WonkCast: People Power Policy

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...

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...