WonkCast: People Power Policy

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 relationships.

That surfaces an uncomfortable question; how would we design policy differently if we defined its success by the actual impact it has on the children experiencing it?

This seemingly simple premise is an organizing principle across the work of today’s guest. Aly Rau Brodsky is a leader whose state and national safety net leadership changed what she sees as a serious policy idea.

She’s currently the Executive Vice President And Chief Strategy Officer at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREEOPP). In that role she also founded and leads the Center for Safe and Stable Futures.

Before that, she was Deputy Secretary of the Department of Children and Family Services and also Louisiana Works, where she oversaw the One Door to Work initiative.

We talked about why she sees the administrative design of policy as being equally important to its architecture, how she thinks about child-centric development of policy, and the way clarity creates capacity to scale a policy vision.

This one sharpened a lot of my thinking around the intersection of federal and state policy, and I know it will for yours too.

🎙️ We’re Hiring: WonkCast Production Assistants

As we produce more conversations like this, we’re expanding the team behind the microphone.

We’re looking for WonkCast Production Assistants to help transform conversations with the people shaping child and family policy into thoughtful, publish-ready episodes.

If that sounds like your kind of work, we’d love to hear from you. Email [email protected] with a brief introduction and any relevant experience.

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 Family Services.

He was integrated into the program office, developing and managing the budgets for Ohio’s child welfare, child care, social services, and adult protective services programs.

Whether you’ve met him or not, his ideas have shaped your conversations about child welfare financing policy; from his central role shaping the Title IV-E waiver program to his impact on state and federal discussions since retiring in 2007.

What stood out most is how his perspective on financing policy is fundamentally about visionary leadership.

Rather than asking what federal funding allows, he urges state leaders to experiment based on their vision for impact, without waiting for permission to innovate.

We talked about the limits of incentives, what he sees as the enemy of child welfare reform, and why the “bed day” is central to his prevention financing approach.

If the uncertainty and fiscal pressures of this moment seem to be impeding your space to think creatively about deeper reform, you won’t want to miss this.

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 size, scope, or ambition of legislative change is the gap between existing capacity and what’s possible under new authority.

As one of the leading national thinkers on child welfare financing policy, today’s guest spends a lot of time exploring that gap.

Don Winstead has over four decades of state and federal experience in health and human services policy, including as Deputy Secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Services Policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under George W. Bush.

We discussed why a minor administrative change can shift spending as much as a landmark law, where our models for how financing changes incentives are inaccurate, and what the Title IV-E waivers can teach us about future child welfare financing reforms.

If you want to understand what actually matters for determining whether a new policy changes practice and makes an impact, this conversation is for you.

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 seemingly unrelated and rational policy design decisions combine to make this inevitable, and heard from child welfare agency leaders about it.

Today’s guest has a unique vantage point because she’s encountered this issue as a foster parent and as a telehealth company founder.

Michelle Turner is the founder and CEO of Here Now Health, which provides virtual mental health services for children and young people who experienced foster care.

We discussed the policy barriers that impede access, why there’s still so little collaboration across child health and child welfare policy, and how future health financing policy design could make the custody for care conundrum obsolete.

This conversation surfaces new ways to start thinking about the future of mental health policy for anyone who works in children’s health or child welfare.

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 distortions of tacitly designing child welfare policy as a backstop system of last resort.

It also captures key tensions constraining child welfare leaders:

* What’s the appropriate role of data in decision-making, especially when it inherently collapses complexity?

* Where’s the boundary line between insufficient accountability controls and ineffective process theater?

* How can states upgrade their partnerships with the federal government amid simultaneously declining investment and rising expectations?

Today’s guest makes decisions shaped by these constraints every day.

Michael Williams currently serves as Oklahoma’s Child Welfare Director, and previously was Deputy Commissioner of Operations for Connecticut’s child welfare agency.

We talked about why Oklahoma was the first state to join the Administration for Children and Families’ A Home for Every Child initiative, and why he takes the approach of data informing and influencing decisions, rather than driving them.

If you wonder why a policy like custody for care persists when everyone involved decries its poor outcomes and clear cost inefficiency, this is a look behind the curtain.

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 encounter friction in moving through the legislative process.

The finite resource that matters is political capacity; the coalition power required to simultaneously align on a workable policy design and assemble the votes to move it.

