WonkCast: People Power Policy

Episode # 19: Former Senate Finance Staffer & Family First Architect Laura Berntsen Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy. It’s easy to fall into the trap of reading a law out of context; comparing it to a perfect ideal, and then wondering why parts of it are seemingly inefficient or contradictory. Equally easy is romanticizing a “perfect” policy fix that is unsullied by p...

Episode # 18: Children’s Bureau Associate Commissioner Ryan Hanlon Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy. In DC, there’s the old adage that “personnel is policy”; who you appoint to policy roles is itself a policy choice, and a signal worth watching. At the Administration for Children and Families , Assistant Secretary Alex Adams is already advancing significant reforms to...

Episode # 17: Foster Insights Director Noah Duncan Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . I’m Zach Laris, and this is WonkCast —where we spotlight the people, ideas, and tensions shaping child and family policy. Decision-makers are both drowning in and starving for data. What matters isn’t volume, it’s value; actionable analytics that can inform hard choices under constra...

Episode # 16: CarePortal Founder & President Adrien Lewis Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . This week we’re continuing our exploration of a key constraint on child welfare policy . Social isolation is forcing a fundamental shift in how public systems think about state capacity in the context of partnerships with private organizations focused on care. A new class of m...

Episode # 15: Safe Families Founder & Executive Director Dr. David Anderson Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . State capacity and the way it impacts last-mile policy delivery is a key constraint on child welfare policy . One strategy states use to surmount it is privatization. When people hear “privatization,” they usually think of government doing two things: * Deleg...

Episode # 14: Wendell Primus on Child Welfare Financing & Congress Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Child welfare financing is structurally stuck. Decades-old design choices have left dollars disconnected from outcomes — and fixing that will require more than better programs. It will require navigating power, process, and the small-p politics of how things actually...

Episode # 13: Teresa Huizar on Child Safety Policy & Technology Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Technology is now moving faster than our ability to protect children from harm. Nowhere is that gap more visible than at the intersection of generative AI, social media, and child sexual abuse material. We don’t yet have answers to basic questions like: * Who owns your l...

Episode # 12: Jedd Medefind on Complex Poverty Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . We’ve been exploring policy debates about poverty, cash assistance, prevention, and child welfare involvement to get beyond the oversimplifications. That debate often gets stuck because we rarely slow down to ask what we actually mean by a word like poverty , and what prevention can real...

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Episode # 11: Ranking Member Danny Davis (D-IL) In an era of information overload and peak partisan polarization, why do the issues that policymakers talk about matter, and what does it mean to say that child welfare policy is bipartisan? Today’s guest sees policymaker attention and bipartisan conversation not as a communications str...

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Episode # 10: Brightpoint President & CEO Mike Shaver We’re now 30 years post passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act , the ‘96 welfare reform law that created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, reshaped child welfare financing, and fundamentally renegotiated the U.S. safety net. Think...

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Episode # 9: TN Human Services Commissioner Clarence Carter This year marks the 30th anniversary of the creation of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF. After three decades, the debate remains lively—yet often largely misframed. It almost always centers on mechanics, design tweaks, or enforcement. Much rarer...

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . If this is your first listen, you can also check out Episode 0 here to learn more about our vision and focus, and subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify . Episode # 8: Author, Crisis Engineer, & Bureaucracy Hacker Marina Nitze Child welfare policy has a last mile delivery problem. We have no shortage of powerful ideas, and even...

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . If this is your first listen, you can also check out Episode 0 here to learn more about our vision and focus, and subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify . Episode # 7: ACF Assistant Secretary Alex Adams This week on WonkCast we’ve got Assistant Secretary Alex Adams, who now leads the Administration for Children and Families. Und...

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . If this is your first listen, you can also check out Episode 0 here to learn more about our vision and focus, and subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify . Episode # 6: AdoptionShare Founder & CEO Thea Ramirez Today’s guest, Thea Ramirez, Founder and CEO of AdoptionShare, is using the same data science that transformed online dat...

Welcome to the Thanksgiving week edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . If this is your first listen, you can also check out Episode 0 here to learn more about our vision and focus, and subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify . From the team here at the Wonk , we wish all of you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving. Episode # 5: Former ACYF Commissioner Rebecca Jones Gaston This week’s conversat...

Welcome, Wonks, to another edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy , where we spotlight the people, ideas, and tensions shaping child and family policy. If this is your first listen, you can also check out Episode 0 here to learn more about our vision and focus, and subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify . I hope you enjoy listening, and look forward to hearing from you about who else you’d...

Welcome, Wonks, to another edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy , where we spotlight the people, ideas, and tensions shaping child and family policy. If this is your first listen, you can also check out Episode 0 here to learn more about our vision and focus, and subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify . I hope you enjoy listening, and look forward to hearing from you about who else you’d...

Rita Soronen is the President & CEO of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption . Under her leadership, they’ve tested, proved, and taken to scale Wendy’s Wonderful Kids, an  evidence-based approach to child-focused recruitment for adoption from foster care. We talk about how the motivations that bring you into this work can eventually become a hindrance you need to shed, the role and limits of evi...

Our first episode is an interview with Mary Bissell, Cofounder and Partner at ChildFocus. She’s a lawyer, policy and advocacy strategist, and entrepreneur who is a leader in child and family policy advocacy. Mary has made an enormous mark on child and family policy, and her influence has been in rooms where policy decisions happen dating back decades.  We talk about the art of effective coalition...

Introducing WonkCast: People Power Policy, where we spotlight the people, ideas, and tensions shaping child and family policy.  In each episode, host Zach Laris talks with leading policy experts and decision makers about the future they're creating. We lift up conversations with the people who power child and family policy, and we also dig into: People . Leaders' background/"why"/significant mento...