WonkCast: People Power Policy

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 can strain their finances and stability, you’d think policymakers would be relentlessly focused on refining solutions.

It’s not that issues like child care and paid leave are simple. Far from it.

They face significant, legitimate policy differences that require resolving. But that doesn’t happen.

Counter-intuitively, issues that affect everyone can face the biggest obstacles to harnessing and leveraging power to shape policy decisions and outcomes.

Today’s guest focuses his work on that paradox to prioritize policy for families.

Elliot Haspel is a nationally recognized child and family policy expert specializing in child care, and a Senior Fellow at Capita, where he works in their Family Policy Lab.

He’s written multiple books on child care policy, including Raising a Nation: 10 Reasons Every American Has a Stake in Child Care for All and Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It.

He writes the excellent Family Frontier newsletter, and contributes to the Wonk, including on child care and maltreatment prevention, and domestic violence policy.

We talked about what prevents prioritization of family policy issues, how to build and sustain momentum to create change over time, and the deeper power of coalitions.

Rather than easy answers or policy prescriptions, Elliot lays out what it looks like to build the power to make an issue un-ignorable, and what it takes to get there.

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.

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-picture vision on prevention and kinship care, and operational reality on financing and accountability.

We talked about how state capacity is the critical factor determining whether federal policy changes like the Family First Prevention Services Act work as designed.

We discussed the way well-intentioned efforts to encode process into policy can lead to bad outcomes with unclear accountability, like undermining kinship care.

She also unpacked why Nebraska was a “quick yes” on ACF’s A Home For Every Child initiative, and how they shifted their approach on Social Security survivor benefits.

Her insights offer actionable takeaways for anyone who cares about shaping current and future child and family policy.

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.

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 debates as varied as whether neglect is just poverty, and whether to abolish the child welfare system.

To dig into that relationship between evidence and policy debate, I sat down with a leading researcher in this space, Dr. Jill Berrick.

She’s a Distinguished Professor and the Zellerbach Family Foundation Professor of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley.

Her book The Impossible Imperative brings to life the tensions and tradeoffs inherent in child welfare, from front-line work with families to the policy that shapes it.

Our conversation unpacks where policy narratives drift from the evidence, how that changes what’s possible, and why it matters for what’s next in child and family policy.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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 his decisions, exploring how they’ve shaped his actual understanding and use of federal power across ACF’s:

* Rollout of the A Home for Every Child initiative;

* Incentives, and looming pressure, for states over Social Security survivor benefits;

* Push to expand the reach of the Family First Prevention Services Act; and more.

At the center of his strategy is a big bet that policy durability comes not from encoding it into regulation but making it too hard to unwind through buy-in.

This is essential for understanding what the first six months signal for what’s ahead.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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 what a system like child welfare is actually for.

Joining me to pose your questions is WonkCast team member Ivory Bennett.

Ivory sits in on and edits each week’s episode, and she also hosts her own podcast, the excellent Inner Views.

She not only prompts what you want to hear but brings her own perspective from time in foster care and as a foster and adoptive parent.

Your questions and the deeper tensions they point to sharpened my thinking, and I’m sure they’ll do the same for yours. If you have more, add them here for next time.

In addition, there’s a sneak preview excerpt of our forthcoming Wonk Intelligence Quarterly, which will drop for all premium members on Friday, April 17th.

To read the full WIQ and all our premium resources, join the Wonk Briefing Room. Individuals can sign up here, or get the team membership rate here

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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.

Advocates and policymakers can talk past each other when they don’t see the constraints that their counterparts are operating within.

Today’s guest has a unique vantage point on that tension, as a senior child advocacy leader who previously ran the Administration for Children and Families.

Jeff Hild is the Senior Vice President for Advocacy at the American Academy of Pediatrics. Before that, he led ACF at the end of the Biden Administration.

He offers essential and actionable insights if you’re an advocate or policy expert wanting to better influence institutional processes.

He also unpacks what shapes how advocates work in a way critical to understand for anyone making decisions about policy, funding, or research.

He has an especially sharp insight into how the very design of administrative processes determines who can participate in them, shaping who gets heard.

As an AAP alum myself, it was a particular treat to get to sit down with Jeff and hear how his public sector leadership is informing their advocacy strategy.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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 extreme, pure individuation aimed at respect for personal perspective can distort policy, by emphasizing outliers and edge cases over what the data point to.

Today’s guest is building the institutional architecture to balance that respect and rigor, by creating data-driven insights about direct experience of child welfare at scale.

Sixto Cancel is the founder and CEO of Think of Us, a social sector research and design lab working to transform child welfare by leveraging lived experience.

We talked about his work scaling individual perspectives into data to reshape policy debates, and its implications for the processes through which leaders make decisions.

We also discussed his vision for reshaping national policy related to older youth, and why he thinks it should go beyond the confines of the current Chafee program.

If you’re interested in how data-driven disruption and technology could restructure child welfare policy, this conversation is for you.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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 political realities, but impossible to enact, because it lacks the buy-in that trade-offs secure.

Today’s guest is a former senior Hill staffer who doesn’t just understand the realities of where policy and politics intersect, but actually navigated them to craft the biggest recent overhaul of child welfare financing, the Family First Prevention Services Act.

Laura Berntsen previously served as Chief Domestic Policy Advisor on the Senate Finance Committee for now Ranking Member Ron Wyden of Oregon.

She was one of the core staff architects of the Family First Prevention Services Act; developing, drafting, negotiating, and advancing it from a set of ideas into law.

Today, she’s a Principal Advisor at The Treasury of New Zealand, advising on income support, child welfare, and social service policy.

She shared about how to work with Hill staffers from the outside, the difficulties of weaving evidence into policy, and why “tiny little changes” are usually anything but.

Her insider perspective from “in the room” on Family First is a guide to navigating the terrain of power in Congress to encode ideas into durable financing architecture.

This builds on our recent Think Like A Staffer and What Hill Staff Wish the Child & Family Policy Understood pieces, pointing to strategic opportunities for success.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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 federal child welfare policy.

Amid that ongoing overhaul, there’s now new leadership for the Children’s Bureau.

Ryan Hanlon is the Associate Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau, leading the approximately $12B institution overseeing much of child welfare policy and financing.

Before he came into that role, he was President and CEO of the National Council for Adoption, bringing a background in adoption advocacy and direct practice.

We talked about his role and approach in implementing the Trump Administration’s child welfare policy agenda, and the shifts he’s had to make in moving from adoption-focused advocacy to public sector leadership on all of child welfare policy.

He also shared his thinking on child welfare financing and fiscal federalism; the rising tension between declining federal investment and persistent policy expectations.

This is a key starting point for understanding how the new leadership at the Children’s Bureau is thinking about policy priorities and what’s ahead.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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 constraint.

Metrics like foster home utilization and adverse placement scores don’t just measure state capacity; they equip leaders to reshape it in service of impact-focused goals.

Today’s guest leads the team behind these and other analytical tools that are quietly reshaping state and federal policy.

Noah Duncan is the director of Foster Insights, a University of Chicago-based non-profit that partners with child welfare leaders who want to use data to understand the challenges they’re facing and develop solutions that will actually work.

We talked about how his outsider perspective informed novel and insight-generating questions about child welfare, what practices seem rational until you look at the metrics, and how to ensure analytics are a compass, rather than a crutch.

This conversation will give you insight into the emerging data-driven approaches behind reforms across the country, and an understanding of the deeper analytical layer powering an idea like the A Home for Every Child initiative

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.