HeyJaredWonkCast: People Power Policy
Conversations with Child Welfare Wonk Founder & President Zach Laris, spotlighting the people, ideas, and tensions shaping child and family policy. www.childwelfarewonk.com
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 11
- Latest publication
- Sep 23, 2026
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- Jul 8, 2026
Latest episodes
WonkCast #43: Is Kinship Care Prevention, or an Intervention? (opens the original)
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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;
WonkCast #42: Sierra Burns on Why Policy Change is Just the Start (opens the original)
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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
WonkCast #41: The Risk of Exercising Judgment (opens the original)
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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 Childr
WonkCast #40: Policy Design Can’t Construct Coalitions (opens the original)
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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 t
WonkCast #39: Paid Leave & the Infrastructure of Inevitability (opens the original)
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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.
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