WonkCast: People Power Policy

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 mission-driven platforms is emerging that doesn’t fit traditional privatization models built around scopes of work and technical execution.

Today’s guest embodies this shift.

Adrien Lewis is the Founder and President of CarePortal a platform leveraging community care capacity at scale to support families in crisis.

CarePortal’s ethos is grounded in a simple truth: when you need a car seat from a stranger, your problems run far deeper than merely not having a car seat.

Our conversation dug into how social isolation underlies family crisis, what community mobilization can do that government alone can’t, and what it points to for future policy.

This episode offers a roadmap to understand how child and family policy is evolving in ways that sharpen the complementary roles of government and private partners.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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:

* Delegating specific services to organizations to more efficiently execute; or

* Contracting for specialized expertise it lacks capacity to build on its own.

But there’s a different model emerging, which doesn’t fit either of those frames.

These scale-driven mission-oriented platforms build relational infrastructure.

Their networks target the challenges, like social isolation, that operate underneath the crises public policy aims to solve.

Rather than replace public systems, they expose what those systems can’t do alone.

Today’s guest is one of the earliest architects of that approach.

Dr. David Anderson is the Founder and Executive Director of Safe Families for Children; a voluntary alternative to traditional foster care that provides temporary care during family crises, without formal court involvement or custody transfer.

In just over two decades, Safe Families has grown from a Chicago pilot into a national platform now eligible for federal funding under Family First.

We unpacked his perspective on the opportunities and risks public sector decision makers face when working with platforms like this, how policymakers reason under uncertainty, and what child and family policy simply cannot do on its own.

If you want to understand the coming shift of networked relational infrastructure reshaping family support, this conversation is for you.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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 move in Congress.

Today’s guest sits squarely at this intersection.

Wendell Primus served as Senior Policy Advisor on Health and Budget Issues to Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi for nearly two decades.

In that role he shaped every major health and human services package Congress enacted, from the Affordable Care Act, to federal drug pricing policy, to the Family First Prevention Services Act.

Today, at the Brookings Institution, Wendell’s focused on redesigning child welfare financing, including co-chairing a task force at the Bipartisan Policy Center that released a Blueprint for Child Welfare Financing and Accountability Reform.

We talked about what he learned by resigning from the Clinton Administration in protest over the ‘96 welfare reform law, what he learned about power from Speaker Pelosi, and what he thinks it will take to redesign child welfare financing.

If you’re tired of hearing people admire the problem — and want a clearer picture of how complex policy actually moves — this conversation is for you.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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 likeness?

* What does consent mean in a digital world?

* What responsibility should platforms bear when harm spreads at scale?

Our legal and policy frameworks were not designed for a world where innocuous images can be manipulated and distributed globally without a person’s knowledge or consent.

Today’s guest works at the center of that reality, where policy assumptions meet real-world harm.

Teresa Huizar is the CEO of the National Children’s Alliance, which represents nearly 1,000 Children’s Advocacy Centers across the country.

These multidisciplinary teams bring together law enforcement, child protection, clinicians, prosecutors, and advocates to respond to child abuse and support healing.

Teresa also hosts the excellent One in Ten podcast, where she explores the science, law, and ethics of preventing child abuse.

Our conversation dug into these gaps in policy, discussing the myriad options out there to solve them, and the reasons they have stalled so far.

We also unpacked why our assumptions about policy can limit its impact.

This is a child safety policy frontier we can no longer afford to treat as theoretical.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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 realistically address.

This week we have a conversation that adds another layer.

Jedd Medefind is the President of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, and held a leadership role in the White House Faith-Based and Community Initiatives Office during the George W. Bush administration.

Last year, Jedd Medefind wrote A Watershed Perspective for Child Welfare, outlining his idea of how “complex poverty” drives child welfare involvement.

He argues that material hardship is often intertwined with other forms of adversity, leading to more complex challenges that have no single solution.

His piece rejected simple narratives, grappling instead with what we actually mean by poverty, and what prevention can realistically address.

I had him onto the show to unpack these ideas, which invite us all to interrogate our own preferred simple solutions.

This conversation sharpened my thinking, and I expect it will sharpen yours.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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 strategy, but as core structural components of the long-term coalition building work necessary for legislative change.

