WonkCast: People Power Policy

Episode #46: Michelle Bezark

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.

You can’t talk about modern child and family policy without referencing the Social Security Act.

For nearly a century, thinking about these issues has meant thinking through the architecture and assumptions of that framework.

But today’s guest points to the road almost taken, and what it reveals about the policy architecture we inherited instead.

Michelle Bezark is a social welfare policy historian and early childhood policy researcher.

Her new book, Making Babies Count, unpacks the history of the Sheppard-Towner Act.

It’s the less well-known maternal-child health law that forged the modern administrative state, shaping the federal-state framework for social policy upon which the New Deal would later build.

We talked about what becomes possible when policy makes families and government legible to each other, and what that means for anyone working to shape what comes next in child and family policy.

The successes, setbacks, and contradictions in Sheppard-Towner underpin much of what we take as given in safety net policy.

Understanding this history does not offer tidy lessons. But it does surface new ways of seeing the central tensions child and family policy continues to grapple with, a century later.

Episode #45: Patrick Brown

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.

There’s a fundamental challenge in crafting public policy to support children and families.

What sounds like a shared, unifying goal sits on top of differing and even directly contradictory perspectives about the right relationship between the state and families.

Coalitional partners can align around a policy idea while still having genuinely divergent views on what support for families is, what purpose it serves, and even what family means.

Today’s guest, for example, is a conservative who has partnered with progressives on the child tax credit, but also sees its purpose less as an anti-poverty program than as a way to reduce the financial friction families face.

Patrick Brown is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and he writes the weekly newsletter Family Matters, a must-read for anyone working on child and family policy issues.

Our conversation centered around what matters and is becoming possible amid growing cross-partisan dissatisfaction with the status quo in family policy.

One big unlock it generated for me was that the familiar question of “how much should government do?” obscures a harder one; what would it take to design future family policy that gives more families more options and support, without imposing assumptions upon them about what a family should be.

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 support.

Instead, even the basics often remain out of reach: things like case workers having an accurate phone number, families knowing when they need to be in court, or documents reaching the right recipient.

Today’s guest came to this paradox with the clarity of a beginner’s mind, as a longtime software entrepreneur who first entered child welfare as a foster parent baffled by its tech stack.

Ryan O’Donnell is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sunlight, where he works directly with agencies on technology aimed at improving communication and coordination to better serve families.

We talked about how child welfare ended up with technology over-engineered for compliance, and under-engineered for actual usability, and why better software alone won’t fix financing and procurement.

A field that has often seen overpromising and underdelivering is understandably skeptical by default of the AI era’s hype. This is a clear diagnostic of how we got there and what could shift it.

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 it is?

Today’s guest thinks our kinship care and prevention policy debates bypass a bigger question; are we separating fewer children from their parents, or merely moving them outside the categories we typically track?

Ali Caliendo is a kinship care expert, social entrepreneur, and professor whose work spans policy, research, and direct service delivery.

In wondering “where did the children go?”, she raises an uncomfortable question; is kinship care primarily prevention, to avoid foster care, or an intervention, for children who can’t remain with their parents?

We dug into what shaped her perspective, the gap between formal policy and its implementation, and how she decided to pass the baton at Foster Kinship after founding and building it over 15 years.

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 peak is often actually just the end of the beginning.

Sierra Burns has experienced a high-velocity advocacy trajectory, from successfully advocating to extend foster care in South Carolina, to being a guest of First Lady Melania Trump at the 2026 State of the Union address.

We talked about what it takes to turn a policy from advocacy win into reality, what she’s learned from her advocacy for housing vouchers, and what it looks like to approach lived experience as a capability rather than an identity.

As federal policymakers continue work on older youth policy, Sierra offers insights to inform current and future conversations, and to equip the next generation of advocates.

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 Social Services underGovernor Henry McMaster, and held senior roles in Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services. Today, he’s the Chief External Engagement Officer at Think of Us.

We talked about the key role agency leaders play in shaping the decision making environment within their institution, and why seemingly rational decisions to reduce risk can create far worse outcomes in aggregate.

We also talked about litigation and consent decrees, and how he sees them as both a symptom of these challenges and an amplifier of them.

This conversation illuminates some of the top impediments to visionary leadership for agency leaders, and some of the strategies that have surmounted them.

At a moment when Congress is looking to update the older-youth focused Chafee program, it’s especially instructive for anyone looking for new approaches.

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 paid leave, there’s no shortage of punditry suggesting that the way to widen the tent of support is to channel your inner cattle auctioneer, offering various versions of your proposal that scale back who it covers or with how much until there’s support.

Those are the kinds of strategies that are ready at hand when you see policy design as an invitation to compromise.

Today’s guest instead presumes that political coalition formulation precedes policy design, treating it as a covenant that captures compromise.

Vicki Shabo is a Senior Fellow at New America’s Better Life Lab, where she leads work on gender equity and paid leave and care policy and strategy.

She has played a central role in shaping strategy related to paid leave at the national and state level, and the way media narratives portray caregiving.

We talked about why moving too quickly to policy design ends up smuggling genuine disagreements over vision and values into the minutia of benefit mechanics.

We also discussed how the durability of any policy often emerges from the way it changes people’s behavior over time.

Regardless of your policy priorities and preferences, this underscores the central role of offering clear and contestable visions to advance any sustainable child and family policy.

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 developed countries without a national paid leave policy, even though the concept has widespread support.

Where divergence emerges is on why.

There are earnest debates over the best way to develop a policy and why, how to craft engaging messages about it, and the advocacy and political strategy to advance one.

What is less debatable is that paid leave has moved from popular idea to credible policy.

A national proposal came within a vote of enactment in 2021. 13 states and DC now have mandatory paid leave policies, and another ten have voluntary ones.

Whenever you see policy acceleration of that kind, it’s worth looking beyond the individual efforts and organizations to the infrastructure making them possible.

Today’s guest plays a pivotal role in building the capacity meant to make paid leave inevitable.

Dawn Huckelbridge is the Founding Director of Paid Leave for All, a national campaign advocating for paid family and medical leave.

We talked about what infrastructure was necessary to create prominence and momentum for the issue of paid leave, what went into that capacity building effort, and why.

The takeaways go beyond paid leave itself to the designing, building, and stewardship of infrastructure for any big policy target, which will be beneficial for anyone who has led or funded an advocacy campaign, or wondered why their powerful policy idea keeps hitting resistance.

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 them to a mental health system whose response to unique grief is often “it’s just loss.”

Today’s guest has spent her career building an institution with scalable approaches to serving the foreseeable impact that child welfare involvement has on families.

Debbie Riley is the Co-Founder and CEO of the Center for Adoption Support and Education, or C.A.S.E., an institution building the field of adoption competent mental health.

We talked about the structural barriers and opportunities to coordinate mental health and child welfare systems, what role Medicaid can play, and how to design an understanding of ambiguous loss into how we serve children and families in the child welfare system.

This is essential for anyone interested in creating the tactical roadmap from where you are to your future vision for how it could look different.

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 everyone must agree on what matters in child welfare policy.

That covers over that we don’t all mean the same thing when we say it.

Our conversation began with a discussion of the Family First Prevention Services Act and my recent analysis, Family First, Light on Families.

What emerged was an exploration of the way implementation and policy design challenges ultimately point to deeper questions of vision for future policy.

This is a moment where there’s real opportunity to shape the future of child and family policy, but only by first surfacing contestable claims to the vision to do it.

I really enjoyed the chance to sharpen my thinking by talking with Valerie, and I hope it does the same for you.