Paid leave is emblematic of this dynamic, and we’re going to be exploring perspectives from an array of thinkers grappling with those questions of coalition and policy strategy.

Today’s guest has led advocacy campaigns on paid leave at every level of government, from a successful initiative in DC to a federal proposal that came quite close in 2021.

Michelle Feit is the Director of Congressional Relations for Economic Justice at the National Partnership for Women and Families, where she leads paid leave campaigns.

She previously worked on the Hill for Representative Jackie Speier and Senator Barbara Mikulski.

We talked about how unified government constrains coalitions, the tension between state and national policy development, and how family policy moves through Congress.

Amid cross-partisan deliberation over what comes next in child and family policy, this is a window into why popular ideas often struggle to become durable national policies.

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 service leadership in the state of Oregon, including four as Director of the Oregon Department of Human Services.

In 2016 she joined Friends of the Children, serving as Chief Officer of Strategy & Innovation to scale a long-term professional mentorship model for children who have experienced multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences before kindergarten.

She reframes that safety and support tension into shared partnership, with government leading on safety and community supporting families through durable relationships.

We talked about how this tension shapes the way leaders make decisions, and how the wrong pockets problem complicates sustainable financing.

These fundamental questions of accountability, governance, and funding are essential for anyone interested in shaping what comes next.

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 refuses to collapse that complexity.

Rebecca Robuck is a Partner at ChildFocus Partners, and the Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child and Family Well-Being.

As a leading national policy expert, she leads coalition advocacy and advises national organizations on what’s happening and what’s possible in child welfare policy.

We talk about why innovation happening on the ground doesn’t always reach national conversations, the role of coalitions in reshaping federal policy, and what’s next in child and family policy.

At its core, our conversation is about what we lose when policy debates don’t surface foundational questions like what a system like child welfare is actually for.

For anyone feeling overwhelmed by current policy volatility, this captures why an era of disruption and uncertainty also offers opportunities for re-imagining what’s possible.

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 lot of time thinking about and teaching principles for public sector leadership to promote policy innovation.

Kristi Putnam has over 25 years of experience working on child and family policy across human Services, early childhood, health policy, and workforce development.

Most recently, she was Secretary of the Arkansas Department of Human Services under Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders from January 2023 to July 2025.

She also held leadership roles in the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, and the Florida Department of Children and Families.

Today, she’s the Dean of the Human Flourishing Academy, which recruits, trains, and deploys professionals passionate about policy into public sector leadership.

We talked about what blocks or unlocks policy innovation, how family policy systems consider and balance risk, and the tension between state responsibility and family autonomy.

We also talked about how her thinking about policy innovation evolved after overseeing the first significant rollout of Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas.

I walked away with a deeper understanding of how agency leaders reason under constraint, and I am sure you will too.

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, regulations, investments, service provision, advocacy, and more.

Often the decisions we want other leaders to make can seem obvious to us.

Not because they’re simple, but because we’re missing the constraints they’re under and the tensions they’re balancing. Where you sit is where you stand.

Moving beyond that changes what we see, making a deeper kind of impact possible.

JooYeun Chang has a uniquely cross-cutting perspective on what shapes leadership roles across the child and family policy sector because she’s held so many of them.

She led at the federal level, running the Children’s Bureau and the Administration for Children and Families in the Obama and Biden Administrations, respectively.

As a state leader she ran Michigan’s child welfare agency.

She’s led across philanthropy, at Casey Family Programs, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and now as Managing Director at the Aviv Foundation.

And her formation came out of advocacy at the Children’s Defense Fund, with the career shaping mentorship that comes from the inimitable MaryLee Allen.

We sat down to talk about why financing is central to policy, how to understand what shapes decisions you care about influencing, and the future of child welfare policy.

If you’ve wondered what it will take for our field to do something at the scale of the Family First Prevention Services Act again, this is for you.

Bolder Horizon Fellowship Shoutout

In addition to running Child Welfare Wonk, I also founded a child and family policy nonprofit called Bolder Horizon, focused on incubating what comes next.

We just launched the engine of that work, a new Emerging Policy Leaders Fellowship.

Child and family policy frameworks built for another era are failing to meet the crises of ours. Do you or someone you know have bold ideas about how to replace them?

We’re accepting applications from now through May 25 to form our first cohort. Learn more at bolderhorizon.org/fellowships.