Congressman Danny Davis represents Illinois’ 7th congressional district, and currently serves as the Ranking Member of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Work and Welfare.

As he enters his 30th and final year in Congress, we had the chance to talk about his inside perspective on how and why legislative change happens.

We also discussed his priorities before retirement, including updates to the Chafee program and investment in supports for the children of incarcerated parents.

If you want to better understand how and why legislators make decisions under constraint, and what shapes their decision making environment, this is for you.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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.

Thinkers across the ideological spectrum are increasingly elevating the ways that this policy from another era is now straining to meet the challenges of this one.

A central question if we’re serious about moving beyond platitudes is what’s missing in the debate about the role of cash assistance in safety net policy, and why does it matter?

So often this debate is flat and two-dimensional.

We hear broad arguments for cash assistance that gloss over complex factors driving poverty, and broad arguments against cash assistance that discount deprivation’s impact.

What’s more rare is a rigorous conversation about the role and limits of cash assistance, particularly in the context of child welfare involvement.

Today’s guest is a leader building the evidence to structure that policy conversation with rigor.

Mike Shaver is the President and CEO of Brightpoint, an IL-based provider of child and family services.

Under Mike’s leadership, BrightPoint is conducting a pilot program; “Empower Parenting with Resources” or EmPwR, which is testing the impact of a monthly cash stipend for families receiving family preservation services.

This conversation explores how policy flexibility fuels innovation, why economic instability constrains choices for families, and what’s missing from the policy debate about cash assistance.

If you’re dissatisfied with slogan solutions and interested in the kind of complexity required to actually get policy right, this conversation is for you.

If this is your first listen, check out Episode 0 here to learn more about the show, and subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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 are the foundational questions: Why does TANF exist? What problem was it designed to solve? And by those standards, is it succeeding?

Today’s guest is a leader who insists we start there.

Clarence Carter currently serves as Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Human Services.

During the first Trump administration, he led the Office of Family Assistance at the Administration for Children and Families, overseeing the $16.5-billion TANF program nationwide.

He also just released Our Net Has Holes in It, a book drawing on his three plus decades in safety-net policy.

In our conversation, we talk about what he learned from overseeing TANF at the national level, how he thinks about the purpose of a safety net, and what the TANF pilots he’s leading in Tennessee could mean for the next generation of federal reforms.

If you’re wondering where debates about the future of TANF are actually headed—or why so many of them feel stalled—this conversation is for you.

If this is your first listen, check out Episode 0 here to learn more about the show, and subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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

If this is your first listen, you can also check out Episode 0 here to learn more about our vision and focus, and subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Episode # 8: Author, Crisis Engineer, & Bureaucracy Hacker Marina Nitze

Child welfare policy has a last mile delivery problem.

We have no shortage of powerful ideas, and even get them codified in laws and regs.

Where we come up short is the last mile delivery; taking a financing incentive or new program and turning it into tangible impact for children and families.

Today’s guest works on that problem every day.

Marina Nitze has entered some of the most complex bureaucracies in government, and left them more functional than she found them.

She served as Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs under President Obama and co-founded the U.S. Digital Service.

She co-authored Hack Your Bureaucracy and Crisis Engineering. Today, she’s a partner at Layer Aleph and leads the Child Welfare Playbook.

We talked about where power really lives in a system as complex as child welfare, how change actually happens, and why well-intentioned reforms so often fall flat.

If you care more about outcomes than announcements, you’ll love this conversation.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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

If this is your first listen, you can also check out Episode 0 here to learn more about our vision and focus, and subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Episode # 7: ACF Assistant Secretary Alex Adams

This week on WonkCast we’ve got Assistant Secretary Alex Adams, who now leads the Administration for Children and Families.

Under his leadership, ACF is anchoring its child welfare agenda to a single accountability metric: the ratio of homes available to every child in foster care.

We unpack why he sees that metric as a catalyst for a broader continuum—especially prevention—and how he’s thinking about retooling federal oversight, data, and regulation to match the realities of a new era.

We also explore the long-term implications of financing trends that are quietly—but decisively—reshaping the federal–state balance of power.

I left this conversation with a sharper sense of where ACF is headed and what that means for the field. I’m confident you will too.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.