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.
