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 elevate.
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.
This WonkCast will be your final of March; we are on a Spring Break hiatus next week before returning to your regularly scheduled programming the week of April 6th.
Sponsorship Shoutout
Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.
