WonkCast: People Power Policy

Episode #44: Ryan O’Donnell Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy. Federal and state policy have invested billions of dollars in the information and technology infrastructure on which child welfare systems rely. You’d think that combination of investment and the extensive data these systems gather about families would allow hyper-specific targeting of interventions and sup...

Episode #43: Ali Caliendo Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy. Over the past 5 years, we’ve seen entries to foster care decline by nearly one-fifth. The stock story our field assumes about that decline is prevention, making the debate about whether that’s progress to celebrate or a growing safety risk. But should we be so sure that data point is measuring what we think i...

Episode #42: Sierra Burns Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Turning an idea into an enacted policy takes years of infrastructure building, hard work, and well-timed luck. When something takes that much time and investment, it can feel like a culmination. By notching some big developments early in her advocacy career, today’s guest has learned that what feels like the...

Episode #41: Mike Leach Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Public sector accountability can easily drift into process theater, rewarding caution over outcomes. Today’s guest ascribes this trend in child welfare to an institutional risk aversion that is as rational in the near-term as it is corrosive in the long-term. Mike Leach ran the South Carolina Department of Soc...

Episode #40: Vicki Shabo Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . As we continue digging into paid leave, it’s a perfect encapsulation of a key question for child and family policy development; is policy design an overture to broker political compromise, or an instrument to memorialize one? Much policy and political debate assumes the former. If you look at the example of p...

Episode #39: Dawn Huckelbridge Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . It takes real capacity to turn even the most popular idea into a durable agenda for action. Paid leave encapsulates many of the friction points requiring that capacity to take an idea from popular concept to durable enacted framework. Most Americans can tell you that we’re among only a handful of develo...

Episode # 38: C.A.S.E. Co-Founder & CEO Debbie Riley Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . What does a system misunderstand when it treats all forms of loss as the same? Policy and practice are quick to label children as “complex” when they’ve had contact with the child welfare system. It’s worth asking ourselves how much of that complexity we’re creating when we connect...

Episode # 37: Valerie Frost x Zach Laris Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . For this week’s WonkCast , we’re mixing it up with a crossover conversation. Community In-Site host Valerie Frost invited me on her show to talk about a fundamental question our field has to grapple with; what do we mean by“prevention”? The term prevention is so pervasive that it can seem like...

Episode # 36: Aly Rau Brodsky Our debates often focus on what the statute says, how the program works, or what the top line data suggest. What we measure typically emphasizes the experiences of adults. What gets lost is the fundamentally different way children experience the child welfare system; in time that passes more slowly, during disorienting experiences with strangers and disrupted family r...

Episode # 35: Dennis Blazey Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Financing is the foundation of policy reform. Today’s guest thinks our conversations about it need to get more entrepreneurial, starting with a focus on “bed days”. For 24 years, Dennis Blazey was the Budget & Fiscal Officer for the Office of Children and Family Services at the Ohio Department of Job and F...

Episode # 34: Don Winstead Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Have you ever wondered why states may balk at seemingly obvious opportunities to draw down federal funding? When Congress is so divided and polarized that renaming a post office is no small feat, it can feel like passing legislation is the biggest step. But in federal financing, what matters more than the s...

Episode # 33: Here Now Health Founder & CEO Michelle Turner Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Something we’ve been exploring across our work is the issue of custody for care. This is when children enter foster care not because of abuse or neglect, but because parents have no other way to access behavioral health services for their child. We’ve previously analyzed how...

Episode # 32: Oklahoma Child Welfare Director Michael Williams Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Five percent of children entering foster care nationally do so not from abuse or neglect, but because it’s the only way to unlock Medicaid financing for behavioral health care . Custody for care is not a quirk or conspiracy. Instead, that datapoint reflects the distortion...

Episode # 31: Michelle Feit Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . There is often a significant gap between the way issues poll with the general public and how they move through policy-making institutions. That often gets vaguely characterized as “political will”, obscuring its origins. Child and family policy has many high-salience issues that are popular in general and...

Episode # 30: Erinn Kelley-Siel Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Our laws and funding task the same agency with removing children from families when there’s a safety risk, and helping those same families avoid crisis and heal. Today’s guest says that asking one agency to hold both is a fundamental problem. Erinn Kelley-Siel Spent over thirteen years in public servic...

Episode # 29: Rebecca Robuck Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Child welfare policy often swings between two possible answers to the system’s purpose: protecting children or supporting families. Even efforts to move beyond that debate can end up recreating it as an argument over whether to reform the system or replace it altogether. Today’s guest is someone who refus...

Episode # 28: Kristi Putnam Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . It’s often the case that our policy patchwork asks families to fit programs , rather than fitting programs to families. That fragmentation extends to how we hold public sector systems and leaders accountable, optimizing for avoidance of visible failure even at the cost of coherence. Today’s guest spends a...

Episode # 27: JooYeun Chang Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Child and family policy is full of “everybody knows” problems. Individually rational decisions can create policy outcomes nobody argues for , because knowing what to fix doesn’t mean knowing how to fix it . Even the most senior decision makers depend upon and work to shape other leaders’ decisions; laws, r...

Episode # 26: Elliot Haspel Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Child and family policy has a power problem. Why is it that issues that reach into the lives of all Americans are so often an afterthought? Families routinely say these issues really matter, without that translating into sustained political power and impact. When every family faces caregiving needs that ca...

Episode # 25: Dr. Alyssa Bish Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . Child welfare agency leaders naturally have to think in constraints and tradeoffs. Since 2023, Dr. Alyssa Bish has served as Director of the Division of Children and Family Services in the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. In that role she leads an agency at the intersection of big-pictur...

Episode # 24: Dr. Jill Duerr Berrick Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . In child welfare, powerful narratives cite evidence to drive discussion of major issues. Evidence can add rigor and authority to arguments over how to craft policy. How we talk about policy can undermine the rigor and authority it rests upon. This isn’t an academic exercise; it underpins ongoing d...

Episode # 23: ACF Assistant Secretary Alex Adams Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . ACF Assistant Secretary Alex Adams has moved quickly in six months on the job. He’s rapidly advanced initiatives, reshaped oversight processes, and pushed on the edges of what’s permissible and possible in federal child welfare policy. Our conversation dug into the tradeoffs underneath...

Episode # 22: AMA With Wonk Founder Zach Laris Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy . This week, we’re doing something different. We asked for your questions about what you’re grappling with right now, and some key themes emerged: * Navigating the relationship between policy and political reality; * Making decisions under real constraints; and * Identifying and asserting...

Episode # 21: AAP Advocacy SVP Jeff Hild 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. The constraints leaders operate under vary by the type of institution they lead. That in turn shapes what they see as possible for the future of child and family policy. Ad...

Episode # 20: Think of Us Founder & CEO Sixto Cancel Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy. What’s the core tension between data and personal perspective in shaping child welfare policy? Pure abstraction in policy can lead to an exploitative or extractive approach to direct experience in service of rigor; the “tell your trauma to advance our policy” model. At the opposite...