible focus ring; the primary nav announces the active page to assistive tech; a skip-to-content link is available on every page for keyboard users; the subscribe dialog traps focus, restores it on close, and announces status changes; the sticky header respects reduced-motion; and the live ticker drops from 250ms to 10-second updates when the reader has requested reduced motion.
Readable mode (the Aa button in the header) swaps the body font to Atkinson Hyperlegible, developed by the Braille Institute for readability, and gives paragraphs more air. Your choice persists across pages on your own device only; the site does not store it.
If a page or component is unreadable for you, or you need a chart in a different format (a plain-text table, a larger rendering, a machine-readable dump), write to info@invisiblechildren.org. We treat accessibility issues as corrections.
The rules we publish under
- A missing value is never rendered as zero. See the methodology.
- The original archive is never modified. What we republish is KARA's own reporting, as written, under its own badge.
- No images from the original corpus, in any form.
- No reader tracking of any kind.