Ten children.
One of them is the reason.
The Walker Conway Foundation did not begin in a lab. It began in a family — and in the particular way a system can lose a person while everyone is looking the other way.
The family
David Walker was one of ten siblings — and not one of the ten stayed together.
Four were adopted out. Four were raised by their grandmother. The last two — David and his older brother Paul, who is autistic — were sent to foster care. David was adopted at twelve. That is the arithmetic of one family meeting a system built to divide it: ten children, four households, none of them kept together.
The brother the system lost
Paul is older than David, and autistic. He was not adopted. He went to a boys’ home — and then he aged out of it.
Aging out is a quiet event. No one marks it. One day the support that had organized a life simply stops, and a young man who was never taught to hold the paperwork is handed all of it at once — housing, benefits, identity, the appointments that decide each.
Among that paperwork was a date. A person disabled before the age of twenty-two can qualify for Disabled Adult Child benefits on a parent’s record — meaningfully more than the baseline a person receives alone. The threshold is age 22. Paul crossed it before anyone realized it was there to be crossed.
He missed it by a margin no one was watching for. The higher benefit — the one that would have steadied the rest of his life — was gone, for good, and for no reason anyone could undo.
We named it for what it is. A catch-22 — a rule you cannot win against.
You need the benefit, but to qualify you had to act before a deadline you were never told to watch, in a window that closed while you were still learning to live alone. The catch is not bad luck. It is a structure — and structures can be studied, mapped, and broken.
The Catch-22 Project is what we built so the deadline that caught Paul stops catching anyone else: research and assistive technology paired with direct, human advocacy, to get each young adult across in time.
Read what the Project does, and how to stand with it →One family taught us a general lesson.
Paul is one person. But the shape of what happened to him — a powerful system, a quiet threshold, a person it was built to help and quietly lost — repeats everywhere systems meet the people with the least margin to absorb their mistakes.
It is the worker an algorithm displaces without a plan for what comes next. It is the patient a model misreads. It is the young adult a care system ages out and forgets. This is why the Foundation has two arms and one promise: rigorous Research, and direct Programs. The AI Watch Lab’s displaced worker and the Catch-22 Project’s foster youth are not separate causes to us — they are the same person, in two places the system leaves behind.
Advancing intelligence for the benefit of everyone — especially the people powerful systems leave behind.
No one should fall through a date no one told them to watch.
Give to the Catch-22 Project, partner on a transition-advocacy pilot, or bring housing, legal, or self-advocacy expertise to the work. Every note is read by a member of the leadership team.