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Episode #47: Andy Schneider Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy. Medicaid plays an essential role in child health financing, especially for children and youth in foster care. Understanding Medicaid policy today means excavating sedimentary layers from decades of decisions, each embodying earlier eras. Over time, that’s how you can end up with something like custody for care, where some young people enter foster care not for neglect or abuse, but because it’s the only way to finance their treatment. Understanding how policy emerges from accumulated layers of decisions is not a philosophical exercise; it’s how policy wonks determine where we are, where we could go, and what leverage points could get us there. And if Medicaid is best understood as a sedimentary structure, today’s guest is one of its foremost geologists. Andy Schneider is a Research Professor of the Practice at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. He has over 50 years of experience working on the Medicaid program as a Hill staffer, senior CMS advisor, private consultant, and public interest attorney. Whether you’re a preeminent Medicaid expert, or someone who knows just enough to be dangerous, this conversation will deepen your understanding of how Medicaid’s past shapes its present, and what that means for the future of child health policy. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.childwelfarewonk.com